This is the privacy policy for The Compact Furniture Place located at compactfurnitureplace.com, owned and operated by Lori and Rachael. This privacy policy was updated 10/06/2021.
We take our readers’ privacy seriously and want you to understand what personal information is collected on our site, how it’s collected and how to prevent it from being collected if you wish.
In order to be compliant with U.S. privacy laws and the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation), this privacy policy will explain:
- How we use cookies
- How third party software used on our site, uses cookies
- Areas of this website that may affect your privacy or personal information
- How we collect, process, manage and store that information
We’ve done our best to make it interesting in the beginning, but as it goes on (and we had to add a bunch of stuff to it to make it GDPR compliant) it’s probably quite boring and we apologize for that.
Cookies
This site uses cookies, so let’s talk about web cookies for a minute.
What Are Cookies?
Actually, there’s a really good explanation of cookies here. But in a nutshell, a cookie is a small text file created when you visit a website. They are created to keep track of your movements within the site, help you resume where you left off, and save any customizations you made.
Cookies are used to help make your browsing experience more convenient for you. For instance, you might visit a site and put something in your shopping cart, then forget about it and close your browser. Later you open it back up, return to the site and lo and behold your shopping cart with the item in it is there waiting for you.
Cookies are like the barista at your favorite coffee shop who knows your order before you say it and writes your name on the cup without having to ask you for it.
Cookies can’t scan your computer or snoop for private information on your hard drive, any more than your friendly barista can reach across the counter, grab your wallet and give herself a nice fat tip.
What Does a Cookie Contain?
The text file contained in a cookie includes some or all of the following information:
- IP addresses
- Internet Service Provider
- Date and time stamp
- Type of browser (such as Chrome, Firefox, Explorer, etc)
- Enter and exit pages
This above information is not linked to a name, address, phone number, or email address.
How Long Do Cookies Stay on Your Browser?
How long a cookie remains on your computer depends on what type of cookie it is. There are session cookies and persistent cookies.
Session cookies are created temporarily when you visit a website and once you leave the site, they are deleted. Persistent cookies remain in your browser’s subfolder and are activated when you return to that particular site. How long they remain depends on the duration set within the cookie file.
Can You Prevent Cookies From Being Installed on Your Browser?
Yes, you CAN block cookies from being installed on your browser. To find out how, go here, and click on the browser you use to get the instructions. It’s quite easy.
Can You Delete Cookies?
You can also go to the same website, here, and see how to delete any cookies that are already installed on your browser. Again, it’s real easy.
Different Types of Cookies
There are two types of cookies: necessary and non-necessary.
Necessary cookies are exactly what the name implies – they are needed to make this Site function properly for you. For example, if we have links to products on a third-party site, those links need to work for you and may require cookies to do so. If we have an online store feature in our site (coming at some point), you’ll need cookies to add products to your cart.
Non-necessary cookies are one of these:
- Performance cookies that track activity, like pages visited, error messages, and similar info. They don’t identify a particular user, just overall activity on this Site.
- Functionality cookies that remember choices you’ve made on this Site, like the comment cookies we mention below.
- Targeting or Advertising cookies that use your browsing habits to display ads on a site.
Cookies Used on This Site
We use both necessary and non-necessary cookies. Below are the Cookies used on our site.
WordPress Comments
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.
These are non-necessary functionality cookies, so if you do not opt-in when you comment, the site will still function normally for you.
Wordfence Security
We use a security plugin on our site, called Wordfence. This helps us keep the site free from malware and viruses, which in turn protects our users as well. Wordfence has a feature we enabled called “Live Traffic”. This shows us the IP address of visitors currently using our site and what pages they viewed.
It also shows IP addresses of bots and crawlers. Which sounds like bugs, but are web tools used by Bing, Google and other companies and softwares. Some of them are good and some bad, but that’s the beauty of Wordfence – it alerts us to the bad ones. It also detects if an IP address is known for installing viruses on other sites and blocks it.
