Who We Are
You have reached this site from ASimpleHomestead.com. You can find out more information about us here: About Us.
Affiliations
We do promote affiliate offers from individuals, Amazon.com and a variety of other sources. However, all opinions are 100% our own, and we only promote those products and services that we truly believe will benefit our readers.
The views and opinions expressed on these blogs are purely our own. Any product claim, statistic, quote or other representation about a product or service should be verified with the manufacturer, provider or party in question.
All content on A Simple Homestead is copyrighted and may not be reprinted in full form without our written consent.
Comment Policy
Comments are welcomed and encouraged on this site, but there are some instances where comments will be edited or deleted as follows:
- Comments deemed to be spam or questionable spam will be deleted. Including a link to relevant content is permitted, but comments should be relevant to the post topic.
- Comments including profanity will be deleted.
- Comments containing language or concepts that could be deemed offensive will be deleted.
- Comments that attack a person individually will be deleted.
The owner of this blog reserves the right to edit or delete any comments submitted to this blog without notice. This comment policy is subject to change at anytime.
Giveaways Policy
Unless noted, all our giveaways will be sweepstakes, which by definition means entrants will have the ability to win a prize selected by a random drawing.
No purchase is necessary. No fees will ever be charged to enter our giveaways.
The following people are ineligible to win our giveaways: family members, anyone who lives in our home, our employees or contractors, our sponsor(s), or our sponsor’s employees or contractors.
Privacy Policy
A Simple Homestead takes your privacy seriously. This privacy policy describes what personal information we collect and how we use it.
Routine Information Collection
All web servers track basic information about their visitors. This information includes, but is not limited to, IP addresses, browser details, timestamps and referring pages. None of this information can personally identify specific visitors to this site. The information is tracked for routine administration and maintenance purposes.
Cookies and Web Beacons
Where necessary, A Simple Homestead uses cookies to store information about a visitor’s preferences and history in order to better serve the visitor and/or present the visitor with customized content.
Advertising partners and other third parties may also use cookies, scripts and/or web beacons to track visitors to our site in order to display advertisements and other useful information. Such tracking is done directly by the third parties through their own servers and is subject to their own privacy policies.
Controlling Your Privacy
Note that you can change your browser settings to disable cookies if you have privacy concerns. Disabling cookies for all sites is not recommended as it may interfere with your use of some sites. The best option is to disable or enable cookies on a per-site basis. Consult your browser documentation for instructions on how to block cookies and other tracking mechanisms.
Special Note About Google Advertising
Any advertisements served by Google, Inc., and affiliated companies may be controlled using cookies. These cookies allow Google to display ads based on your visits to this site and other sites that use Google advertising services. Learn how to opt out of Google’s cookie usage. As mentioned above, any tracking done by Google through cookies and other mechanisms is subject to Google’s own privacy policies.
Contact Information
Concerns or questions about this privacy policy can be directed to carmen3@asimplehomestead.com for further clarification.
Specific Privacy Policies
These are the specific policies of the tools used on this site for maintenance, comment tracking and general use.
Newsletter
When you sign up for the newsletter, your information – including name, email address, sign-up date and time, and email format will be stored in MailChimp’s servers. Refer to Section 20 of MailChimp’s Terms of Use and Section 16 of their Privacy Policy for more information.
Activity Log
This feature only records activities of a site’s registered users, and the retention duration of activity data will depend on the site’s plan and activity type.
Data Used: To deliver this functionality and record activities around site management, the following information is captured: user email address, user role, user login, user display name, WordPress.com and local user IDs, the activity to be recorded, the WordPress.com-connected site ID of the site on which the activity takes place, the site’s Jetpack version, and the timestamp of the activity. Some activities may also include the actor’s IP address (login attempts, for example) and user agent.
Activity Tracked: Login attempts/actions, post and page update and publish actions, comment/pingback submission and management actions, plugin and theme management actions, widget updates, user management actions, and the modification of other various site settings and options. Retention duration of activity data depends on the site’s plan and activity type. See the complete list of currently-recorded activities (along with retention information).
Data Synced (?): Successful and failed login attempts, which will include the actor’s IP address and user agent.
Comment Likes
This feature is only accessible to users logged in to WordPress.com.
Data Used: In order to process a comment like, the following information is used: WordPress.com user ID/username (you must be logged in to use this feature), the local site-specific user ID (if the user is signed in to the site on which the like occurred), and a true/false data point that tells us if the user liked a specific comment. If you perform a like action from one of our mobile apps, some additional information is used to track the activity: IP address, user agent, timestamp of event, blog ID, browser language, country code, and device info.
Activity Tracked: Comment likes.
Contact Form
Data Used: If Akismet is enabled on the site, the contact form submission data — IP address, user agent, name, email address, website, and message — is submitted to the Akismet service (also owned by Automattic) for the sole purpose of spam checking. The actual submission data is stored in the database of the site on which it was submitted and is emailed directly to the owner of the form (i.e. the site author who published the page on which the contact form resides). This email will include the submitter’s IP address, timestamp, name, email address, website, and message.
Data Synced (?): Post and post meta data associated with a user’s contact form submission. If Akismet is enabled on the site, the IP address and user agent originally submitted with the comment are synced, as well, as they are stored in post meta.
