Who we are

The Mississippi Valley Traveler is a website with information on the history, culture, and travel opportunities along the Mississippi River. The site is independently owned and operated by Dean Klinkenberg. Our website address is: https://mississippivalleytraveler.com.

I’m one guy with a WordPress site. My site runs with a lot of plug-ins, which makes your experience on the site better and helps me figure out what people like to read when they visit. I don’t collect or store your personal information, although some of these plug-ins might track a few bits about you to help me know who’s coming to this site and how often. Keep reading below if you want to know what each of these plug-ins might do. If you have questions or concerns about privacy or data issues with this site, please contact me directly: [email protected].

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.

Contact forms

When you use the contact form, the information you submit is sent to me as an email. That message is stored on the email host’s server until I manually delete it. I generally keep these emails for up to a year, so I can track my response in case you contact me again. No information submitted through the contact form is used for marketing purposes.

Cookies

By using or accessing the site, you are consenting to the Mississippi Valley Traveler’s use of Cookies. Like most websites, we use cookies for a variety of purposes in order to improve your online experience, for analytics and for marketing, but specifically we use Cookies on the Site for the following purposes:

  1. This site uses Cookies to analyze user activity in order to improve the Website. For example, using Cookies we can look at aggregate patterns like which pages and posts visitors read most frequently. We can use such analysis to gain insights about how to improve the functionality and experience of the website and to add new content that would interest site visitors.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.

Use the options in your web browser if you do not wish to receive a cookie or if you wish to set your browser to notify you when you receive a cookie. You can easily delete and manage any cookies that have been installed in the cookie folder of your browser by following the instructions provided by your particular browser manufacturer.

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.

Events Manager

We use Google services to generate maps and provide autocompletion when searching for events by location, which may collect data via your browser in accordance to Google’s privacy policy.

We collect and store information you submit to us when making a booking, for the purpose of reserving your requested spaces at our event and maintaining a record of attendance.

We collect and store information you submit to us about events (and corresponding locations) you would like to publish on our site.

We may use cookies to temporarily store information about a booking in progress as well as any error/confirmation messages whilst submitting or managing your events and locations.

Patreon features in this website

In order to enable you to use this website with Patreon services, we save certain functionally important Patreon information about you in this website if you log in with Patreon.

These include your Patreon user id, Patreon username, your first, last names and your vanity name. Additionally, the id of your campaign at Patreon and your campaign’s Patreon URL are also saved.

If you request that your data be deleted from this website, this data will also be deleted and Patreon functionality will not work. You would need to register on this website and log in to this website with Patreon again in order to re-populate this data and have Patreon functionality working again.

Analytics

Activity Tracked: This feature sends page view events (and potentially video play events) over to Google Analytics for consumption. This site also runs a WooCommerce-powered store, so some additional events are also sent to Google Analytics: shopping cart additions and removals, product listing views and clicks, product detail views, and purchases. Tracking for each specific WooCommerce event needs to be enabled by the site owner.

WordPress.com Stats

Data Used: IP address, WordPress.com user ID (if logged in), WordPress.com username (if logged in), user agent, visiting URL, referring URL, timestamp of event, browser language, country code. Important: The site owner does not have access to any of this information via this feature. For example, a site owner can see that a specific post has 285 views, but he/she cannot see which specific users/accounts viewed that post. Stats logs — containing visitor IP addresses and WordPress.com usernames (if available) — are retained by Automattic for 28 days and are used for the sole purpose of powering this feature.

Activity Tracked: Post and page views, video plays (if videos are hosted by WordPress.com), outbound link clicks, referring URLs and search engine terms, and country. When this module is enabled, Jetpack also tracks performance on each page load that includes the Javascript file used for tracking stats. This is exclusively for aggregate performance tracking across Jetpack sites in order to make sure that our plugin and code is not causing performance issues. This includes the tracking of page load times and resource loading duration (image files, Javascript files, CSS files, etc.). The site owner has the ability to force this feature to honor DNT settings of visitors. By default, DNT is currently not honored.