Each visitor to the Site, whether bot or human, gets a row in the Wordfence live traffic screen. When a person or bot clicks on a new page, that displays to us in a new row.
The reason I’m explaining this is to let you know that the length of time the live traffic data is stored, varies according to the number of rows we wish to save. It is currently set to 500 rows. That sounds like a lot, but because many of those hits are bots and crawlers, it’s really not that much. The timeframe this entails depends on how much traffic we get.
If a hack or malware attempt comes from an IP address, that address is saved in our records for a long time – 10 years – so that we recognize the scallywags if they try it again. If you aren’t attempting any funny business, your IP address drops off pretty quickly, again, depending on how much traffic we get.
The Wordfence cookies are necessary because they help protect this Site from malware and viruses.
Litespeed Cache Cookie
This is a necessary cookie. Our hosting server uses this cookie as part of a caching process to improve the speed and performance of our website. Caching allows our website to load more quickly for our visitors. Here is their privacy notice regarding what this cache cookie is used for:
“This site utilizes caching in order to facilitate a faster response time and better user experience. Caching potentially stores a duplicate copy of every web page that is on display on this site. All cache files are temporary, and are never accessed by any third party, except as necessary to obtain technical support from the cache plugin vendor. Cache files expire on a schedule set by the site administrator, but may easily be purged by the admin before their natural expiration, if necessary.”
Pinterest Cookie (_pinterest_cm)
We embed Pinterest images and use Pinterest widgets on our site to make it convenient for readers to save ideas to their Pinterest boards. This requires Pinterest cookies. The Pinterest cookie policy is here. These are non-necessary cookies.
Amazon Cookie (ad-id)
We have Amazon ads on our website, so you may see the “ad-id” cookie in your browser when you visit one of our pages. This cookie is used by Amazon Advertising to register user actions and target content on the website based on ad clicks on a different website. This is a non-necessary cookie.
The Amazon cookie does see visitor’s IP addresses. You can view Amazon’s privacy policy and how they use IP address information here. For the Amazon UK policy, go here and for their Canada policy go here.
We also use Google Analytics, which uses non-necessary performance cookies and deserves a heading all on its own.
Google Analytics Cookies
We use Google Analytics. Like any business, we like to see if our visitors come from Google, Facebook or another site in order to better manage and market our business. We use Google Analytics to tell us this information. Google Analytics installs cookies on the browsers of visitors to our website. When we login to our Google Analytics account, we can see which pages on this website visitors visited, the paths visitors took, where they came from and how they left.
We can not see which website you visited after you leave us, however. The only way we could narrow down the information to any one individual is if only one person was on this website that day, and we knew who that was (hi, mom!).
Our Google Analytics Cookies are set to retain the visitor information for 26 months and resets each time you visit us. For example, if you visit this Site on July 1, then again on July 14, the 26 months starts again on the July 14 visit.
This visitor usage history helps us to see, month over month or year over year, how our site is performing, which pages people like and how we can improve it to get more visitors.
Google Analytics cookies are non-necessary cookies. This site will function normally for you if you disable them.
Furthermore, we have our Google Analytics set to anonymize IP addresses. That means the last three numbers of your IP address becomes a zero, rendering it more anonymous than it was before. It is then not a personally identifiable piece of information (it really wasn’t completely one before, but in combination with other pieces of information, it could have been). Clear as mud, right?
Yeah, it confuses us too. The main thing is that our Google Analytics isn’t saving or sharing your personal information.
We now have Google Adsense ads on our site and below is a heading and information about that. Whether we had Adsense ads on our site or not, based upon your activity on our site (which Google sees because of the analytics cookies), Google might serve you a related ad when you visit someone else’s site.
Here is the Google Analytics privacy disclosure:
“Google Analytics is a web analysis service provided by Google. Google utilizes the data collected to track and examine the use of compactfurnitureplace.com, to prepare reports on its activities and share them with other Google services. Google may use the data collected to contextualize and personalize the ads of its own advertising network. Personal data collected: Cookie and Usage Data. Place of processing: USA. Find Google’s privacy policy here.”
