I am just a sole street and documentary photographer who prefers to create beautiful images than hack into the deep troves of data that exist on the internet. I do not have the time or energy to do anything nefarious with your data. It’s not that I am not evil – I am as corruptible as anyone – I am just too tired to think up a malevolent plot to steal your identity.

I collect and store the info I need to provide you with the service you buy from me. I might occasionally stalk you via Facebook adverts. That’s really it.

Seriously who actually cares? Do you even know what a cookie is or does? Well then. Yes we use cookies because that’s kinda how the Internet works. If you don’t want our delicious home-baked chocolate chip scripts, then you need to block cookies on your browser but don’t come crying to us when nothing does what it’s supposed to.

Look, we’re following you, ok? We use Google Analytics, primarily to stare at the real time stats because they’re cool but also to see what stuff people looking at so we can write more of the stuff you like.

We also have the Facebook Pixel installed so that we can sell you stuff. Yes you heard it. We are a business and – shocker – we want you to spend money with us. The Facebook Pixel means that we can see how people interact with our site and with Facebook adverts and then we try to flog you relevant stuff. If you’ve not seen the Facebook Ads analytics dashboard MAN ALIVE it’s stalker central. That shit is a terrifying Black Mirror horror show. If you’re not on Facebook – well bloody done but the pixel is tracking you anyway.

Don’t know if there’s a specific Facebook Pixel blocking thing but we accidentally discovered that if you use Freedom app to block social media while you’re writing it also blocks the FB pixel. Handy hints!

We also use AddThis which shows us what content people are sharing. This is because we like to compete about whose content is doing the best. You can’t block this because it’s not tracking you, it’s tracking our content.

None of these things store any super personal data about you but probably they nab your IP address, not that we’d know where to look for it or what to do with it. All we see is that a person or many people have interacted with the website in a particular way. You can mess with us by doing something totally unexpected on the website and skewing our stats. Or you could do something way more fun and useful with your time LIKE WRITING.

DATA!! It’s all about the data, baby. A literal fuck-tonne of petabytes whirring around the world and what? What’s it all for? WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN? What will future historians actually see of us and our slowly collapsing society? So. We store your data in a few different places and use it in a couple of different ways. You ready for this?

Here on this website! If you register with the site we will store your name and email address. If you buy stuff from us we will store your name, email address, postal address, phone number if you give it to us, and purchase history. Your payment details ARE NOT held on the site. We obviously go to the maximum effort to keep this data secure and only three people have access to it. Only one of them ever actually looks at it and that’s to solve any technical problems you might have.

We’ll be honest: we do absolutely nothing unsurprising or radical with your info. We use your purchase history to target you with ads for stuff you might like. For e.g. if you buy writing retreats, we’ll occasionally ask you if you want to go on another writing retreat. If you’ve done one of our courses, we’ll occasionally ask you if you want to do another course. Does that make us EvilMegaCorp? Idk, it’s fairly standard isn’t it?

Mailchimp! If you’ve signed up for anything or bought anything on our site – newsletter, free course, paid course, membership, merch, anything – your name and email address also wangs its way over to Mailchimp, which is the system we use to manage our newsletters and emails. They are (allegedly) GDPR compliant. You can unsubscribe from emails at any time by hitting the unsubscribe button.

Thinkific! All our courses run on a learning management system called Thinkific. It’s rad. When you sign up for a course, your name, email address and the course you want to take is flung over to Thinkific where it sits there and lets you access your course. Thinkific is (allegedly) GDPR compliant.

Zapier! This is the go-between between the website and our third party services. Your name, email address and course travels through this system on the way to our other systems. Your data is held in the logs. TBH it’s not the best set up and we’re looking to change it soon, so everything will be deleted at some point in 2018.

When you buy stuff, you will either pay through Stripe or PayPal. The only payment-based details we hold on our site is how much you’ve spent and whether you paid with Stripe or PayPal. We have no bank or card details or nada here. Stripe is GDPR compliant. PayPal is being totally weird about it but will have to be GDPR compliant or everyone in Europe will have to stop using it and probably they don’t want that.

If you sign up to our newsletter, we will send you a newsletter – generally around two a month, but occasionally more if there is more interesting stuff to tell you. You can unsubscribe at any time by clicking the unsubscribe button in every email. Your name and email address are stored securely in Mailchimp.

If you sign up for a course, we will send you emails about the course. The frequency of which depends on the course. You can unsubscribe but you’ll miss important stuff about the course.

Mailchimp automatically adds tracking things to links so if you click on a link WE KNOW. If you open an email WE KNOW. If you ignore us reminding you to be writing WE KNOW.

The most important thing about this is we have neither the time nor inclination to actually look at or do anything with these stats.

FINE FUCK OFF THEN WE DON’T CARE. If you want to go undercover, just chuck us an email at help@writershq.co.uk and we’ll delete all the info we have on you from our systems while having a passive aggressive huff about what we could have possibly done wrong.

This does not include PayPal and Stripe. If you want to delete your PayPal or Stripe accounts you have to do that yourself via PayPal or Stripe. We cannot delete your purchase history because the taxman will be terribly upset.

Just so you know, though, you won’t be able to access our courses anymore. We’re not being dicks, it’s because we need your email address so we know you’ve paid and that you’re allowed to access it.

We use social media a lot, partly to promote our courses and retreats but mostly as a vehicle for our creative swearing and political opinions. If you talk to us in our Facebook group and we become familiar with you, we might find you on Twitter and say hello. You can ask us to be less friendly if you wish and we will of course respect your boundaries.

You are not required to follow our social media accounts and we won’t ask our employees to temper themselves in the service of us. If they turn out to be racist, bigoted dipshits then we wanna know so we can tell them to go to hell.