Music Matters Blog

Inspiring Creativity

Privacy Policy

Last Updated: November 16, 2018

Natalie’s Piano Studio (“us”, “we”, or “our”) operates the https://musicmattersblog.com website (the “Service”).

This page informs you of our policies regarding the collection, use, and disclosure of personal data when you use our Service and the choices you have associated with that data.

We use your data to provide and improve the Service. By using the Service, you agree to the collection and use of information in accordance with this policy. Unless otherwise defined in this Privacy Policy, terms used in this Privacy Policy have the same meanings as in our Terms and Conditions, accessible from https://musicmattersblog.com/terms-conditions

Definitions

  • Service

    Service is the https://musicmattersblog.com website operated by Natalie’s Piano Studio

  • Personal Data

    Personal Data means data about a living individual who can be identified from those data (or from those and other information either in our possession or likely to come into our possession).

  • Usage Data

    Usage Data is data collected automatically either generated by the use of the Service or from the Service infrastructure itself (for example, the duration of a page visit).

  • Cookies

    Cookies are small pieces of data stored on your device (computer or mobile device).

  • Data Controller

    Data Controller means the natural or legal person who (either alone or jointly or in common with other persons) determines the purposes for which and the manner in which any personal information are, or are to be, processed.

    For the purpose of this Privacy Policy, we are a Data Controller of your Personal Data.

  • Data Processors (or Service Providers)

    Data Processor (or Service Provider) means any natural or legal person who processes the data on behalf of the Data Controller.

    We may use the services of various Service Providers in order to process your data more effectively.

  • Data Subject (or User)

    Data Subject is any living individual who is using our Service and is the subject of Personal Data.

Information Collection And Use

We collect several different types of information for various purposes to provide and improve our Service to you.

Types of Data Collected

Personal Data

While using our Service, we may ask you to provide us with certain personally identifiable information that can be used to contact or identify you (“Personal Data”). Personally identifiable information may include, but is not limited to:

  • Email address
  • First name and last name
  • Phone number
  • Address, State, Province, ZIP/Postal code, City
  • Cookies and Usage Data

We may use your Personal Data to contact you with newsletters, marketing or promotional materials and other information that may be of interest to you. You may opt out of receiving any, or all, of these communications from us by following the unsubscribe link or instructions provided in any email we send or by contacting us.

Akismet

We use the Akismet plugin to help protect the Service against spam. Please see the statement about Akismet and the GDPR for more information or check out Automattic’s Privacy Policy here.

Feedzy RSS Feeds Lite

We use the Feedzy plugin to post several RSS feeds from other websites in our “Music Community Friends” section of the home page. Please note that each of these feeds do not contain content from our site and if you click/tap on one of these links, your browser will open a new tab that directs you to one of these external sites. We do not claim any responsibility as to the content or practices of these third-party sites (see the “Links to Other Sites” section below for more info).

YouTube

We have embedded YouTube videos on our site, which allows you to view content hosted on external platforms directly from the pages of this Service and interact with them. The embedded videos might still collect web traffic data for the pages where they are installed, even when users do not use it. YouTube is a video content visualization service provided by Google Inc. that allows this Service to incorporate content of this kind on its pages.

The personal Data collected includes cookies and usage data and the place of processing is in the United States. Please see Google’s Privacy Policy for more information.

Vimeo

We may use the Vimeo service to implement video(s) on this Service. The Vimeo Privacy Policy can be found here.

reCAPTCHA Data

The reCAPTCHA SPAM protection feature analyzes traffic, potentially containing Users’ Personal Data, with the purpose of filtering it from parts of traffic, messages and content that are recognized as SPAM. Google reCAPTCHA is a SPAM protection service provided by Google Inc. The use of reCAPTCHA is subject to the Google privacy policy and terms of use. You acknowledge and understand that the reCAPTCHA API works by collecting hardware and software information, such as device and application data, and sending these data to Google for analysis. The information collected in connection with your use of the Service (such as cookies and usage data) will be used for improving reCAPTCHA and for general security purposes. It will not be used for personalized advertising by Google.