How to Opt-Out
If you don’t want Google analytics to track these activities, you can see how to opt-out here. It’s a browser add-on that is very simple to add.
How to Control Which Ads Google Shows You
You can choose not to see Ads based on your browsing history by going here and controlling what Google Ads you see.
You can even manage many third party companies’ cookies used for online advertising by going here.
Google Adsense Ads on Our Site
As of 10/6/2021, you may see ads served by Google on our site. You can tell they are Google ads because they will look very different from the other content on the page.
If you are not in California or the EU or EEA, you may see personalized ads served by Google or its approved third-party ad technology providers. What this means is when you visit a page on our site with ads served by these providers, a cookie may be installed on your browser so that the ads you see are more relevant to you. Here is how Google Adsense explains it:
- Third party vendors, including Google, use cookies to serve ads based on a user’s prior visits to this or other websites.
- Google’s use of advertising cookies enables it and its partners to serve ads to our visitors based on their visit to this site and/or other sites on the Internet.
- Users may opt out of personalized advertising by visiting Ads Settings and simply turning off ad personalization. You can also opt out of a third-party vendor’s use of cookies for personalized advertising by visiting www.aboutads.info.
- Below is a list of the approved third-party ad vendors that may serve ads on our site. Again, you can go to the above link to opt out of the ad personalization cookies these vendors use.
Cookie Consent
On your very first visit to this Site, you will see a cookie consent message at the bottom. There we let you know a quick summary of the types of cookies we use and why. According to the GDPR, we have to get the consent of EU visitors before we use any non-necessary cookies that share or store personal information.
Well, NONE of our non-necessary cookies share or store personal information, so we don’t ask for consent before installing them. So when you click “Accept” on our cookie consent message, it’s just informing you and making the annoying message go away.
And when you click “Tell me more”, you go to this page you’re on, (hi!) to read all this stuff.
But as I mentioned above, some third-party cookies not controlled by us (like Amazon’s), do see your IP address.
BUT, if you just don’t like the idea of any cookies from our site being installed on your browser, that’s totally okay. You can use the links referred to earlier on this page, to control the cookies in your browser.
Your Email Address
We don’t currently offer a newsletter or emailed post service, so we do not ask for anyone’s email address. If that changes, we will update this privacy policy.
If you complete our contact form, you may provide an email address. This is so that we can reply to you if need be.
We do not share your email address with anyone else and we do not send spam. We would only use your email to send you a reply or a piece of information relative to your inquiry.
This site does not store email addresses, but if you would like your email address deleted from our email server, simply state that in your inquiry.
If we are compelled by law to provide an email address, or other information we have that is related to your visit to our site (from Google Analytics, for instance), then we must comply with such orders.
Where We Store Your Personal Information
For any Europeans using the site, the data that we collect from you may be transferred to, and stored at, a destination outside the European Economic Area (“EEA“). It may also be processed by staff operating outside the EEA who work for us or for one of our suppliers or contractors. Territories outside of the EEA may not have equivalent legal protections to those that apply within the EEA but we are under a duty to make sure that our suppliers and contractors located outside of the EEA continue to take all steps reasonably necessary to ensure that your data is treated securely and in accordance with this Policy. By submitting your personal data to us, you agree to this transfer, storing or processing.
Unfortunately, the transmission of information via the internet is not completely secure. Although we will do our best to protect your personal data, we cannot guarantee the security of your data transmitted to our Site; any transmission is at your own risk. Once we have received your information, we will use strict procedures and security features to try to prevent unauthorized access.
We follow strict security procedures to ensure that your personal information is not damaged, destroyed or disclosed to a third party without your permission and to prevent unauthorized access to it. The computers that store the information are kept in a secure facility with restricted physical access and we use secure firewalls and other measures to restrict electronic access. If we are working with third parties, we will require them to have in place similar measures to protect your information.
