Privacy policy GDPR thing hoozit
Wow has anyone ever read one of these?
We have to have one of these dealios to explain how we comply with the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation), the DPA (Data Protection Act) and the PECR (Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations) because god knows there’s not enough actual interesting things in the world to read, you need to read 1,000 words of legalese nonsense that makes literally not one bit of difference to anyone, ever. Also, we don’t really know what these things are. We’re just a bunch of scruffy writers who thought we’d have a laugh and get other people writing with us and now apparently we’re doing this??
Short words (written by short people)
The best bit about the GDPR stuff is that all this has to be “concise, transparent, intelligible and easily accessible” so hold on to your hats, motherfuckers, this is going to be the shortest, clearest and best freakin’ privacy policy you ever did see. So. Here we go…
Tl;dr
We’re a tiny, overstretched business and we don’t have the time or energy to do anything nefarious with your data. It’s not that we’re not evil – we’re as corruptible as anyone – we’re just too tired to think up a malevolent plot to steal your identity.
We collect and store the info we need to provide you with the service you buy from us. We occasionally stalk you via Facebook, Instagram or Google adverts. That’s really it.
Cookies
Seriously who actually cares? Do you even know what a cookie is or does? Well then. Yes we use cookies because that’s kinda how the Internet works. If you don’t want our delicious home-baked chocolate chip scripts, then you need to block cookies on your browser but don’t come crying to us when nothing does what it’s supposed to.
Stalky visitor tracking
Look, we’re following you, ok? We use Google Analytics, primarily to stare at the real time stats because they’re cool but also to see what stuff people are looking at so we can write more of the stuff you like.
We also have the Facebook Pixel installed so that we can sell you stuff. Yes you heard it. We are a business and – shocker – we want you to spend money with us. The Facebook Pixel means that we can see how people interact with our site and with Facebook adverts and then we try to flog you relevant stuff. If you’ve not seen the Facebook Ads analytics dashboard MAN ALIVE it’s stalker central. That shit is a terrifying Black Mirror horror show. If you’re not on Facebook – well bloody done – but the pixel is tracking you anyway.
You can download browser extensions and other things that block Facebook tracking, just sayin’.
Anyway, none of these things store any super personal data about you but probably they nab your IP address, not that we’d know where to look for it or what to do with it. All we see is that a person or many people have interacted with the website in a particular way. You can mess with us by doing something totally unexpected on the website and skewing our stats. Or you could do something way more fun and useful with your time LIKE WRITING.
Data storage
DATA!! It’s all about the data, baby. A literal fuck-tonne of petabytes whirring around the world and what? What’s it all for? WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN? What will future historians actually see of us and our slowly collapsing society? Eesh. We store your data in a few different places and use it in a couple of different ways. You ready for this?
Here on this website! If you register with the site we will store your name and email address. If you buy stuff from us we will store your name, email address, postal address, phone number if you give it to us, and purchase history. Your payment details ARE NOT held on the site.
We obviously go to the maximum effort to keep the data we collect secure and only a handful of people have access to it. Only a few of them ever actually looks at it and that’s to solve any technical problems you might have or do our accounts. If you want to change, update or delete your financial-schminancials you need to speak to Stripe or PayPal, depending on how you paid for stuff.
We’ll be honest: we do absolutely nothing surprising or radical with your info. We use your purchase history to target you with ads for stuff you might like. Eg. if you buy writing retreats, we’ll occasionally ask you if you want to go on another writing retreat. If you’ve done one of our courses, we’ll occasionally ask you if you want to do another course. Does that make us EvilMegaCorp? Idk, it’s fairly standard isn’t it?
If you’ve signed up for anything or bought anything on our site – newsletter, free course, paid course, membership, merch, anything – your name and email address also wangs its way over to our customer relationship manager (CiviCRM) which is the system we use to manage our notifications, newsletters and emails. We also use Mailchimp to send you reminders about the courses you’re taking and to make our emails pretty. These platforms are also (allegedly) GDPR compliant.
You can unsubscribe from emails at any time by hitting the unsubscribe button.
If you want us to delete your data off the face of the earth, wang us an email at help@writershq.co.uk.
Your payment details
When you buy stuff, you will either pay through Stripe or PayPal. The only payment-based details we hold on our site is how much you’ve spent and whether you paid with Stripe or PayPal. We have no bank or card details or nada here. Everyone is GDPR compliant. If you want to change any financial details or have that data deleted, you need to speak to Stripe or PayPal. Ok cool.
Email marketing and newsletters
If you sign up to our newsletter, we will send you a newsletter approximately once a week, but occasionally more if there is something super interesting to tell you. You can unsubscribe at any time by clicking the unsubscribe button in every email. Your name and email address are stored securely in on our website and in our newsletter service provider and you can email us if you want this info deleted.
If you sign up for a course, we will send you emails about the course. The frequency of which depends on the course. You can unsubscribe but you’ll miss important stuff about the course.
Mailchimp automatically adds tracking things to links, so if you click on a link WE KNOW. If you open an email WE KNOW. If you ignore us reminding you to be writing WE KNOW.
The most important thing about this is we have neither the time nor inclination to actually look at or do anything with these stats.
Your right to be deleted
If you want to go totally off grid, just chuck us an email at help@writershq.co.uk and we’ll delete all the info we have on you from our systems while having a passive aggressive huff about what we could have possibly done wrong.
This does not include PayPal and Stripe. If you want to delete your PayPal or Stripe accounts you have to do that yourself via PayPal or Stripe. We cannot delete your purchase history because the taxman will be terribly upset.
Just so you know, though, if you go full deletey, you won’t be able to access our courses anymore. We’re not being dicks, it’s because we need your email address so we know you’ve paid and that you’re allowed to access it. So if you’re just trying to cancel your paid subscription, it’s proabably a whole lot easier to just do that and downgrade to a free account.
Social media and all that bollocks
We use social media a lot, partly to promote our courses and retreats but mostly as a vehicle for our procrastination, creative swearing and political opinions. If you chat to us, we’ll chat back at you. You can ask us to be less friendly if you wish and we will of course respect your boundaries.
You are not required to follow our social media accounts but they’re funny as all hell so you should.
We won’t ask our employees to temper themselves on social media in the service of us. However, if they turn out to be racist, bigoted dipshits then we wanna know so we can tell them to go to hell.
Last updated: 4 December 2024