Wordfence Data

We use the Wordfence plugin to help with site security. To help you understand which cookies the Wordfence plugin sets, when in use on this Service, please see below. Wordfence currently sets three cookies and the below explains what each cookie does, who will have the cookie set, and why the cookie helps secure our Service. You can read Wordfence’s privacy policy here.

wfwaf-authcookie-(hash)

What it does: This cookie is used by the Wordfence firewall to perform a capability check of the current user before our Service has been loaded.
Who gets this cookie: This is only set for users that are able to log into our Service.
How this cookie helps: This cookie allows the Wordfence firewall to detect logged in users and allow them increased access. It also allows Wordfence to detect non-logged in users and restrict their access to secure areas. The cookie also lets the firewall know what level of access a visitor has to help the firewall make smart decisions about who to allow and who to block.

wf_loginalerted_(hash)

What it does: This cookie is used to notify the Wordfence admin when an administrator logs in from a new device or location.
Who gets this cookie: This is only set for administrators.
How this cookie helps: This cookie helps site owners know whether there has been an admin login from a new device or location.

wfCBLBypass

What it does: Wordfence offers a feature for a site visitor to bypass country blocking by accessing a hidden URL. This cookie helps track who should be allowed to bypass country blocking.
Who gets this cookie: When a hidden URL defined by the site admin is visited, this cookie is set to verify the user can access the site from a country restricted through country blocking. This will be set for anyone who knows the URL that allows bypass of standard country blocking. This cookie is not set for anyone who does not know the hidden URL to bypass country blocking.
How this cookie helps: This cookie gives site owners a way to allow certain users from blocked countries, even though their country has been blocked.

Redirection

We use the Redirection plugin to help make your browsing experience seamless and more enjoyable. Please see this link for the developer’s Privacy Policy.

Jetpack

WordPress.com Secure Sign On

This feature is only accessible to registered users of this Service 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.

Activity

This feature only records activities of registered users, and the retention duration of activity data will vary.

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 Service, the Jetpack version in use on the Service, and the timestamp of the activity. Some activities may also include your 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 will vary.

Data Synced (?): Successful and failed login attempts, which will include your IP address and user agent.

Gravatar Hovercards

Data Used: This feature will send a hash of your email address (if logged in to the Service or WordPress.com — or if your submitted a comment on the Service using your email address attached to an active Gravatar profile) to the Gravatar service (also owned by Automattic) in order to retrieve your profile image.

Notifications

This feature is only accessible to registered users of the Service 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 us 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 a notification is sent 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.

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). Jetpack also sets 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 (available since Akismet is in use on the Service), the following information is used: sharing party’s name and email address (if you are logged into WordPress.com, this information will be pulled directly from your 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, since reCAPTCHA (by Google) is enabled on the Service, the sharing party’s IP address will be shared. You can find Google’s privacy policy here.

Our blog posts will be automatically shared to selected social media accounts, which may include Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Facebook’s Privacy Policy is here, the LinkedIn Privacy Policy is here and the Twitter Privacy Policy is here.

Subscriptions

Data Used: To initiate and process subscriptions, the following information is used: subscriber’s email address and the ID of the post or comment (depending on the specific subscription being processed). In the event of a new subscription being initiated, Jetpack also collects some basic server data, including all of the subscribing user’s HTTP request headers, the IP address from which the subscribing user is viewing the page, and the URI which was given in order to access the page (REQUEST_URI and DOCUMENT_URI). This server data used for the exclusive purpose of monitoring and preventing abuse and spam.

Activity Tracked: Functionality cookies are set for a duration of 347 days to remember a visitor’s blog and post subscription choices if, in fact, they have an active subscription.

MailChimp

If you wish to receive email updates about our blog posts, you can sign up via our MailChimp form. The information you provide will be processed by MailChimp and you can read their Privacy Policy to learn more about the data that will be collected.

