Your Privacy & Security
San Francisco Writers Conferences wants your online experience to be easy and anxiety free, and we’ve taken careful measures to make sure it is just that. Our database, kept in secured locations with no direct Internet access, is designed to protect your online information at all times. Our website address is https://sfwriters.org.
In addition, all information you submit here is further protected by the SSL (Secure Socket Layer) technology we have implemented to encrypt your information transactions and our third party gateway used to process every online transaction you make via our site. Mouse over the Comodo seal at the foot of our menu to verify the security of your transactions.
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:
If you upload images to the website, you should avoid uploading images with embedded location data (EXIF GPS) included. Visitors to the website can download and extract any location data from images on the website.
CONTACT FORMS:
The information we ask for on our contact/registration forms is needed by our third party secure credit card processing companies to verify your credit card transaction only. We (San Francisco Writers Conference) do not have access to or keep any credit card transaction information. We do keep email addresses and phone numbers so that we may contact you with conference information or onsite for emergency purposes only. This information is kept for two years.
COOKIES:
Our website uses “cookies” when you create an account. Cookies are small bits of information stored by your browser on your computer’s hard drive. Our cookies do not contain any information that identifies you, but they will allow us to provide features like welcoming you back to your account with your name in the greeting.
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.
If you have an account and you log in to this site, 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.
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 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.
WHAT PERSONAL DATA WE COLLECT AND WHY WE COLLECT IT:
Because our site uses third party secure credit card processing from both Stripe and Square, we do not need to gather or store any of your credit card information. Our online registration is not only easy to use, but keeps your transactions entirely private. We never sell or share your information with any 3rd Parties, and you will not receive additional solicitations when using our system. Also, anything you submit to us is used only to update your online account information, to complete your purchases, to notify you as you have requested, and to improve our site in order to better serve you.
EMBEDDED CONTENT FROM OTHER WEBSITES:
Articles on this site may include embedded content (e.g. videos, images, articles, etc.). 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, including tracing your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that website.
HOW LONG WE RETAIN YOUR DATA:
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:
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:
Visitor comments are checked through Akismet, an automated spam detection service.
FOR EXTRA SECURITY To safeguard your privacy when using shared computers at work or on the road, we strongly advise you to log out. Logging out is the way you fully disable or kill any cookies in your browser and keep your account access/information entirely private. After logging out, you should also close your browser for added security.