Who we are
Our website address is https://houseunpacked.com.
What personal data we collect & why we collect it
House Unpacked is committed to protecting your privacy whilst using our website. We collect personal information that you provide to us and the information stated below.
Contact forms
If you decide to contact us on our 'contact' page, you will be asked to complete a contact form. You'll be asked to enter your name, email and the message that you would like to send.
This data is collected so we can receive and respond to your query.
The contact forms we use are called Ninja Forms, which is a plug-in (i.e. software) that can be used on WordPress (the system we use to build our website).
Ninja forms have a great explanation on their website of how they work but to summarise:
- You fill out your details on the contact form
- Ninja Forms passes the data to WordPress for processing
- WordPress passes the data to our website host for it to be 'packaged' and sent over to us as an email
Leaving comments
When you leave a comment on our website, we collect the data in the comments form (name and email). You can also choose to enter your own website when leaving a comment.
Your IP address and browser user agent string (this identifies which browser is being used) are collected to help spam detection.
An anonymised string created from your email address (also called a hash) may be provided to the Gravatar service to see if you are using it. Gravatar means Globally Recognised Avatar (i.e. a picture you can have to represent you online). 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.
Security plugin (software)
To protect our website, we use a security plugin (software that enables certain features on our website). For security reasons, this plugin may collect IP addresses to mitigate login threats and malicious activity.
Cookies
Our website uses cookies. Cookies are small data files saved on your device (i.e. laptop, phone etc) when you visit our website. WordPress (the system we used to build our website) stores cookies on your computer.
Essential cookies (WordPress user cookies):
WordPress has essential cookies, which means our site would not run without them. These are also known as session or user cookies.
If you have an account and you log into this website, WordPress 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, WordPress will also set up several cookies to save your login information and your screen display choices. Login cookies last for 2 days, and screen option cookies last for 1 year. If you select 'Remember Me', your login will persist for 2 weeks. If you log out of your account, the login cookies will be removed.
Non-essential cookies (WordPress comment 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. The cookies will expire after 1 year. The comment cookies are:
- comment_author_{HASH}: for remembering your name
- comment_author_email_{HASH}: for remembering your email address
- comment_author_url_{HASH}: for remembering your website URL (if you have one and choose to enter this information).
Cookies from plugins
We install a variety of plugins on our website. Plugins are software that enable certain features and services on our website. For example, security protection, theme design etc. We only install plugins that we need for the running and design of our website.
We are not aware of these plugins using cookies on our visitors' browsers (i.e. your browser) based on their own cookie policy. However, we cannot guarantee that these plugins will not use cookies.
You can choose which cookies you would like to accept on the pop up cookie window on our website.
Cookie Compliance plugin:
We display a pop up cookie banner when you visit our site using a cookie compliance plugin. This is for you to choose which cookies you would like to accept and to ensure that we are complying with GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation).
This plugin will collect data on the number of visits our website has and how many cookie consent forms have been collected. This enables us to monitor the consent activity for our website. When consent is recorded, it generates a unique identifier that is stored on the user's browser and the Cookie Compliance app. It does not collect any personal data or IP addresses.
Google Analytics
With your consent, we use google analytics (specifically Google Analytics 4) to measure how visitors are using our website for us to improve your experience. For example, if we know how popular certain posts are, we can continue producing similar content on that topic.
Google Analytics 4 does not log or store individual IP addresses. Their policy says "IP addresses are used at collection time to determine location information (country, city, latitude and longitude of city) and then discarded before data is logged in any data centre or server."
By default, Google Analytics 4 collects data on number of users, session statistics, approximate geolocation, browser and device information. We collect data on the following areas:
- Page views
- Scrolls
- Scroll depth (i.e. how far down the page readers go)
- Outbound clicks
- Site search
- Video engagement
- File downloads
- Form interactions
Google Analytics 4 uses first-party cookies:
- _ga is the cookie used to distinguish users and expires after 2 years
- _ga_<container-id> is used to distinguish sessions for a user and expires after 2 years
You can prevent your data being used by Google Analytics by installing the Google Analytics browser add-on. Learn more about Google Analytics and privacy.
Monster Insights
Monster Insights is a Google Analytics plugin for WordPress. This means the data collected from Google Analytics is presented to us in a nice and easy-to-read format (i.e. graphs/visuals) when we login to WordPress (the system we use to build our website).