Site Backups – UpdraftPlus

We use the UpdraftPlus plugin to perform site backups. We will not delete information out of our website backups, because this becomes technically difficult to accomplish. However, our backups are stored in a safe place, including Google Drive. Please see this page for more information specifically on this. These links also offer additional information on the Google Privacy Policy and on UpdraftPlus.

Yoast SEO Data

The Yoast SEO plugin we use only collects information regarding our site’s environment, PHP version, and installed plugins.

Google Fonts

The Google Fonts API is designed to limit the collection, storage, and use of end-user data to what is needed to serve fonts efficiently.

Use of Google Fonts is unauthenticated. No cookies are sent by website visitors to the Google Fonts API. Requests to the Google Fonts API are made to resource-specific domains, such as fonts.googleapis.com or fonts.gstatic.com, so that your requests for fonts are separate from and do not contain any credentials you send to google.com while using other Google services that are authenticated, such as Gmail.

In order to serve fonts quickly and efficiently with the fewest requests, responses are cached by the browser to minimize round-trips to the Google servers.

Requests for CSS assets are cached for 1 day. This allows Google to update a stylesheet to point to a new version of a font file when it’s updated, and ensures that all websites using fonts hosted by the Google Fonts API will be using the most updated version of each font within 24 hours of each release.

The font files themselves are cached for one year, which cumulatively has the effect of making the entire web faster: When millions of websites all link to the same fonts, they are cached after visiting the first website and appear instantly on all other subsequently visited sites. Google does sometimes update font files to reduce their file size, increase coverage of languages, and improve the quality of their design. The result is that website visitors send very few requests to Google: Google only sees 1 CSS request per font family, per day, per browser.

Google Fonts logs records of the CSS and the font file requests, and access to this data is kept secure. Aggregate usage numbers track how popular font families are, and are published on the Google Fonts analytics page. Google Fonts uses data from Google’s web crawler to detect which websites use Google fonts. This data is published and accessible in the Google Fonts BigQuery database. To learn more about the information Google collects and how it is used and secured, see Google’s Privacy Policy.

Comments

If visitors leave comments on the site, we collect the data shown in the comments form, and also the visitor’s IP address and browser user agent string to help spam detection.

An anonymized string created from your email address (also called a hash) may be provided to the Gravatar service to see if you are using it. The Gravatar service privacy policy is available here: https://automattic.com/privacy/. After approval of your comment, your profile picture is visible to the public in the context of your comment.

If you leave a comment, the comment and its metadata are retained indefinitely. This is so we can recognize 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

If you have an account and you log in to this site, 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.

If you edit or publish an article, an additional cookie will be saved in your browser. This cookie includes no personal data and simply indicates the post ID of the article you just edited. It expires after 1 day.

Usage Data

We may also collect information how the Service is accessed and used (“Usage Data”). This Usage Data may include information such as your computer’s Internet Protocol address (e.g. IP address), browser type, browser version, the pages of our Service that you visit, the time and date of your visit, the time spent on those pages, unique device identifiers and other diagnostic data.

Location Data

We may use and store information about your location if you give us permission to do so (“Location Data”). We use this data to provide features of our Service, to improve and customize our Service.

You can enable or disable location services when you use our Service at any time, through your device settings.

Tracking & Cookies Data

We use cookies and similar tracking technologies to track the activity on our Service and hold certain information.

Cookies are files with small amount of data which may include an anonymous unique identifier. Cookies are sent to your browser from a website and stored on your device. Tracking technologies also used are beacons, tags, and scripts to collect and track information and to improve and analyze our Service.

You can instruct your browser to refuse all cookies or to indicate when a cookie is being sent. However, if you do not accept cookies, you may not be able to use some portions of our Service.

Examples of Cookies we use:

  • Session Cookies. We use Session Cookies to operate our Service.
  • Preference Cookies. We use Preference Cookies to remember your preferences and various settings.
  • Security Cookies. We use Security Cookies for security purposes.

