Privacy Policy

We respect the privacy of all of our visitors. We will not sell, rent, or lease your information to anyone for any purposes. Period.

Your email address and other contact information will only be used to contact you in accordance with your specific requests, and you can change your preferences at any time. If, by mistake, we send you an email or notification that you believe you did not request, you may change your preferences through the “unsubscribe” link provided in all of our emails, or you can contact us directly ( matthew@lightandmatter.org) and your information will be removed from our database immediately.

At some times in the past, technical errors with our software or servers have caused multiple copies of particular emails to be sent out at a time. While we can’t guarantee that there will never be technical problems again, we are working as hard as possible to fix known problems and insure that similar problems don’t occur in the future.

Affiliate Links

Like most web publishers, this site is supported by “affiliate links”. This means that if a visitor clicks a link on Light & Matter and follows it to an eCommerce site and makes a purchase, we will probably receive a commission or percentage of that sale.

However, we will never provide positive reviews for any type of compensation, and with few exceptions, we don’t have affiliate agreements with manufacturers, only retailers. This allows us to recommend products of our choice, without additional bias.

Our affiliates do not provide us with any personally identifiable information about who makes purchases through links on this site; all data we receive are anonymous. Affiliates will know that you followed links to their site from lightandmatter.org.

For additional details, please read our “Full Disclosure” page regarding affiliate links.

Who we are

Light & Matter Media is operated by Matthew Gore. Our website address is: https://www.lightandmatter.org.

What personal data we collect and why we collect it

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.

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.

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.

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.

Analytics

Our website uses Google analytics to anonymously track page views on the site. We also use some basic trackers on our servers to count how many people visit the site, and where they come from, and where they click.

Who we share your data with

Nobody. We don’t share your data.

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 may be checked through an automated spam detection service.