Who I am
I am John Morrish. My address is 2 Priory Mews, Sidney Street, Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, GL52 6DJ. My landline number is (0)1242 693385. The website address is: https://filmcheltenham.online.
I am doing everything I can to make your use of this site private. I do not track you and I do not sell your data. I do not use any sort of analytics software. I do not sell space to advertisers who will track you. If you join my mailing list, I will have your email address, and I will know whether you receive my newsletters. I have opted not to know whether you open them. It’s really not my business.
But it is extremely difficult to operate any sort of website or mailing list these days without using the services of people whose business is the invasion of privacy. Really, you would need to have your own internet. If anyone can help me with that, please get in touch.
In the meantime, the site is a WordPress installation, hosted on a virtual server supplied by a hosting company called Hostinger, based in Lithuania, although they have a London postal address. It is anyone’s guess where the actual physical server lives. The mailing list is a MailPoet installation. I use Akismet spam filtering for the comments. MailPoet and Akismet claim to be privacy-friendly, but they are both now part of Automattic, a global company with 1,600 employees, owned by Matt Mulleweg, an internet entrepreneur. He was one of the co-creators of WordPress, and appears to be on the side of the angels, donating heavily to Open Source and Internet Freedom charities, but who can really tell? He has certainly built a mighty monopoly. At last count Automattic was valued at $3bn. Matt Mulleweg is 37.
I’m sure some of these hip capitalists are sincere in their belief that they are building a better world. Sadly, I don’t think they are succeeding. I have read The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff. You might also enjoy Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now by Jaron Lanier. He was one of the inventors of social media, writing the code for LinkedIn. I am on LInkedIn. I was also once banned by LinkedIn for allegedly offending its community standards. I was subsequently found not guilty and reinstated. [Full disclosure!]
The Privacy Policy that follows is based on the standard wording that comes with WordPress. If you add any content to the site, these things will concern you.
Comments
You may wish to comment on articles on the site. When you leave comments on the site we collect the data shown in the comments form, and also your IP address and browser user agent string to help spam detection. I don’t like this any more than you do.
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 want to upload images to the website, you should avoid uploading images with embedded location data (EXIF GPS) included. I use Graphic Converter to take that stuff out of mine. Visitors to the website can download and extract any location data from images on the website. That’s the internet for you.
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 visit our login page, 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.
If 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. So if you click a link to a YouTube trailer, you’re entering the wonderful world of Google.
These websites will collect data about you, use cookies, embed additional third-party tracking, and monitor your interaction with that embedded content, including tracking your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that website. It’s all a dystopian nightmare.
Who we share your data with
If you request a password reset, your IP address will be included in the reset email. That means your email provider and mine can see it. But they know it anyway. If you use the internet, that is.
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.
For users that register on our website, we also store the personal information they provide in their user profile. All users can see, edit, or delete their own personal information at any time (except they cannot change their username). Website administrators (which currently is me, JM) 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, 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. There seems to be a lot of that.
Where we send your data
Visitor comments may be checked through an automated spam detection service: Akismet. Make your own mind up what you think about them.