Use of Data

Natalie’s Piano Studio uses the collected data for various purposes:

  • To provide and maintain our Service
  • To notify you about changes to our Service
  • To allow you to participate in interactive features of our Service when you choose to do so
  • To provide customer support
  • To gather analysis or valuable information so that we can improve our Service
  • To monitor the usage of our Service
  • To detect, prevent and address technical issues
  • To provide you with news, special offers and general information about other goods, services and events which we offer that are similar to those that you have already purchased or enquired about unless you have opted not to receive such information

Legal Basis for Processing Personal Data Under General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)

If you are from the European Economic Area (EEA), Natalie’s Piano Studio legal basis for collecting and using the personal information described in this Privacy Policy depends on the Personal Data we collect and the specific context in which we collect it.

Natalie’s Piano Studio may process your Personal Data because:

  • We need to perform a contract with you
  • You have given us permission to do so
  • The processing is in our legitimate interests and it’s not overridden by your rights
  • For payment processing purposes
  • To comply with the law

Retention of Data

Natalie’s Piano Studio will retain your Personal Data only for as long as is necessary for the purposes set out in this Privacy Policy. We will retain and use your Personal Data to the extent necessary to comply with our legal obligations (for example, if we are required to retain your data to comply with applicable laws), resolve disputes, and enforce our legal agreements and policies.

Natalie’s Piano Studio will also retain Usage Data for internal analysis purposes. Usage Data is generally retained for a shorter period of time, except when this data is used to strengthen the security or to improve the functionality of our Service, or we are legally obligated to retain this data for longer time periods.

Transfer Of Data

Your information, including Personal Data, may be transferred to — and maintained on — computers located outside of your state, province, country or other governmental jurisdiction where the data protection laws may differ than those from your jurisdiction.

If you are located outside United States and choose to provide information to us, please note that we transfer the data, including Personal Data, to United States and process it there.

Your consent to this Privacy Policy followed by your submission of such information represents your agreement to that transfer.

Natalie’s Piano Studio will take all steps reasonably necessary to ensure that your data is treated securely and in accordance with this Privacy Policy and no transfer of your Personal Data will take place to an organization or a country unless there are adequate controls in place including the security of your data and other personal information.

Disclosure Of Data

Disclosure for Law Enforcement

Under certain circumstances, Natalie’s Piano Studio may be required to disclose your Personal Data if required to do so by law or in response to valid requests by public authorities (e.g. a court or a government agency).

Legal Requirements

Natalie’s Piano Studio may disclose your Personal Data in the good faith belief that such action is necessary to:

  • To comply with a legal obligation
  • To protect and defend the rights or property of Natalie’s Piano Studio
  • To prevent or investigate possible wrongdoing in connection with the Service
  • To protect the personal safety of users of the Service or the public
  • To protect against legal liability

Security Of Data

The security of your data is important to us, but remember that no method of transmission over the Internet, or method of electronic storage is 100% secure. While we strive to use commercially acceptable means to protect your Personal Data, we cannot guarantee its absolute security.

“Do Not Track” Signals

We do not support Do Not Track (“DNT”). Do Not Track is a preference you can set in your web browser to inform websites that you do not want to be tracked.

You can enable or disable Do Not Track by visiting the Preferences or Settings page of your web browser.

Your Data Protection Rights Under General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)

If you are a resident of the European Economic Area (EEA), you have certain data protection rights. Natalie’s Piano Studio aims to take reasonable steps to allow you to correct, amend, delete, or limit the use of your Personal Data.

If you wish to be informed what Personal Data we hold about you and if you want it to be removed from our systems, please contact us.

In certain circumstances, you have the following data protection rights:

  • The right to access, update or to delete the information we have on you. Whenever made possible, you can access, update or request deletion of your Personal Data directly within your account settings section. If you are unable to perform these actions yourself, please contact us to assist you.
  • The right of rectification. You have the right to have your information rectified if that information is inaccurate or incomplete.
  • The right to object. You have the right to object to our processing of your Personal Data.
  • The right of restriction. You have the right to request that we restrict the processing of your personal information.
  • The right to data portability. You have the right to be provided with a copy of the information we have on you in a structured, machine-readable and commonly used format.
  • The right to withdraw consent. You also have the right to withdraw your consent at any time where Natalie’s Piano Studio relied on your consent to process your personal information.

