At The Houston Gardener (“THG,” “we,” “us”), we respect your privacy and are committed to protecting your data. Our policy describes the types of information you may provide when you visit our website TheHoustonGardener.com and what are our practices for collecting, using, maintaining, protecting, and disclosing that information.

Affiliate Marketing Disclosure 

The Houston Gardener is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and links to Amazon.com. As part of this Amazon Associates program, the Website will post customized links, provided by Amazon, to track the referrals to their website. This program utilizes cookies to track visits for the purposes of assigning commission on these sales.

Changes to Our Privacy Policy

The Houston Gardener reserves the right to update its Privacy Policy and other privacy-related documents if required due to changes in the law, service, or any other reason that involves privacy issues. We will provide notice of such changes on our website.

Google Analytics – This service tracks Website usage and provides information such as referring websites and user actions on the Website.

Our website uses Google Analytics to collect traffic data. All websites which collect traffic data, which is more than ½ of all websites on the Internet, have the ability to monitor visitor information such as IP addresses, browser type, operating system, location, date/time of visit, and information about which areas of the site are visited. The data is anonymous and does not personally identify you. It is used solely for improving the user experience of our audience as a whole.

In compliance with the GDPR, our Google Analytics does not store your full IP address. Instead, the last octet of your IP is reset to zeros before any processing or storing takes place. This means that it cannot be used to identify you at all. If you want to opt-out of Google Analytics, you can do so by following this guide.

MailChimp – We use this service to deliver email updates and newsletters. The application collects and stores your name and email address for purposes of delivering such communications.  Please refer to MailChimp’s privacy policy for further information.

Cache Policy – This Website uses cache technology to ensure optimum page load, so this necessitates the use of cookies. These save frequently used parts of our site to your device’s cache so it does not need to be drawn from the web server by ascertaining your general location to deliver our Website from a local server that’s closer to you.

The Houston Gardener has partnered with Cloudfare to leverage their CDN (Content Delivery Network) locations to cache content globally. Refer Cloudfare privacy policy for further details.

Email Subscription Policy – Upon subscribing to our email communications, we will send you emails for advertising purposes. All communications may contain tracking pixels embedded in emails that allow the 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.

Personal Information Management Policy

The Houston Gardener, upon willful consent through subscription, would store your email and name.

Your rights to your information

We offer the following management of your personal information so that you are able to execute the rights if deemed necessary.

Opt-out – You may opt-out of future email communications by following the unsubscribe links in our website and email communication. You may also notify us at Thehoustongardener@gmail.com to exclude your email from our mailing list. Alternatively, you can unsubscribe anytime by clicking on the footer link of the campaign emails. Upon unsubscribing, we will delete all the data from our site as we fully comply with the GDPR. For any data that resides on your computer, such as cookies or push notification opt-in, you would need to remove it yourself.

Website Content Policy

The Houston Gardener team creates all the content (such as blog posts, how-to, and photographs) unless mentioned otherwise. Some of our media are sourced from paid stock websites. All the content (articles and media) shared on the website is our copyright, and you should not reproduce any part of the contents without our consent. If you include our posts in round-up or promotional features without prior approval, we encourage you to provide us visibility through the mandatory backlink to the referenced post.

If you want to discuss the content policy, please contact us at Thehoustongardener@gmail.com.

No warranty policy

We do not provide a warranty of any kind. All our gardening posts are based on our own research, experience, and knowledge. All our content is published on an “as is” and “as available” basis, unless otherwise specified in writing. THG makes no representations or warranties of any kind, express or implied unless otherwise specified in writing. To the full extent permissible by law, we disclaim all warranties, express and implied, including, but not limited to, implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, non-infringement, availability, or security.

We make our best effort to provide accurate information but cannot warrant that any information provided is accurate, complete, reliable, or current. We provide no warranty or assume no liability for any information on the website.

In addition to the disclosure above, please be informed that we cannot guarantee that your outcome of following the article/how-to will generate the same outcome as written or photographed on the website.

Data Security

We have implemented reasonable security measures to secure your personal information from accidental loss and unauthorized access, use, alteration, and disclosure. All information you provide to us is stored on our secure servers. 

We have procured SSL certificates that help us makes all interactions between you and our servers that host the site encrypted.

User Comment Policy

When visitors leave comments on the site we collect the data shown in the comments, 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.

We reserve the right to reject any comment based on the best judgment by the editing team. If you have any questions regarding your comment please contact me through email at Thehoustongardener@gmail.com.

THG strives to ensure that its services are accessible to people with disabilities. We have invested a significant amount of resources to help ensure that our website is made easier to use and more accessible for people with disabilities, with the strong belief that every person has the right to live with dignity, equality, comfort, and independence.

This privacy template paged saved in your footer navigation is provided as a sample to help you get your new website up and running quickly. The text on this page was generated by WordPress and Restored 316 is not providing legal advice.  If you are looking for more information regarding your obligation to keep your blog business legal, then please check out the resources from The Contract Shop.

Who we are

Suggested text: Our website address is: https://thehoustongardener.com.

Comments

When 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.

Media

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.

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 visit our login page, 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.

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.

Embedded content from other websites

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.

Who we share your data with

Suggested text: If you request a password reset, your IP address will be included in the reset email.

How long we retain your data

Suggested text: 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.

What rights you have over your data

Suggested text: 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.

Where we send your data

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