Google Analytics
Data Used: Please refer to the appropriate Google Analytics documentation for the specific type of data it collects. For sites running WooCommerce (also owned by Automattic) and this feature simultaneously and having all purchase tracking explicitly enabled, purchase events will send Google Analytics the following information: order number, product id and name, product category, total cost, and quantity of items purchased. Google Analytics does offer IP anonymization, which can be enabled by the site owner.
Activity Tracked: This feature sends page view events (and potentially video play events) over to Google Analytics for consumption. For sites running WooCommerce-powered stores, some additional events are also sent to Google Analytics: shopping cart additions and removals, product listing views and clicks, product detail views, and purchases. Tracking for each specific WooCommerce event needs to be enabled by the site owner.
Likes
This feature is only accessible to users logged in to WordPress.com.
Data Used: In order to process a post like action, the following information is used: IP address, WordPress.com user ID, WordPress.com username, WordPress.com-connected site ID (on which the post was liked), post ID (of the post that was liked), user agent, timestamp of event, browser language, country code.
Activity Tracked: Post likes.
Mobile Theme
Data Used: A visitor’s preference on viewing the mobile version of a site.
Activity Tracked: A cookie (akm_mobile) is stored for 3.5 days to remember whether or not a visitor of the site wishes to view its mobile version. Learn more about this cookie.
Notifications
This feature is only accessible to registered users of the site who are logged in to WordPress.com.
Data Used: IP address, WordPress.com user ID, WordPress.com username, WordPress.com-connected site ID and URL, Jetpack version, user agent, visiting URL, referring URL, timestamp of event, browser language, country code. Some visitor-related information or activity may be sent to the site owner via this feature. This may include: email address, WordPress.com username, site URL, email address, comment content, follow actions, etc.
Activity Tracked: Sending notifications (i.e. when we send a notification to a particular user), opening notifications (i.e. when a user opens a notification that they receive), performing an action from within the notification panel (e.g. liking a comment or marking a comment as spam), and clicking on any link from within the notification panel/interface.
PayPal Payments
Data Used: Transaction amount, transaction currency code, product title, product price, product ID, order quantity, PayPal payer ID, and PayPal transaction ID.
Activity Tracked: The PayPal payer ID, transaction ID, and HTTP referrer are sent with a payment completion tracking event that is attached to the site owner.
Data Synced (?): PayPal transaction ID, PayPal transaction status, PayPal product ID, quantity, price, customer email address, currency, and payment button CTA text.
Because payments are processed by PayPal, we recommend reviewing its privacy policy.
Protect
Data Used: In order to check login activity and potentially block fraudulent attempts, the following information is used: attempting user’s IP address, attempting user’s email address/username (i.e. according to the value they were attempting to use during the login process), and all IP-related HTTP headers attached to the attempting user.
Activity Tracked: Failed login attempts (these include IP address and user agent). We also set a cookie (jpp_math_pass) for 1 day to remember if/when a user has successfully completed a math captcha to prove that they’re a real human. Learn more about this cookie.
Data Synced (?): Failed login attempts, which contain the user’s IP address, attempted username or email address, and user agent information.
Sharing
Data Used: When sharing content via email (this option is only available if Akismet is active on the site), the following information is used: sharing party’s name and email address (if the user is logged in, this information will be pulled directly from their account), IP address (for spam checking), user agent (for spam checking), and email body/content. This content will be sent to Akismet (also owned by Automattic) so that a spam check can be performed. Additionally, if reCAPTCHA (by Google) is enabled by the site owner, the sharing party’s IP address will be shared with that service. You can find Google’s privacy policy here.
WordPress.com Secure Sign On
This feature is only accessible to registered users of the site with WordPress.com accounts.
Data Used: User ID (local site and WordPress.com), role (e.g. administrator), email address, username and display name. Additionally, for activity tracking (see below): IP address, WordPress.com user ID, WordPress.com username, WordPress.com-connected site ID and URL, Jetpack version, user agent, visiting URL, referring URL, timestamp of event, browser language, country code.
Activity Tracked: The following usage events are recorded: starting the login process, completing the login process, failing the login process, successfully being redirected after login, and failing to be redirected after login. Several functionality cookies are also set, and these are detailed explicitly in our Cookie documentation.
Data Synced (?): The user ID and role of any user who successfully signed in via this feature.
WordPress.com Stats
Data Used: 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: The site owner does not have access to any of this information via this feature. For example, a site owner can see that a specific post has 285 views, but he/she 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.
Activity Tracked: Post and page views, video plays (if videos are hosted by WordPress.com), outbound link clicks, referring URLs and search engine terms, and country. When this module is enabled, 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.). The site owner has the ability to force this feature to honor DNT settings of visitors. By default, DNT is currently not honored.
WordPress.com Toolbar
This feature is only accessible to registered users of the site who are also logged in to WordPress.com.
Data Used: Gravatar image URL of the logged-in user in order to display it in the toolbar and the WordPress.com user ID of the logged-in user. Additionally, for activity tracking (detailed below): IP address, WordPress.com user ID, WordPress.com username, WordPress.com-connected site ID and URL, Jetpack version, user agent, visiting URL, referring URL, timestamp of event, browser language, country code.
Activity Tracked: Click actions within the toolbar.