Privacy Policy

Who we are

Our website address is: https://thepolyphony.org. This website is managed by the Institute for Medical Humanities at Durham University.

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 anonymised string created from your email address (also called a hash) may be provided to the Gravatar service to see if you are using it. After approval of your comment, your profile picture is visible to the public in the context of your comment.

Contact forms

If you send us a message via the contact form your email address and any other information your provide will be forwarded to staff in Durham University who may forward your message and contact information on to another member of the team who is better able to address your query. We do not use the information submitted for marketing purposes and completing the contact form will not add you to our mailing list.

Mailing List

If you subscribe to our mailing list your name, email address and any other information your provide will be transferred to and held by MailChimp. Access to the list is password protected and accessible to authorised staff only.  You can ask to be removed from the list or remove yourself at any time by emailing mail@thepolyphony.org or following the link in one of our emails. You can read more about MailChimp’s privacy policy here

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

To track page views and basic audience information we use the WordPress JetPack Site Stats plugin. This service collects your IP address, WordPress.com user ID (if logged in), WordPress.com username (if logged in), user agent, visiting URL, referring URL, timestamp of event, browser language, country code. Important: We (the site owner) do not have access to any of this information via this feature. For example, we can see that a specific post has 285 views, but we cannot see which specific users/accounts viewed that post. Stats logs, containing visitor IP addresses and WordPress.com usernames (if available), are retained by Automattic for 28 days and are used for the sole purpose of powering this feature.

Jetpack Site Stats tracks post and page views, video plays (if videos are hosted by WordPress.com), outbound link clicks, referring URLs and search engine terms, and country. Jetpack also tracks performance on each page load that includes the Javascript file used for tracking stats. This is exclusively for aggregate performance tracking across Jetpack sites in order to make sure that our plugin and code is not causing performance issues. This includes the tracking of page load times and resource loading duration (image files, Javascript files, CSS files, etc.).

Who we share your data with

This website is managed by Durham University. Editors and administrative staff  have access to the data outlined above but we do not share it beyond the website teams. We use a number of service providers to provide and maintain this website and our communications. These include our web hosting company Siteground, our mailing service MailChimp, WordPress and WordPress-approved plug-in providers.

How long we retain your data

If you leave a comment, the comment and its metadata are retained indefinitely. This is so we can recognise 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.

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.

Where we send your data

Visitor comments may be checked through an automated spam detection service.

Our contact information

You can get in touch with us via mail@thepolyphony.org or the site administrator Sarah McLusky, sarah.mclusky@durham.ac.uk, 0191 334 8142