Privacy Policy

This privacy policy sets out how Honest & Truly! uses and protects any information that you give while using HonestAndTruly.com.

Here’s the real scoop. Any website on the internet collects data. It’s how they run and how they make your experience better – from loading the site faster to not requiring you to enter information repeatedly to ensuring the site stays safe and secure from hackers and spammers and more. We collect only the data we need to collect to run our website.

This is a one person show, not a huge marketing business that’s looking to mine your data and do creepy things. I enjoy cooking and traveling and technology, and I have fun sharing my recipes and tips. That’s why this website exists. I run ads because I spend so much time creating the articles that I need an income stream to feed myself. End of story.

The Details

Should we ask you to provide certain information by which you can be identified when using this website, then you can be assured that it will only be used in accordance with this privacy statement.

Honest & Truly!  may change this policy from time to time by updating this page. You should check this page from time to time to ensure that you are happy with any changes. This policy is effective from May 1, 2018.

Our Data Collection Principles

• We collect the bare minimum data needed required for any purpose
• Processing is limited to the purpose. Our Processing activities fit the purpose for which Personal Data was gathered.
• We value the privacy and security of your data, and we have processes in place to keep your data safe.
• Our data collection and processing is transparent and follows the below privacy policy. We collect only the data we need to run our site as well as what you choose to share by leaving comments and/or signing up for our newsletter.

What we collect

We may collect the following information:

• contact information including email address and name that you voluntarily provide by leaving a comment or subscribing to our newsletter
• demographic information such as postcode, preferences and interests
• IP address from the location you visit this website (anonymized to prevent identifiable information from being shared)

What we do with the information we gather

We require this information to understand your needs and provide you with a better service, and in particular for the following reasons:

• We may use the information to improve our products and services (the articles we create and share on this site, for example).
• We may periodically send promotional emails about new products, special offers or other information which we think you may find interesting using the email address which you have provided. You will always be required to sign up for any newsletters, and they will incorporate a two-step verification process. We take the sending of spam seriously and only want to send you emails you want to receive.
• From time to time, we may use the information to customize the website according to your interests.

Security

We are committed to ensuring that your information is secure. In order to prevent unauthorized access or disclosure, we have put in place suitable physical, electronic and managerial procedures to safeguard and secure the information we collect online.

We use safe protocols for communication and transferring data (such as HTTPS). We use anonymising and pseudonymising where suitable. We monitor our systems for possible vulnerabilities and attacks on an ongoing basis.

We do not create accounts for our users, which minimizes any data we collect or store.

Even though we try our best we can not guarantee the security of information. However, we promise to notify suitable authorities of data breaches. We will also notify you if there is a threat to your rights or interests. We will do everything we reasonably can to prevent security breaches and to assist authorities should any breaches occur.

How we use cookies

A cookie is a small file which asks permission to be placed on your computer’s hard drive. As you access this site, the file is added and the cookie helps analyze web traffic or lets you know when you visit a particular site. Cookies allow web applications to respond to you as an individual. The web application can tailor its operations to your needs, likes and dislikes by gathering and remembering information about your preferences.

We use traffic log cookies to identify which pages are being used. This helps us analyze data about web page traffic and improve our website in order to tailor it to customer needs. We only use this information for statistical analysis purposes, and then the data is removed from the system.

Overall, cookies help us provide you with a better website, by enabling us to monitor which pages you find useful and which you do not. A cookie in no way gives us access to your computer or any information about you, other than the data you choose to share with us.

You can choose to accept or decline cookies. Most web browsers automatically accept cookies, but you can usually modify your browser setting to decline cookies if you prefer. This may prevent you from taking full advantage of the website.

Additionally, the Website may use third-party service providers to service various aspects of the Website. Each third-party service provider’s use of your personal information is dictated by their respective privacy policies.

