Who we are
I’m Martin Tilo Schmitz and my website address is: https://www.martin-schmitz.com.
For further details as required by German Imprint laws, please visit Imprint/Impressum.
Privacy is near and dear to me, so I’m trying my best to protect yours as you visit my website. This website is hosted in Germany by Strato.de which means all content handling by my webhoster automatically falls under GDPR and the even stricter German data protection laws. Further I encourage and try to enforce usage of https and only use few and well selected word press plugins to help me maintain the website and protected it against hackers and spam while trying to keep the personally identifying information that is necessarily collected in this process to a reasonable minimum. Further details follow below:
What personal data we collect and why we collect it
Comments
When visitors leave comments on the site we collect the data shown in the comments form, and also the visitor’s IP address and browser user agent string to help spam detection.
An anonymized string created from your email address (also called a hash) may be provided to the Gravatar service to see if you are using it. The Gravatar service privacy policy is available here: https://automattic.com/privacy/. After approval of your comment, your profile picture is visible to the public in the context of your comment.
Media
If you upload images to the website, you should avoid uploading images with embedded location data (EXIF GPS) included. Visitors to the website can download and extract any location data from images on the website. You should also avoid to upload any other elements in your images that you don’t want us to make public.
Contact forms
If you choose to contact me through the contact form on the Contact Me page or other areas of this website, we collect and store the data you filled in to the fields (e.g. first and last name, email address, website and the message) as well as your IP address. This data is used to handle your attempt to contact me, allow me to reply and to deal with spam. It will be forwarded to my e-mail account, which is also provided by my hosting provider Strato.de (i.e. no automated reading of your email content as would be the case with gmail). Data submitted this way will be held indefinitely unless I decide to delete it or you request it’s removal. We will also not use the information submitted through them for marketing purposes nor will or can any other third party.
Cookies
If you leave a comment on our site you may opt-in to saving your name, email address and website in cookies. These are for your convenience so that you do not have to fill in your details again when you leave another comment. These cookies will last for one year.
If you have an account and you log in to this site, we will set a temporary cookie to determine if your browser accepts cookies. This cookie contains no personal data and is discarded when you close your browser.
When you log in, we will also set up several cookies to save your login information and your screen display choices. Login cookies last for two days, and screen options cookies last for a year. If you select “Remember Me”, your login will persist for two weeks. If you log out of your account, the login cookies will be removed.
If you edit or publish an article, an additional cookie will be saved in your browser. This cookie includes no personal data and simply indicates the post ID of the article you just edited. It expires after 1 day.
Embedded content from other websites
Articles on this site may include embedded content (e.g. videos, images, articles, etc.). Embedded content from other websites behaves in the exact same way as if the visitor has visited the other website.
These websites may collect data about you, use cookies, embed additional third-party tracking, and monitor your interaction with that embedded content, including tracing your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that website.
Analytics
We are using Jetpack as our Analytics tool. We’re only analyzing to improve the website for you, no information is used for marketing purposes (if you ignore the fact, that this is my online portfolio and is therefore obviously and shamelessly advertising myself). You can find their Privacy Policy here: https://automattic.com/privacy/
We are also using Wordfence to additionally guard the website against hackers and spammers. We have a standing Data Processing Agreement with them and have disabled the plugins cookies.
Further, we’re also using Redirection to redirect you, in case you stumble upon an invalid URL. We capture requests leading to a 404 and log them, so we can set up further redirects and improve your experience while browsing the page. The plugin is set to not collect IP addresses by default. On occasion we might have to debug the redirects and 404 requests in more detail. For this we might turn collection of pseudonimized IP addresses (discarding the last part of it) or if that absolutely doesn’t help, the entire IP address. The logs are only ever kept for up to 2 months and in case we had to debug and collect full IP addresses, we will discard them within a week.
To help reduce unnecessary bandwidth usage on mobile, we’re using WP Mobile Detect which will figure out what device you’re using and serve you some content based on that. This tracks non of your data directly, though one could conceivably deduct, whether or not a device was used, by looking at content request counters. That is, if mobile devices get Content A and B while Desktop devices get A and C, the discrepancy between requests for those elements when using A as a base line could be analyzed manually. But seriously, who has time for that?
Who we share your data with
For the purpose of Analytics as outlined above, we share data with Jetpack and Wordfence.
How long we retain your data
If you leave a comment, the comment and its metadata are retained indefinitely. This is so we can recognize and approve any follow-up comments automatically instead of holding them in a moderation queue.
Data submitted through contact forms will also be held indefinitely unless I decide to delete it or you request it’s removal.
For users that register on our website (if any), we also store the personal information they provide in their user profile. All users can see, edit, or delete their personal information at any time (except they cannot change their username). Website administrators can also see and edit that information.
What rights you have over your data
If you have an account on this site, or have left comments, or filled out the contact form, you can request to receive an exported file of the personal data we hold about you, including any data you have provided to us. You can also request that we erase any personal data we hold about you. This does not include any data we are obliged to keep for administrative, legal, or security purposes.
Where we send your data
Visitor comments may be checked through an automated spam detection service.
Your contact information
You can contact me through my Contact Form, any of the social media buttons in the header or find more direct contact information in the Imprint/Impressum