Your Rights
You have the right to use our Site without consenting to marketing and communication services that we provide. We will inform you (before collecting your data) if we intend to use your data for such purposes or if we intend to disclose your information to any third party for such purposes. We always use the most recently submitted form to be your current consent status. You can also exercise the right at any time by contacting us at lori (at) compactfurnitureplace.com
Your Rights:
You have the right to ask us not to process your personal data at any time.*
You have the right to ask us, at any time, to show you what data we’ve collected.
You have the right to fix any data we have that is incomplete or wrong.
The Data Protection Act 1998 (DPA) and the GDPR (in Europe) gives you the right to access information held about you. Your right of access can be exercised in accordance with the DPA and GDPR.
*Asking us to not process your data does require us to delete your data, which is legally considered processing your data. So respectfully inform you that we’d have to do that one thing.
Third Party Companies and Links
We are an affiliate for various third party companies and as such, we have links and/or ads to those company’s websites (an affiliate means we promote their products and if you buy through our link, we get a small commission. Full disclosure regarding that is here.).
Those companies use cookies and may use information about your visits (NOT your name, address, email or telephone number though) to this and other websites in order to display ads for services or products that may interest you.
If you would like details about this practice and your choices in the matter, please go to networkadvertising.org.
These are the companies for whom we are affiliates and a link to their privacy policy:
Amazon
Amazon EU
Amazon CA
Target
Impact Radius
Conversant Media
Home Depot
ShareASale
If you make a purchase on these third party websites, this website (compactfurnitureplace.com) does not have any access to your personal information, such as your name, address, payment information, email, or anything else you may input on their site to complete your order. We are only a portal to direct you to the product we feel would benefit you.
We are not responsible for the content, security, privacy policies or practices of any other websites, even if you access them using links from this Site or if you can access this Site or use our services from them.
We recommend that you check the policy of each website that you visit and make sure you are comfortable with the terms of such policies before providing any personal information.
Embedded Content on This Site
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 you have 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.
Below are links to the privacy policies of the websites where we have embedded content from:
Pinterest
Youtube
houzz
Instagram
Third Party Plugins and Social Sharing
We use third party plugins for social sharing and other purposes. By the way, plugins are tools installed on a website to make it look and act the way we want it to.
Below are the plugins we use and how they may affect your information.
The Sassy Social Share plugin allows you to share content from this Site to Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Google+. The plugin does not track any user data, but it depends on the third party social network you are sharing to, and THAT party might track data.
How that works is the plugin sends a request to the third party APIs via your web browser to fetch information (like whether you are logged into your Facebook or Pinterest account to be able to share the post). This request made by your web browser may include your IP address, which can then be seen by the third-party that it’s being requested from. This API request doesn’t include any of your personal data other than the IP address.
If you use the share buttons on our site to share to Facebook, be aware that the process will share your IP address, and web browser with Facebook and will store and retrieve cookies on your browser, embed additional tracking, and monitor your interaction with the widget, including correlating your Facebook account with whatever action you take (such as sharing our webpage), if you are logged in to Facebook. For more information about how this data may be used, please see Facebook’s data privacy policy: https://www.facebook.com/about/privacy/update.
If you share a post to Twitter, the plugin will make a request to Twitter’s servers for you to be able to tweet our posts using your Twitter account. These requests make your IP address visible to Twitter, who may use it in accordance with their data privacy policy: https://twitter.com/en/privacy#update.
If you share a photo or post to Pinterest, Pinterest may track your IP address in accordance with their data privacy policy: https://policy.pinterest.com/en/privacy-policy.
What Do We Do With Your Personal Data?
Currently, the only personal data we collect from you is possibly an email address (from your comment or contact form) and an IP address (from Wordfence, our security software plugin).