We use cookies for the following purposes:

• Necessary cookies – these cookies are required for you to be able to use some important features on our website. These cookies don’t collect any personal information.
• Functionality cookies – these cookies provide functionality that makes using our service more convenient and makes providing more personalized features possible. For example, they might remember your name and e-mail in comment forms so you don’t have to re-enter this information next time when commenting.
• Analytics cookies – these cookies are used to track the use and performance of our website and services.
• Advertising cookies – these cookies are used to deliver advertisements that are relevant to you and to your interests. In addition, they help limit the number of times you see an individual advertisement. They are usually placed on the website by advertising networks with the website operator’s permission. These cookies remember that you have visited a website and this information is shared with other organizations such as advertisers. Often targeting or advertising cookies will be linked to site functionality provided by the other organization.

You can remove cookies stored in your computer via your browser settings. Alternatively, you can control some 3rd party cookies by using a privacy enhancement platform such as optout.aboutads.info or youronlinechoices.com. For more information about cookies, visit allaboutcookies.org.

We use Google Analytics to measure traffic on our website. Google has their own Privacy Policy which you can review here. If you’d like to opt out of tracking by Google Analytics, visit the Google Analytics opt-out page. Your IP address is anonymized through this website, which means we do not collect personally identifiable information when you visit.

The Website currently uses the following third-party service providers:

Google Analytics – this service tracks Website usage and provides information such as referring websites and user actions on the Website. Your IP address is anonymized on this site, so we do not collect your specific IP address. That means we do not collect any personally identifying information via your IP address through Google Analytics.

Mail Chimp – this service is used for delivery of email updates and newsletters. We store your first name and email address for purposes of delivering such communications. Mail Chimp also collects who opens emails when we send them, the IP address where you open it, and what links (if any) you click once you open it. Please refer to Mail Chimp’s privacy policy for further information.

Mediavine – This company runs our ads, and all EU visitors must consent to the cookies before any ads appear. If you decline the cookies, you will not receive targeted ads but still can access the website. For more information about Mediavine Programmatic Advertising, please see the detailed section below.

WebSavers – This company hosts this website. To create a visible site, they must run cookies (necessary cookies as defined above), but they do not collect any personally identifiable information. WebSavers also runs a backup of this site to ensure it remains available if technical issues arise.

Akismet – This is a spam preventing plugin that helps keep this website safe and reduces the likelihood that it gets hacked and helps eliminate nasty spam comments from this site. This collects name, email address, and website as input via your comment. It also gathers IP address to allow approved addresses to automatically approve comments and to help identify potentially spammy IP addresses to segregate comments so they do not get published.

Amazon Mobile Ads – This is an advertising service provided by Amazon. You can read their privacy policy here.

Grow Pro – This is a plugin that lets you share my awesome content with others. The widgets for Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest make requests to their respective servers when you choose to share that make your IP address visible to that express platform. These platforms may use it in accordance with their data privacy policy:

• https://twitter.com/en/privacy#update
• https://policy.pinterest.com/en/privacy-policy

This Facebook widget may collect your IP address, your web browser User Agent, store and retrieve cookies on your browser, embed additional tracking, and monitor your interaction with the widget, including correlating your Facebook account with sharing an article, if you are logged in to Facebook. For more information about how this data may be used, please see Facebook’s data privacy policy: https://www.facebook.com/about/privacy/update

Influencer Networks – From time to time, we partner with brands to work on sponsored campaigns. The brands may include a tracking pixel or link that gathers your IP address and visit history to gauge the effectiveness of the campaign. We do not directly share any information with them, such as name or email address that we may gather through other means.

• Collective Bias
• Pollinate Media
• Acorn Influence
• The Sway – uses an anonymous tracking pixel. No specific IP addresses or any identifiable data gets collected. This purely tracks blog traffic.
• Influence Central
• Clever – any pixel data collects only IP addresses that are aggregated to determine blog traffic levels and not used to identify individuals nor combined with other data for that purpose. Data is anonymized.
• TapInfluence
• OrbReach

At this time, your personal information is not shared with any other third-party applications. This list may be amended from time to time in the Website’s sole discretion.