Please note that we may ask you to verify your identity before responding to such requests.

You have the right to complain to a Data Protection Authority about our collection and use of your Personal Data. For more information, please contact your local data protection authority in the European Economic Area (EEA).

Service Providers

We may employ third party companies and individuals to facilitate our Service (“Service Providers”), to provide the Service on our behalf, to perform Service-related services or to assist us in analyzing how our Service is used.

These third parties have access to your Personal Data only to perform these tasks on our behalf and are obligated not to disclose or use it for any other purpose.

Analytics

We may use third-party Service Providers to monitor and analyze the use of our Service.

  • Google Analytics

    Google Analytics is a web analytics service offered by Google that tracks and reports website traffic. Google uses the data collected to track and monitor the use of our Service. This data is shared with other Google services. Google may use the collected data to contextualize and personalize the ads of its own advertising network.

    You can opt-out of having made your activity on the Service available to Google Analytics by installing the Google Analytics opt-out browser add-on. The add-on prevents the Google Analytics JavaScript (ga.js, analytics.js, and dc.js) from sharing information with Google Analytics about visits activity.

    For more information on the privacy practices of Google, please visit the Google Privacy & Terms web page: http://www.google.com/intl/en/policies/privacy/

Behavioral Remarketing

Natalie’s Piano Studio may use remarketing services to advertise on third party websites to you after you visited our Service. We and our third-party vendors use cookies to inform, optimize and serve ads based on your past visits to our Service.

Payments

We may provide paid products and/or services within the Service. In that case, we use third-party services for payment processing (e.g. payment processors).

We will not store or collect your payment card details. That information is provided directly to our third-party payment processors whose use of your personal information is governed by their Privacy Policy. These payment processors adhere to the standards set by PCI-DSS as managed by the PCI Security Standards Council, which is a joint effort of brands like Visa, Mastercard, American Express and Discover. PCI-DSS requirements help ensure the secure handling of payment information.

We use Ecwid for our “Store” on the Service (their Privacy Policy is here) and the payment processor we work with is:

Links To Other Sites

Our Service may contain links to other sites that are not operated by us. If you click on a third party link, you will be directed to that third party’s site. We strongly advise you to review the Privacy Policy of every site you visit.

We have no control over and assume no responsibility for the content, privacy policies or practices of any third party sites or services.

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.

Promotion / Affiliate Disclosure

We occasionally receive requests to review products and/or promote them via giveaways. We often receive free products in exchange for this service, but are not compensated monetarily. We are committed to presenting honest reviews that make readers aware of the product and give them the opportunity to check it out for themselves.

We have affiliate accounts with a number of other companies that sell products we like. We receive a commission whenever our affiliate links are used by readers to purchase a recommended product or service. Affiliate commissions are one of the ways that we offset the cost of running the Service, and we are so grateful for the readers who help support us in this way!

Children’s Privacy

Our Service does not address anyone under the age of 18 (“Children”).

We do not knowingly collect personally identifiable information from anyone under the age of 18. If you are a parent or guardian and you are aware that your Children has provided us with Personal Data, please contact us. If we become aware that we have collected Personal Data from children without verification of parental consent, we take steps to remove that information from our servers.

Changes To This Privacy Policy

We may update our Privacy Policy from time to time. We will notify you of any changes by posting the new Privacy Policy on this page.

We will let you know by updating the “Last Updated” at the top of this Privacy Policy.

You are advised to review this Privacy Policy periodically for any changes. Changes to this Privacy Policy are effective when they are posted on this page.

Contact Us

If you have any questions about this Privacy Policy, please contact us by email: natalie@musicmattersblog.com

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