We mentioned above that we will only use your email address to reply to your inquiry from our contact form. As far as comments, we may reply to a comment, but that reply doesn’t even get sent to you via email. You can view those in your WordPress account or come back to the post where you commented and check for a reply. We don’t use the email address you provide when you comment unless you specifically request us to do so.
As for your IP address, we mentioned how we use Wordfence to see the live traffic hits to our site, from humans, crawlers and bots and to protect this Site from virus attacks.
These are the only ways we use your data.
We don’t share your email or IP address with anyone else. If you have a WordPress account and leave a comment, WordPress has access to your email address. You can find their privacy policy here, including how to change the settings in your WordPress account.
Also, if you comment, it will be checked by the spam filter within the Wordfence plugin, to determine if the comment contains a virus or is spam.
We also do not share your contact form information with anyone else. All conversations between The Compact Furniture Place staff and you via email or the contact form are private. If law enforcement legally demands those conversations then we would have to comply, but other than that, we don’t spill.
We may have links to other websites from our Site. We are not responsible for the content, security, privacy policies and practices of any other websites, even if you access them using links from this Site or if you can access this Site or use our services from them. We recommend that you check the policy of each website that you visit and make sure that you are comfortable with the terms of such policies before providing any personal information.
If our business is sold or merged, or if we sell or buy any business or assets, we may disclose your personal data to the prospective seller or buyer of such business or assets. We will make sure that any such transfer is done in a secure way.
How Long Do 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.
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.
Earlier, we explained about the Wordfence security plugin and how long (approximately) that data is retained.
Where Do We Store Your Data?
We maintain your data at the server of our hosting company, Namecheap, and within the backups for this Site stored on our business computer.
If you leave a comment on this website, that information is stored at our hosting company, Namecheap, as well. That information includes your name, your avatar, your comment, the time you left the comment and your ISP address.
For any Europeans using the site, the data that we collect from you may be transferred to, and stored at, a destination outside the European Economic Area (“EEA“). It may also be processed by staff operating outside the EEA who work for us or for one of our suppliers or contractors. Territories outside of the EEA may not have equivalent legal protections to those that apply within the EEA but we are under a duty to make sure that our suppliers and contractors located outside of the EEA continue to take all steps reasonably necessary to ensure that your data is treated securely and in accordance with this Policy. By submitting your personal data to us, you agree to this transfer, storing or processing.
Unfortunately, the transmission of information via the internet is not completely secure. Although we will do our best to protect your personal data, we cannot guarantee the security of your data transmitted to our Site; any transmission is at your own risk. Once we have received your information, we will use strict procedures and security features to try to prevent unauthorized access.
We follow strict security procedures to ensure that your personal information is not damaged, destroyed or disclosed to a third party without your permission and to prevent unauthorized access to it. The computers that store the information are kept in a secure facility with restricted physical access and we use secure firewalls and other measures to restrict electronic access. If we are working with third parties, we will require them to have in place similar measures to protect your information.
What Rights You Have Over Your Data
If you have an account on this site, or have left comments, 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.
Your Rights:
You have the right to ask us not to process your personal data at any time.*
You have the right to ask us, at any time, to show you what data we’ve collected.
You have the right to fix any data we have that is incomplete or wrong.
The Data Protection Act 1998 (DPA) and the GDPR (in Europe) gives you the right to access information held about you. Your right of access can be exercised in accordance with the DPA and GDPR.
You can also exercise the rights above at any time by contacting us at Lori (at) compactfurnitureplace.com. Simply send us an email with your request and we will comply. You can also use our contact form for this purpose.
*Asking us to not process your data does require us to delete your data, which is legally considered processing your data. So respectfully inform you that we’d have to do that one thing.
How We Protect Your Data
We use whatever means are within our control to protect your data and that consists of:
- This Site uses a SSL security certificate to help prevent evil hackers from intercepting the connection between your computer and our Site.
- We use Wordfence, a security plugin to protect our site from hackers, attackers and other malicious entities out to steal people’s information.