Except when required by law, we will not sell, distribute, or reveal your email addresses or other personal information without your consent; however, we may disclose or transfer personal information collected through the Website to third parties who acquire all or a portion of our business, which may be the result of a merger, consolidation, or purchase of all or a portion of our assets, or in connection with any bankruptcy or reorganization proceeding brought by or against us.

Data Collected When You Contact This Site

When visitors leave comments on the site, we collect the data shown in the comments form as you choose to share (name, email address, and website, if you have one), and also the visitor’s IP address and browser user agent string to help spam detection.

This data remains stored for as long as your comment remains live on this site. Your data collected via comments does not get used for marketing purposes. Additionally, you may opt-in to saving your name, email address and website which creates 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 submit a contact request via the “Contact Me” option, you choose to share your name, email address, and website, if you have one. Additionally, the site captures your IP address and browser user agent string to help spam detection. For customer service purposes, the website maintains the data for one year before deleting, but we do not use the information submitted through the contact form for marketing purposes.

Embedded Content

Some articles on this website contain embedded content such as videos, tweets, or Instagram posts. Embedded content from other websites behaves in the exact same way as if you 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 tracing your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that website.

Anonymous Data

From time to time, we may use anonymous data, which does not identify you alone, or when combined with data from other parties. This type of anonymous data may be provided to other parties for marketing, advertising, or other uses. Examples of this anonymous data may include analytics or information collected from cookies.

Affiliate Program Participation

The Website may engage in affiliate marketing, which is done by embedding tracking links into the Website. If you click on a link for an affiliate partnership, a cookie will be placed on your browser to track any sales for purposes of commissions.

Honest and Truly is a participant in various affiliate programs designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and links to online retailers.  As part of these programs, the Website will post customized links, provided by the affiliates, to track the referrals to their website(s). These programs utilize cookies to track visits for the purposes of assigning commission on these sales.

All posts that contain affiliate links disclose this at the top of the individual article. You will also have the opportunity to opt out of cookie collection when you click on any affiliate link.

Newsletters

On the Website, you may subscribe to our newsletter, which may be used for advertising purposes. All newsletters sent may contain tracking pixels. The pixel is embedded in emails and allows an analysis of the success of online marketing campaigns. Because of these tracking pixels, we may see if and when you open an email and which links within the email you click. Also, this allows the Website to adapt the content of future newsletters to the interests of the user. This behavior will not be passed on to third parties.

Advertising

Some of our advertisers occasionally serve you cookies, as well. We do not have control over cookies placed by advertisers. We may use advertising service vendors to help present advertisements on the website. These vendors may use cookies, web beacons, or similar technologies to serve you advertisements tailored to interests you have shown by browsing on this and other sites you have visited, to determine whether you have seen a particular advertisement before and to avoid sending you duplicate advertisements. In doing so, these vendors may collect non-personal data such as your browser type, your operating system, Web pages visited, time of visits, content viewed, ads viewed, and other clickstream data. The use of cookies, web beacons, or similar technologies by these advertising service vendors is subject to their own privacy policies, not ours, and Service Provider disclaims all liability in connection therewith.

Advertising via Raptive (Effective November 7, 2023)

This Site is affiliated with CMI Marketing, Inc., d/b/a Raptive (“Raptive”) for the purposes of placing advertising on the Site, and Raptive will collect and use certain data for advertising purposes. To learn more about Raptive’s data usage, click here: https://raptive.com/creator-advertising-privacy-statement/

Mediavine Programmatic Advertising (Ver 1.0)
The Website works with Mediavine to manage third-party interest-based advertising appearing on the Website. Mediavine serves content and advertisements when you visit the Website, which may use first and third-party cookies. A cookie is a small text file which is sent to your computer or mobile device (referred to in this policy as a “device”) by the web server so that a website can remember some information about your browsing activity on the Website.