We use the EU compliance add on with Monster Insights to protect your privacy. This means the following:
- IP addresses are anonymised for Google Analytics hits
- Demographic and interests reports for remarketing and advertising are disabled
- User ID tracking and author tracking are disabled
Embedded content from other sites
Posts on this site may include embedded content (i.e articles, images). 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. These websites should have their own privacy policy that you should read.
For example, we have links to our Instagram and Pinterest page on our website. These can be found in the top menu (the social media icons in the top right hand corner) and in the footer. When you click on these icons, you will be redirected to Instagram and Pinterest, who have their own privacy policy that you should read.
How is your data stored?
- The data collected through the Ninja contact form is stored on the server in our WordPress database. Ninja forms do not see or store any of your data when you complete a contact form.
- The data collected on the comment form is stored on the server in our WordPress database.
- The data collected through the security plugin is stored on our website server. It is not transmitted to third parties or remote server locations.
- Cookies are stored on your device's browser.
- Google analytics stores data on their Analytics servers and data centres, which can be in the EU and US.
- Monster Insights stores data on our WordPress dashboard.
How do we protect your data?
We aim to protect your personal information through a system of organisational and technical security measures.
WordPress is a secure, password-protected system. We also protect your data by using a security plug-in to protect our site.
Please note that despite our best efforts to secure your information, no electronic transmission over the internet or information storage technology can be guaranteed to be 100% secure, so we cannot promise or guarantee that hackers, cybercriminals, or other unauthorised third parties will not be able to defeat our security and improperly collect, access, steal, or modify your information. Transmission of personal information on our website is at your own risk. You should only access our website within a secure environment.
Who do we share your data with?
We only share information with your consent, to comply with laws, to protect your rights, or to fulfil our website services.
We only share and disclose your information in the following situations:
- Compliance with Laws. We may disclose your information where we are legally required to do so in order to comply with applicable law, governmental requests, a judicial proceeding, court order, or legal process, such as in response to a court order or a subpoena (including in response to public authorities to meet national security or law enforcement requirements).
- Vital Interests and Legal Rights. We may disclose your information where we believe it is necessary to investigate, prevent, or take action regarding potential violations of our policies, suspected fraud, situations involving potential threats to the safety of any person and illegal activities, or as evidence in litigation in which we are involved.
- Third-Party Service Providers. We may share your data with third party service providers, who perform services and require access to such information to do that work. Examples include: email delivery and hosting services. Visitor comments may be checked through an automated spam detection service. We may allow selected third parties to use tracking technology on the Sites, which will enable them to collect data about how you interact with the Sites over time. This information may be used to, among other things, analyse and track data, determine the popularity of certain content and better understand online activity.
Unless described in this Policy, we do not share, sell, rent or trade any of your information with third parties for their promotional purposes.
How long do we retain your data?
By default, data submissions on Ninja contact forms are set to expire after 90 days. It then moves to the trash can, where we delete it. You can choose to have your data deleted at any time (see below).
When 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.
Data collected through google analytics is retained for 14 months.
What rights you have over your data?
Under UK data protection law, you have rights including:
- Your right of access - You have the right to ask us for copies of your personal information
- Your right to rectification - You have the right to ask us to rectify personal information you think is inaccurate. You also have the right to ask us to complete information you think is incomplete
- Your right to erasure - You have the right to ask us to erase your personal information in certain circumstances
- Your right to restriction of processing - You have the right to ask us to restrict the processing of your personal information in certain circumstances
- Your right to object to processing - You have the the right to object to the processing of your personal information in certain circumstances
- Your right to data portability - You have the right to ask that we transfer the personal information you gave us to another organisation, or to you, in certain circumstances
You are not required to pay any charge for exercising your rights. If you make a request, we have one month to respond to you.
Please contact us via our contact us page if you wish to make a request.
Do we update this privacy policy?
We may update this privacy policy from time to time. The updated version will be indicated by an updated 'Revised' date and the updated version will be effective as soon as it is accessible. We encourage you to review our privacy policy frequently to stay informed on how we protect your information.
Our privacy policy was last updated on 23/05/23.
How to contact us
You can reach us via our contact form on our contact us page.