Gravatar Hovercards

Data Used: This feature will send a hash of the user’s email address (if logged in to the site or WordPress.com — or if they submitted a comment on the site using their email address that is attached to an active Gravatar profile) to the Gravatar service (also owned by Automattic) in order to retrieve their profile image.

Infinite Scroll

Data Used: In order to record page views via WordPress.com Stats (which must be enabled for page view tracking here to work) with additional loads, the following information is used: IP address, WordPress.com user ID (if logged in), WordPress.com username (if logged in), user agent, visiting URL, referring URL, timestamp of event, browser language, country code.

Activity Tracked: Page views will be tracked with each additional load (i.e. when you scroll down to the bottom of the page and a new set of posts loads automatically). A page view event will also be sent to the owner’s Google Analytics account with each additional load.

Likes

This feature is only accessible to users logged in to WordPress.com.

Data Used: In order to process a post like action, the following information is used: IP address, WordPress.com user ID, WordPress.com username, WordPress.com-connected site ID (on which the post was liked), post ID (of the post that was liked), user agent, timestamp of event, browser language, country code.

Activity Tracked: Post likes.

Mobile Theme

Data Used: A visitor’s preference on viewing the mobile version of a site.

Activity Tracked: A cookie (akm_mobile) is stored for 3.5 days to remember whether or not a visitor of the site wishes to view its mobile version. Learn more about this cookie.

Notifications

This feature is only accessible to registered users of the site who are logged in to WordPress.com.

Data Used: IP address, WordPress.com user ID, WordPress.com username, WordPress.com-connected site ID and URL, Jetpack version, user agent, visiting URL, referring URL, timestamp of event, browser language, country code. Some visitor-related information or activity may be sent to the site owner via this feature. This may include: email address, WordPress.com username, site URL, email address, comment content, follow actions, etc.

Activity Tracked: Sending notifications (i.e. when we send a notification to a particular user), opening notifications (i.e. when a user opens a notification that they receive), performing an action from within the notification panel (e.g. liking a comment or marking a comment as spam), and clicking on any link from within the notification panel/interface.

Protect

Data Used: In order to check login activity and potentially block fraudulent attempts, the following information is used: attempting user’s IP address, attempting user’s email address/username (i.e. according to the value they were attempting to use during the login process), and all IP-related HTTP headers attached to the attempting user.

Activity Tracked: Failed login attempts (these include IP address and user agent). We also set a cookie (jpp_math_pass) for 1 day to remember if/when a user has successfully completed a math captcha to prove that they’re a real human. Learn more about this cookie.

Data Synced (?): Failed login attempts, which contain the user’s IP address, attempted username or email address, and user agent information.

Sharing

Data Used: When sharing content via email (this option is only available if Akismet is active on the site), the following information is used: sharing party’s name and email address (if the user is logged in, this information will be pulled directly from their account), IP address (for spam checking), user agent (for spam checking), and email body/content. This content will be sent to Akismet (also owned by Automattic) so that a spam check can be performed. Additionally, if reCAPTCHA (by Google) is enabled by the site owner, the sharing party’s IP address will be shared with that service. You can find Google’s privacy policy here.

Who we share your data with

The Mississippi Valley Traveler does not knowingly share, sell, trade, or rent Users’ Personal Information to others, except as described above and only then in the aggregate.

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, 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.

Your contact information

Dean Klinkenberg

P.O. Box 15146

St. Louis, Missouri 63110-5146

USA

[email protected]

How we protect your data

We take reasonable security measures to protect against unauthorized access to or unauthorized alteration, disclosure or destruction of data. These include firewalls and encryption, internal reviews of our data collection, storage and processing practices and security measures, as well as physical security measures to guard against unauthorized access to systems. However, we are unable to guarantee that the security measures we take will not be penetrated or compromised or that your information will remain secure under all circumstances.