First party cookies are created by the website that you are visiting. A third-party cookie is frequently used in behavioral advertising and analytics and is created by a domain other than the website you are visiting. Third-party cookies, tags, pixels, beacons and other similar technologies (collectively, “Tags”) may be placed on the Website to monitor interaction with advertising content and to target and optimize advertising. Each internet browser has functionality so that you can block both first and third-party cookies and clear your browser’s cache. The “help” feature of the menu bar on most browsers will tell you how to stop accepting new cookies, how to receive notification of new cookies, how to disable existing cookies and how to clear your browser’s cache. For more information about cookies and how to disable them, you can consult the information at https://www.allaboutcookies.org/manage-cookies/.

Without cookies you may not be able to take full advantage of the Website content and features. Please note that rejecting cookies does not mean that you will no longer see ads when you visit our Site. In the event you opt-out, you will still see non-personalized advertisements on the Website.

The Website collects the following data using a cookie when serving personalized ads:

• IP Address
• Operating System type
• Operating System version
• Device Type
• Language of the website
• Web browser type
• Email (in hashed form)

Mediavine Partners (companies listed below with whom Mediavine shares data) may also use this data to link to other end user information the partner has independently collected to deliver targeted advertisements. Mediavine Partners may also separately collect data about end users from other sources, such as advertising IDs or pixels, and link that data to data collected from Mediavine publishers in order to provide interest-based advertising across your online experience, including devices, browsers and apps. This data includes usage data, cookie information, device information, information about interactions between users and advertisements and websites, geolocation data, traffic data, and information about a visitor’s referral source to a particular website. Mediavine Partners may also create unique IDs to create audience segments, which are used to provide targeted advertising.

If you would like more information about this practice and to know your choices to opt-in or opt-out of this data collection, please visit Opt Out – NAI: Network Advertising Initiative. You may also visit http://optout.aboutads.info/#/ and http://optout.networkadvertising.org/# to learn more information about interest-based advertising. You may download the AppChoices app at YourAdChoices.com | AppChoices to opt out in connection with mobile apps, or use the platform controls on your mobile device to opt out.

For specific information about Mediavine Partners, the data each collects and their data collection and privacy policies, please click here.

Links to other websites

Our website may contain links to other websites of interest. However, once you have used these links to leave our site, you should note that we do not have any control over that other website. Therefore, we cannot be responsible for the protection and privacy of any information which you provide whilst visiting such sites and such sites are not governed by this privacy statement. You should exercise caution and look at the privacy statement applicable to the website in question.

Controlling your personal information

You may choose to restrict the collection or use of your personal information in the following ways:

• whenever you are asked to fill in a form on the website, look for the box that you can click to indicate that you do not want the information to be used by anybody for direct marketing purposes
• if you have previously agreed to us using your personal information for direct marketing purposes, you may change your mind at any time by contacting us.

We will not sell, distribute or lease your personal information to third parties unless we have your permission or are required by law to do so. We may use your personal information to send you promotional information about third parties which we think you may find interesting if you tell us that you wish this to happen.

Opt Out

If you believe that any information we are holding on you is incorrect or incomplete, please contact us at michelle@honestandtruly.com. You may also unsubscribe from emails at any time by following the link at the bottom of each email newsletter.

In certain situations, you may request that we erase or forget your personal data. To do so, please submit a request to michelle@honestandtruly.com.

Please note that we may need to retain certain information for recordkeeping purposes or to complete transactions, or when required by law.

Sensitive Personal Information

At no time should you submit sensitive personal information to the Website. This includes your social security number, information regarding race or ethnic origin, political opinions, religious beliefs, health information, criminal background, or trade union memberships. If you elect to submit such information to us, it will be subject to this Privacy Policy.

Children’s Information

The Website is aimed at adults age 18 and older. It does not knowingly collect any personally identifiable information from children under the age of 16. If a parent or guardian believes that the Website has personally identifiable information of a child under the age of 16 in its database, please contact us immediately at michelle@honestandtruly.com and we will use our best efforts to promptly remove such information from our records. We do not target anyone under the age of 18 with our services or content.

Contact Us

If you have a question about your personal data or would like to remove your data, please contact us:

Michelle Price

michelle@honestandtruly.com