Your inbox has probably been flooded with privacy policy updates lately. Here’s why and here’s what we’re doing.
Today, the General Data Processing Regulations, or GDPR, take effect. If you want to read up, do so here. TL;DR, the regulations require websites to be up front and transparent about the data they collect from you and, when appropriate, ask you to clearly consent to their collection of this data. It’s important to note that right now this directly impacts businesses that operate in the European Union or have visitors from the EU.
We’re big fans of transparency, so we thought we would be upfront on the data we collect and what happens to it. The short answer is, we don’t and not much.
But in the spirit of GDPR, we’ll provide more details:
- We do use Google Analytics to keep tabs on what content our readers like or don’t like.
- We recently removed the option to comment on our posts and have since removed all comments and identifying information (email address or IP address) from our database.
- We do deliver you a pretty cool newsletter each week and rely on MailChimp to safely collect and store the data you provide. (Please sign up!)
- We do serve up third party advertising to visitors from the United States and Canada only, and the advertiser does use cookies to geotarget the ads. Those ads, BTW, are the videos you sometimes see in our posts (maybe one is above this text right now). It’s not much of a moneymaker but does cover our hosting fees, which makes our wives happy.
- We do have an online store, but it’s currently unavailable for the moment. When it was up, we relied on Stripe and Amazon to process transactions and store your information, which are GDPR-friendly.
- Finally, we do have a privacy policy but because we’re not lawyers we’re consistently trying to tweak it to ensure it is up to date and accurate.
So there you have it. If you have any questions about data retention, you can email us direct at theguys@guysdrinkingbeer.com. But please at least tell us your favorite beer too, just to keep with the spirit of the site.