Published by Jeremy. Last Updated on April 18, 2020.
Disclaimers: Our site uses demographic data, email opt-ins, display advertising, and affiliate links. Please check out our Terms and Conditions for more information. Listed prices and attraction details may have changed since our visit and initial publication.
The below is Living the Dream’s Data Policy, and is a small subset of our full Terms and Conditions. To read the full T&Cs, click the previous link.
Recent changes to European privacy laws require us to share how we use data in operation of our sites. Although we are US based and receive primarily US based traffic, we believe in full disclosure for data usage all the same.
As bloggers, we use data rather minimally through 3rd party services such as in our analytics software, ad network, social media pages/profiles, and through our mailing list.
Our personal access to your data is quite minimal, but these services may use your data via your profiles, cookies, location, etc. in order to operate- most all of which is transmitted automatically purely because you are on this site (this would be true just about everywhere online).
But as we believe in full disclosure, we want to dive into greater detail on how data from these services is used on our sites.
Use of Personal Data
To put it simply, we do not require registration for you to use our site.
You are free to use our site and read our articles without submitting your name, email, mailing address, or other personal information to us at all.
If we were to pass you on the street tomorrow, we’d have no way of knowing you were on our site unless you made an effort to tell us so by emailing, talking to us on social media, etc.
However, we do use 3rd party programs which do track some data including demographics and cookies that we want to outline below.
As mentioned above, virtually all websites use services like these- not just us!
1) We use analytics software to monitor our site performance and growth and we do have access to ancillary data about each visitor (Examples: Google Analytics and StatCounter).
The data we have access to here can generally be read roughly as follows:
“Someone from [IP hosted by Company A] in [City/State] came to our site from [a Pinterest pin] on [date]. They viewed article X, then Y, and then Z. They were on an iPad and spent 15 minutes on our site. On article Z they clicked a link to [Amazon Product] and left our website. This user has visited our site before.”
or
“X% of our readers are female, Y% of our readers live in the USA, and Z% are over the age 55.”
In most cases, we do not know your name, address, email, phone number, or other comparable information from the above. For blogging service affiliates, we may receive additional information such as the business name that made the purchase.
If you comment on a blog post, we will see the information submitted (name, email) as well as your IP address. We do not use this data beyond having access to it. You will not be signed up for further notifications unless you check the boxes below the comment area to opt-in for further emails.
We only share broad demographic data when speaking to partners, and only personally use the data to provide a better user experience for you over time.
2) We use a 3rd party advertising network (Mediavine) that delivers image-based ads to you in part based on our site’s content, your demographics (via #1 above), and your web usage (via cookies saved on your device).
We do not receive any data from our ad network regarding this, and we do not know what ads are explicitly delivered to you at any time.
3) We use 3rd party social media networks and a mailing list service (Mailerlite).
To use these features of our site you must explicitly opt-in by liking a social media profile or submitting your email address. Links and sign up forms for these are available on our site, but they are not required for use.
By opting in, we may have access to your name, email address, and other associated data based on the individual site’s policies.
We do not use personal data (name, email, mailing address, phone number) in any capacity beyond its intended use (i.e. delivering newsletters to subscribers).
4) We participate in 3rd party affiliate programs (Amazon, hotel booking engines, etc) that may track referral data once you leave our site.
Much like how we can see that someone clicked a link to Amazon from our site (noted in #1 above), these sites can see that we referred you to them and may track this based on their own specific data policies.
Through the affiliate relationship, these sites may send some data back to us over time (such as how many total clicks we’ve sent, what pages/links have resulted in sales, products sold, product cost, timestamp, etc.). We keep this data separate from our general analytics (in #1) at this time. To put it simply, we can see when users leave our site, and we can see when we’ve made sales, but we do not attempt to connect the two on the user level at this time.
Right to Be Forgotten
You have the right to be forgotten on the sites you visit.
If following Living the Dream on social media or via our newsletter, you can unsubscribe or unfollow at any time, for any reason. You can remove cookies by clearing your browser history at any time.
We do not use your names/emails or data associated with any specific individual outside of their designated 3rd party services as noted above.
If you would like us to remove any further data, please email us and we’ll be happy to discuss our data policies further and see if we have any further data that can be removed.
But please note that by emailing us to discuss this, you have to tell us more data about yourself than we typically have access to in the first place. Weird, we know, but unfortunately we have to state this in order to be compliant.
If you have any questions regarding how we use data on our sites, please email us at [email protected].