Your privacy is important to Shield.

Our privacy policy was last updated on Sunday, 1 July 2018.

You should know that we are a small blog staffed entirely by volunteers, and our knowledge about privacy law is limited. If you feel we are not upholding our privacy obligations, please get in contact. We want to learn, improve and do the right thing. In the meantime, we have taken a common-sense approach to privacy.

If you spot an error, think there’s something else we should cover here or want to discuss Shield‘s privacy policy in greater depth, please get in contact.

Our short privacy policy

We promise to do our best to protect your privacy.

Our full privacy policy

Everyone

Analytics and tracking

The Shield website automatically tracks and records information about the users of this website. For example, it counts how many visitors the website receives each day, and which countries their IP address is located in.

Other website analytics information collected includes how many people have visited each page of the site. This is helpful because we can see which posts and pages are popular.

Until we hire a website manager, we do not have the technical knowledge in the team to adjust the default tracking settings, nor to establish what (if any) cookies the website uses. As far as we can tell from WordPress, you are never personally identifiable from browsing the website (but your IP address is revealed if you use the contact form; see below).

If you are knowledgeable about websites, and want to work with us, please get in contact.

Contact form

The contact form automatically collects your IP address and sends this, along with the information you fill in, to the Managing Editor. (Again, until we hire a website manager, we cannot adjust this. In the meantime, if you do not want to share your IP address, please use a VPN service, such as ProtonVPN, to disguise it.)

The details sent in the contact form may be held for an indefinite period. As and when time allows, we delete old emails – including contact form emails – that are no longer relevant.

Your email address will never be shared outside of the Shield team without your express permission. We will not add you to any mailing lists (so if you want to be notified when new blog posts are published, please subscribe by email).

Guest writers

Our editors will delete all copies of your article from their computers once the editing process is completed.

Any emails you send to Shield staff may be held for an indefinite period. As and when time allows, we delete old emails that are no longer relevant.

Your email address will never be shared outside of the Shield team without your express permission. We will not add you to any mailing lists (so if you want to be notified when your article is published, please subscribe by email).

We will ask you to write under your full name and provide one paragraph of biographical information. This will be published with your article and remain available online for an indefinite period. If this causes you concern, please get in contact.

Shield staff and applicants

Your personal information (such as your CV and cover letter) will be held in the Managing Editor’s email account while the recruitment and hiring process is completed.

If you are unsuccessful in your application, we will delete this personal information as soon as is reasonably practicable unless you expressly ask us to keep your CV on file, or we ask to do so and receive your express permission.

If you work for Shield, a more comprehensive privacy policy will be sent to you after you join the team, explaining how staff information is handled and protected.

Shield subscribers

If you subscribe to Shield through WordPress, we will be able to view some basic details about you (such as the information you share on your public WordPress profile).

If you subscribe to Shield by email, we will be able to see your email address.

In both cases, this information is stored within our WordPress site in order to automatically notify you when a new blog post is created.

Social media users

Shield is present on several social media platforms. When we advertise our latest blog posts on social media, we use Bitly links. These provide us information including how many people clicked on the link, what countries they are from, and what referrers were involved.

A referrer is the platform that the user first clicked on the Bitly link from. For example, Bitly might tell us that 21 people clicked through to an article from Facebook, 27 people clicked through to it from Twitter and 7 people clicked through to it from email, SMS or other methods.

As far as we know, you are never personally identifiable from clicking on such a link. (Again, when we get a website manager we can confirm this.)