This policy explains when and why we collect personal information about people who visit our website, how we use it, the conditions under which we may disclose it to others and how we keep it secure.
We may change this policy from time to time so please check this page occasionally to ensure that you’re happy with any changes. By using our website, you’re agreeing to be bound by this policy.
I am Chris Marquardt and I am the person responsible for GDPR on this site. Any questions regarding this policy and our privacy practices should be sent to me by email to privacy@chrismarquardt.com
Who am I?
I am Chris Marquardt and I teach photography in the following ways:
I provide regular updates in form of podcast episodes, blog posts and if you want to be informed of new content, I provide newsletters that you can subscribe to to keep you up-to-date.
How do I collect information from you?
I obtain information about you when you use my websites, for example, when you contact me about workshops or other services, to make a donation, to participate in an event or if you register to receive one of my newsletters.
What type of information is collected from you?
The personal information I collect might include your name, address, email address, IP address, and information regarding what pages you accessed and when. If you purchase anything from me online, your card information is not held by me. It is collected by a third-party payment processor (typically PayPal), who specialize in the secure online capture and processing of credit/debit card transactions, as explained below.
How is your information used?
I may use your information to
- process orders that you habe submitted
- carry out obligations arising from any contracts entered into by you and me
- provide you with updates if you signed for those updates (newsletter)
- analyze my services to improve them
- provide download and subscriber numbers to my sponsors
Your information will not be transmitted to third parties other than for reasons lined out in this policy.
Collection of default information during a website visit
If you access our websites, our servers might exchange cookies with your web browser. Information will also be saved in our web server log files. These include the type of your web browser or the operating. Your identity can not be inferred from this information. Collecting this information is technically necessary to serve the requested content to you. This happens automatically.
This information is collected to
- ensure a reliable connection with our websites
- ensure reliable use of our websites
- give us technical information to ensure security and stability
- help us administer the server
We process your data due to the legitimate interest to provide you with good service. Anonymized data about your visits to our servers might be analyzed to allow us to optimize our internet presence and the technology behind it.
Hosting
We use a hosting service to provide this online presence to you. To do this, we receive infrastructure services, including storage space, network access, CPU, database services, email services and security services, technical support. We use these services to run this online presence.
For this, our service provider might use your IP address, content information, usage information and meta information to ensure an undisturbed experience on our website.
Comments
If visitors write a comment on our websites, we will collect the data that is displayed in the comment form. We also collect the IP address of the visitor and the User-Agent string which identifies the web browser, to support spam detection.
Gravatar
Your email address can be converted into an anonymized string (a “hash”) and be transferred to the Gravatar service to check if you use the service. You can find their privacy policy at https://automattic.com/privacy/. After your comment has been approved, your Gravatar avatar can be displayed next to your comment.
Cookies
If you write a comment on one of our websites, we might save your name, email address and website in a cookie in your web browser. This is a comfort function so you won’t have to provide the same data again when you write another comment. These cookies are saved on your browser for one year, or until you decide to delete these cookies.
If you have an account on one of our websites, we will set a temporary cookie to test if your browser accept cookies. This cookie doesn’t contain personal information and will be deleted once you close your web browser.
Embedded content from other websites
Posts on our websites can include embedded content (e.g. videos, pictures, posts, etc.) Embedded content from other websites behave exactly as if the visitor was visiting that website directly. These websites might collect data ab out you, set cookies, embed third party tracking services that can track your interaction with the embedded content, if you have an account on said third party website and if you’re logged in there.
SSL-Encryption
To ensure the safety of your data, we use current state-of-the-art encryption practices (e.g. SSL) via HTTPS.
Matomo
Our websites use Matomo (formerly Piwik), an open source software to statistically analyze website visits and help us to optimize our services and websites. Matomo uses cookies to support this analysis. The information is stored on a server located in Germany.
Your IP address gets anonymized by Matomo before it is saved to the database. You can prevent your browser from saving the Matomo cookies by changing your browser settings. It is possible that by preventing your browser from saving cookies from our websites, some functionality might not work anymore.
Matomo respects your web browser’s Do-Not-Track settings.
If you do not agree with saving your anonymized data and its analysis, you can prohibit Matomo to set its cookies here, with a click or a tap. In that case we will place an opt-out cookie in your browser that tells Matomo to not record anything from you. Please note that clearing your browser’s cookies will also delete said opt-out cookie, so you might have to re-enable it.
You may choose not to have a unique web analytics cookie identification number assigned to your computer to avoid the aggregation and analysis of data collected on this website.
To make that choice, please click below to receive an opt-out cookie.
Usage of script libraries (e.g. Google Webfonts)
In order to provide a correct and graphically appealing experience over multiple browsers and screen sizes, we us script libraries and web font libraries on some of our websites, e.g. Google Webfonts. Google Webfonts are saved in your browser’s cache to avoid multiple reloads. If your browser doesn’t support web fonts, our content will be displayed with standard fonts.
The inclusion of script libraries or web fonts causes a connection to the provider of that library. It is theoretically possible that said provider also acquires data from your visit.
Google’s privacy policy is at https://www.google.com/policies/privacy/
How long we save your data
If you write a comment, it will be saved (including its metadata) without a time limit. This way we can recognize and approve follow-up comments, instead of keeping them in a moderation queue.
Your rights regarding your data
If you have an account on one or multiple of our websites, you can use the above contact address to request us sending you said data. You can also ask us to delete any personal data that we might have saved about you. This does not include data that we have to keep for administrative or legal reasons or to ensure the safety of our systems.
Where we send your data
Comments may be transferred to an automated service for spam detection.
Embedded YouTube videos
We might embed YouTube videos or Vimeo videos on some of our websites. When visiting an according page, your browser will connect to the YouTube (or Vimeo) service. YouTube (or Vimeo) will know which page you are looking at. If you are logged into your YouTube (or Vimeo) account, they can save that information about you.
If you play one of those videos on our websites, YouTube (or Vimeo) might set a cookie to track your usage of the service.
YouTube is a Google company, their privacy policy is at https://www.google.de/intl/de/policies/privacy/
Vimeo’s privacy policy is at https://vimeo.com/privacy
Newsletter
We provide several newsletters to
- notify you of new podcast episodes
- notify you of new blog content
- notify you of new photography workshops or tours
- notify you of other things (e.g. for technical reasons or similar)
We only send those to your email address after you explicitly signed up and only after receiving your explicit consent (double opt-in).
To receive a newsletter, it is sufficient if you give us your email address. When signing up for a newsletter, the information provided by you will only be used to send you said newsletter.
To sign you up for the newsletter, we need a valid email address. To make sure that the registration was done by the actual owner of that email address, we use the double opt-in method. For this, we temporarily save the information provided. We then send an email to that address to confirm that you want to receive the newsletter and that this is actually your address.
You can revoke your consent any time by following the “unsubscribe” link that you find at the bottom of each of our newsletters.