- We keep our plugins and platforms up to date so as not to leave them vulnerable to hackers.
- We don’t share your email with anyone, unless we’re required to by law.
Data Breach Procedures
After yelling some not-so-nice words, the procedure we will follow if we discover this website has been breached is to email the commenters, form submitters and registered users within 24 hours of discovering the breach.
We will also perform a scan of this Site to determine where and how the breach occurred and take extra security precautions to ensure it doesn’t happen again.
California Online Privacy Protection Act
CalOPPA requires any person or company in the United States (and elsewhere) that operates websites collecting Personally Identifiable Information from California consumers to post a clear privacy policy on its website and it must state what information is being collected and with whom it is being shared. You can learn more about this act here.
According to CalOPPA, we agree to the following:
- Users can visit our site anonymously.
- We will link to this privacy policy on our home page (it’s in the footer of every page).
- Our privacy policy includes the word ‘privacy’ and can be easily located on our site.
- Changes to our privacy policy will be posted on our privacy policy page (this one).
- If you have a change to your personal information you’ve provided to us, you can let us know through email, via our contact form.
How does our site handle Do Not Track signals?
We honor Do Not Track signals and do not plant cookies when a Do Not Track (DNT) browser option is in place.
Does our site allow third-party behavioral tracking?
It’s also important to note that we allow third-party behavioral tracking, as mentioned above in our “Third Party” section.
It is also important to note that our Google Adsense settings do not serve up personalized ads to visitors from California. This means the ads a California visitor sees on our site are not based on their prior website browsing or searches.
COPPA (Children Online Privacy Protection Act)
The Children Online Privacy Protection Act states that parents are in control of ensuring their children’s safety when using the Internet. However, the The Federal Trade Commission spells out what operators of websites and online services must do to protect children’s privacy and safety online.
We do not specifically market to children under the age of 13 years old.
Fair Information Practices
In compliance with Fair Information Practices we agree to notify users of our website if a security breach occurs which puts their personal information at risk. We will notify users on this site within 1 business day of a breach.
We also agree to the Individual Redress Principle which means people have the right to legally pursue data collectors and processors who fail to follow privacy laws. This also means that people can go to the courts or government agencies to investigate and/or prosecute any non-compliance by data processors.
Business Transfers
If Compactfurnitureplace.com, or substantially all of its assets, were acquired, or in the unlikely event that Compactfurnitureplace.com goes out of business or enters bankruptcy, user information would be one of the assets that is transferred or acquired by a third party. You acknowledge that such transfers may occur, and that any acquirer of Compactfurnitureplace.com may continue to use your personal information as set forth in this policy.
Changes to Our Privacy Policy
This privacy policy was last updated 10/06/2021 and will be modified as needed or required.
The owner of Compactfurnitureplace.com may change these Terms from time to time. Please review these Terms periodically for any updates or changes. Your continued use of this Site following the posting of any updates or changes to these Terms constitutes your acceptance of such changes. If you object to any provision of these Terms or any subsequent modifications to these Terms, your exclusive recourse is to immediately terminate use of this Site.
It is our policy to post any changes we make to our privacy policy on this page. If we make material changes to how we treat our users’ personal information, we will notify you through a notice on the Website home page. The date the privacy policy was last revised is identified at the top of the page. You are responsible for ensuring we have an up-to-date active and deliverable email address for you, and for periodically visiting our Website and this privacy policy to check for any changes.
If you have any questions or concerns about our Privacy Policy, don’t hesitate to contact us at Lori (at) compactfurnitureplace.com.
Helpful Links
Go here to see how to prevent cookies from being installed on your browser
Go here to see how to delete cookies from your browser
Go here to opt-out of Google Analytics cookies
Go here to control which ads Google shows you
Go here to manage third-party advertisers cookies
Coffee image photo credit: diff_sky via Foter.com / CC BY-ND
Private image photo credit: helge thomas via Foter.com / CC BY