On this page

• Introduction
• Your email
• Cookies
• Affiliate links
• What we do with your data
• Your right to be forgotten
• More advertising information
• List of advertising vendors

Introduction

Under GDPR rules I am obliged to make my privacy policy "concise, transparent, intelligible" and "written in clear and plain language". That’s good news because the old way, written in legal speak designed just to cover everyone’s arse, meant nothing to anybody and was a complete waste of time.

This page is here to explain what happens with your data that gets collected from this website. This data falls into two categories: email and cookies.

Email Addresses

Email is straightforward, if you sign up to my newsletter then I will have access to your email address which will be stored by another company who have their own GDPR compliance in place. You can read more about this here. An email address is also required if you sign up as a member on this website. More details about that here. www.guitar-chords.org.uk does not collect or ask for your email address for anything other than newsletter sign up or website membership.

Cookies

This is where things get a little more complicated, kind of. The problem with GDPR ruling is that it is written by incompetents that do not understand what personal data actually is. They say they have "expanded" the scope of what personal data is: in actual fact, what they have done is took it upon their own arrogant selves to "redefine" the meaning of "personal data". I would need to write a very lengthy article to explain their absolute misunderstanding of data and the utterly impractical conditions that they are imposing on website owners, as well as causing confusion for the average visitor to any website, who would be, almost guaranteed, clue-less as to what any of it means. The bottom line is this: No cookie used on this website can be used by me, the website owner, to find out who you are as a person or any of your details other than an email address if you choose to sign up to my newsletter. The closest I can get, through the use of analytical data is to say " a certain amount of my website visitors "probably" come from a particular city. I say "probably" because the data isn’t 100% accurate. Either way, I couldn’t possibly find out who any of you are but as far as GDPR is concerned, this is now considered personal data.

There is a caveat! If you click on something like a Facebook "like" button, then Facebook have the potential to know that you clicked from www.guitar-chords.org.uk, and from here they can use your information to assume that you have an interest in adverts that relate to guitar. They also have access to any information you have allowed them to use when you signed up with them. I have no control from this point so you will need to decide for yourself what data you will allow them to use, which under GDPR, they should be giving you the option to pull out of personalisation.

This website uses advertising provided by Google so the same applies. If you click on an Advert from this website then Google or the advertising provider that supplies Google may use any information they have on you to show you personalised adverts elsewhere. Again, you can opt out of personalised advertising with Google and their third parties usage of data, the details of how to do this, as well as how they might use your information can be found here. https://policies.google.com/technologies/partner-sites

From May the 25th 2018, all of our Advertising links provided by Google will be automatically set to non-personalised if you are a visitor form the EU. All other countries, at present may still be shown personalised advertising, until such a time that we are given the option to set it to non-personalised.

The bottom line with all of this is once you click away from www.guitar-chords.org.uk, a cookie might track you so that they know you clicked a link displayed on this website, however, no information about you is collected from www.guitar-chords.org.uk and forwarded along with that cookie. This doesn’t mean they don’t necessarily have any information about you if they are already tracking you from elsewhere, however, we do not collect or provide any information about you and pass it on. Again, one more caveat and that is Google Analytics. We do use this service on our website but as of 19th May 2018 we have this set to anonymous tracking which Google have now given us the option to do under GDPR ruling, so legally they are no longer allowed to track you as an individual entity while we have this set to anonymous.

Cookie	Description
_ga, _gat, _gid	We use Google Analytics to monitor user interaction on this website. This information helps us improve the website experience. If you consent, these cookies collect information in a way that does not directly identify you but will be stored to monitor your site usage with us.
wordpress_ wordpress_logged_in_ wp-settings wp-emember eMember_in_use anspress_session	We use Wordpress for some of the lesson material on this website, the jam tracks, Q&A, commenting and the member only material. These cookies are enabled and necessary for the functioning of this site

 

Affiliate Links

We use advertising links for related products on Amazon. If you click on one of these links, you will be taken to the Amazon website where they will use their own cookies and have their own cookie policies in place, which you should observe. If you have an Amazon account, they are already doing this internally anyway but you should be able to check your settings in your Amazon account to have some control of this.

Other affiliate links we may use could direct you to other teaching or related websites, such as Truefire, Jamplay, Udemy

I do not use cookie based links for any of these other websites, nor Amazon's - these are linked via referral codes only and not tracking links. In other words, no cookies or any information is gathered from these links unless you click on them, at which point the above warnings should be observed once you reach those websites

What we do with your data

In short, other than email to send you newsletters, nothing! I’m simply not interested in it. I use Google analytics to find out how many visitors use this site, what pages are popular and what aren’t. This way I can get a better idea of things that my visitors are interested in, or not, so that I can provide more useful and relevant diagrams, topics and lessons. As an individual and your personal details, even if I had access to it (which I don’t), I’m just not interested. I don’t personally do targeted advertising and marketing other than link to, or talk about guitar related products that might be of interest to all or any visitor to this website.

Your right to be forgotten

Under GDPR rules, if you are in the EU you have the right to be forgotten; in other words, you can request any information we have on you to be permanently deleted. You also have the right to ask for a copy of any information we hold. For www.guitar-chords.org.uk it’s simple, we do not have any information on you so there is nothing to show or delete unless you have signed up to our newsletter. Our current mail provider is Mailerlite and based in the EU. You can use the unsubscribe link at any time to be removed from any future emails. You can contact me at web@guitar-chords.org.uk if you want your details to be removed from the Mailerlite database or to see a copy of what info is stored there, which will be things like your sign up date, email address, how many emails you have been sent by us and opened or clicked on.

Google are making it possible for you to request data removal if you are in the EU. Amazon, we are still waiting to find out what they are doing but if you already have an account with either of them then you should find options there. If you don’t then contact us and we’ll see if we can get involved. Despite this being the law, I will personally make no promises of how responsive they would be in such cases until they give us automatic tools. It’s easy for the "law" to say we must oblige, however, we need to be realistic; it may not be possible to delete information about you if we do not have that information in the first place. The EU insists we write in plain language, unfortunately they don’t themselves deal in plain reality.

Again, we at www.guitar-chords.org.uk have no interest in you other than a general idea of how well our site is performing, "general" meaning "not individual". How the rest of the Internet is tracking or following you is not anything we could know about. That’s plain reality and common sense, something the powers of the EU struggle with.

Advertising Information
This website uses advertising and affiliate links to cover its running costs and earn a small profit. You may read more about this here. Advertising Disclaimer

Third party advertisers
To see a full list of third party advertising vendors with links to their own privacy policies, click the below link
List of Advertising Vendors

 

If you have any further questions regarding our privacy policy you are welcome to contact us by email at web@guitar-chords.org.uk