Privacy Policy

Who we are

Our website address is: http://pacifigo.com.au. My name is Allan Hunt, and the business is PacifiGo.

What personal data we collect and why we collect it

Comments

If you leave a comment, you will be asked to input a name, e-mail and (optionally) a website. The name is publicly visible (e.g. Bob says: “I love the 2×2 invasion!”), the email is not. The IP address you comment from is logged for purposes of blocking spam – I’m not happy about this, trying to work out a way to prevent this, but that is the current state of affairs. If this is a concern for you, I’d recommend looking into a VPN: this is one of the legitimate things they do actually help with.

Media

If you upload images to the website, you should avoid uploading images with embedded location data (EXIF GPS) included. Visitors to the website can download and extract any location data from images on the website. I encourage you to strip all EXIF data from any pictures before uploading it anywhere, not just here.

Contact forms

Cookies

If you leave a comment on our site you may opt-in to saving your name, email address and website in cookies. These are for your convenience so that you do not have to fill in your details again when you leave another comment. These cookies will last for one year by default, although I encourage you to regularly delete your cookies – ideally by setting your browser to do this automatically on exit in the Settings.

If you visit our login page, we will set a temporary cookie to determine if your browser accepts cookies. This cookie contains no personal data and is discarded when you close your browser.

When you log in, we will also set up several cookies to save your login information and your screen display choices. Login cookies last for two days, and screen options cookies last for a year. If you select “Remember Me”, your login will persist for two weeks. If you log out of your account, the login cookies will be removed. I encourage you to log out when you are finished, even if you have set your browser to delete cookies – it closes the session server-side, which makes it a bit harder for malicious actors to hijack your account.

Embedded content from other websites

Articles on this site may include embedded content (e.g. videos, images, articles, etc.). Embedded content from other websites behaves in the exact same way as if the visitor has visited the other website.

These websites may collect data about you, use cookies, embed additional third-party tracking, and monitor your interaction with that embedded content, including tracking your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that website.

I do try to vet these as best I can to protect your privacy, but I can’t promise I don’t miss anything. If you notice something, please let me know, and I’ll see if I can improve it. In the meantime, I recommend U-Block Origin to block the majority of this kind of tracking.

Analytics

Who we share your data with

The data is not – to my knowledge – shared with anyone, although I am attempting to verify this. In the meantime, if this is a potential concern to you I encourage you to assume that your activity is public, and to use a VPN or Tor browser to make it harder to track.

How long we retain your data

If you leave a comment, the comment and its metadata are retained indefinitely. This is so we can recognise and approve any follow-up comments automatically instead of holding them in a moderation queue.

For users that register on our website (if any), we also store the personal information they provide in their user profile. All users can see, edit, or delete their personal information at any time (except they cannot change their username). Website administrators can also see and edit that information.

Any orders you make, we hold the relevant information until the order is processed (defined as “boxed up and either sent off or prepared to be sent off”). After that, we mark the order as “done”, and all information as to the customer side (e.g. name, address, e-mail, basically everything except what was ordered and how much shipping cost) is wiped automatically after three days. This delay is to give us a bit of grace in case we need to pull up that information for some reason, and this seemed the best compromise.

What rights you have over your data

If you have an account on this site, or have left comments, you can request to receive an exported file of the personal data we hold about you, including any data you have provided to us. You can also request that we erase any personal data we hold about you. This does not include any data we are obliged to keep for administrative, legal, or security purposes.

Where we send your data

Visitor comments may be checked through an automated spam detection service.

Your contact information

Additional information

How we protect your data

The primary way we protect your data is by trying to gather as little as possible without compromising the function of the websites. This is an ongoing quest.

If you make an order, the information tied to that order (name, address, email, phone number, etc) is retained for 3 days before being removed from the order. After this point, the order is still visible (ie someone ordered a set of biconvex yunzi stones), but not who, where etc. At time of writing, it does still retain the costs (which could potentially narrow down location via shipping cost) and more concerningly customer IP address. I am still trying to work out how to remove this data, but that’s how it is at the moment. I may end up just deciding to wipe all orders past a certain period of time after saving them to an offline backup for my own reference, but that’s a decision I still need to make.

An example of a “cleared” order, with potentially sensitive information redacted

In the meantime, the server the website is hosted on is protected using industry-standard SSL certificates, including using HTTPS by default.

What data breach procedures we have in place

If I detect we have suffered a data breach, or have cause to think we might have suffered a data breach, I will post a notice on the website. Because we do not keep customer information, I cannot let people know directly. I am sorry about this, but this is the best solution I have come up with. If you have a better suggestion, please feel free to let me know!

What third parties we receive data from

What automated decision making and/or profiling we do with user data

None. I encourage users to use VPN services or the Tor browser, both of which at least potentially conceal location. So profiling is impossible.

I have, in the past, sent email to past clients about related but distinct things (most notably the Australian and New Zealand Go Census), but I commit to not doing again in the future. That was wrong of me, and I will not do it again.

Industry regulatory disclosure requirements