Policy summary
Here is the short (tl;dr) version of our privacy policy (the full version follows just after these few bullet points):
- Life Love Illusion (hereafter “We”) never directly share any type of data about you or your activities with any other company or website.
- The site itself uses only necessary cookies; advertisers do not set cookies but may be able to anonymously correlate data based on your internet address. Some pages on our site use Spotify’s embedded music player, and it sets cookies. Click here to go straight to the Cookies section of this policy statement.
- If you create a Life Love Illusion account, we keep basic information about you (e.g., name, email, optional profile photo, email subscriptions) along with any comments you post on articles.
- Your comments on our site become a permanent part of our site content; your comments become anonymous if your account is removed. If you have included personally identifiable data in a comment, you may request that we change or mask it.
- If you log in to our site with a social id (e.g., Facebook, Google, Amazon) that firm may track when you log in to our site.
- When you click on an ad, advertisers on our site may track data about your activity on our site (whether or not you are logged in to our site).
- As with any website, if you are logged into a social id when you visit our site, advertisers who cooperate with social id firms (or other websites) may be able to track and correlate your activity on our site with activity on other websites (even if you are not registered or logged into our site).
Who we are
Life Love Illusion is an independent, personal endeavor. Its purpose is to contribute a little bit to the world chiefly in the form of a few words and a few creations. You’ll find here perspectives on and reactions to the lives we live, the love we wish for, and the ambiguity that infuses all happenings and things around us. We have a particular affinity for themes relating to art, spirituality, and the common good of society and the world.
Our website address is: https://lifeloveillusion.com.
Personal data we collect and why
Email subscriptions
You may subscribe to our email updates with or without creating an account (i.e., “registering”) on our site. In this case, we store your name, email address, and the email lists you have subscribed to, along with a record of your consent. We also keep logs of the emails we have sent to you (but we do not track which emails you have opened).
If you have either registered on our site or subscribed to an email list, we place your email on an email list reserved for use on the rare occasion that there is some important information or announcement that all users should know about (e.g., should there be a security concern). We keep your email on this list even if you unsubscribe to all other lists. If you wish to have your email removed completely from our database, see instructions below on contacting us.
Your registration and account data
When you create an account on Life Love Illusion, which is necessary before you may comment on our articles, we capture basic data so that we may distinguish your comments from those of other users. If you login to our site using a social id (e.g., Facebook, Google, Amazon), we obtain some of this data from the social id firm or, if not supplied by them, we generate some items on our own. The data we maintain is:
- Login username (auto-generated for new social-linked accounts)
- Email address
- Account password (auto-generated for new social-linked accounts, but not used unless you unlink your account from the social id)
- Given name and surname (first and last name)
- Display name (optional) — an alternate name to display by your comments
- Short biographical notes (optional) — a few notes about you
- Profile photo (optional, but pulled from social-linked accounts)
By requiring all users to provide basic information and verified email addresses, we seek to increase the level of accountability and civility in discussions on the site. We need your email address in case of important notifications about our site (e.g., if there were a data breach). In addition, we may offer future services that involve notifications of articles published or other items of interest.
If you login directly to Life Love Illusion (i.e., not through a social id), we may send an anonymized version of your email address (i.e., a hash) to the Gravatar service to see if you have a profile photo there. The Gravatar service privacy policy is available here: https://automattic.com/privacy/.
Your comments on articles
When you post comments and reactions on the site, we collect the content you enter into the comment form. To help us detect and prevent so-called spam, we also collect the current internet address of your device/computer and identify which browser you are using. If your account has a profile photo, it will be displayed next to each of your comments.
Media uploaded by you
If you upload images to our site, you should avoid uploading images with embedded location data (e.g., EXIF, GPS). Although our site is designed to prevent visitors from downloading images, an aggressive hacker (on our site or any site) might possibly find a way around our image security measures, download an image, and extract location data from it.
Embedded content from other websites
Articles on our site may include embedded content from other websites (e.g. videos, images, articles, etc.). We do not send any information about you to the other site. Embedded content behaves the same way as if you had directly visited the other website. The other site will have its own privacy policy, which may include collecting data about you, using cookies, sending data to additional sites via third-party tracking, tracking your interaction with the embedded content, or other such actions — particularly if you have an account with and are logged into the other website or any of its tracking partners.
Analytics
We do not use data about your interaction with our site to analyze your individual activities. To understand better how people use our site and which content they most interact with, we analyze anonymous data about overall site usage.
Data storage and processing
Our website is hosted by Just Host, which is a Newfold Digital company. As of the date of our privacy policy, Newfold Digital indicates that it stores and processes data in the United States (per Newfold’s Privacy Notice and the Addendums linked to from there).
Cookies
Life Love Illusion uses necessary cookies to make our site work well. We use advertising to help defray the costs of running the site, but none of our advertising services use cookies. We use Spotify’s embedded player to enrich selected articles on our site, and it does set cookies. The next two sections describe these in detail, along with your options to control them.
Necessary Cookies
When you use our site, with or without being logged in, we may set up certain cookies to help ensure you have a secure, smooth experience using our site. You may disable these by changing your browser settings, but this may affect how our site functions. Here is the full list of cookies we may use (in parentheses are the names/prefixes of the cookies):
- Cookie preference (cookieChoice): This cookie lets us remember the choice you made concerning our use of cookies. This cookie expires after a year. If we update our cookie policy, we will prompt you again for your cookie choice, even if your prior choice has not yet expired.
- Type of device (mobile): For small mobile devices, we (try to) improve LLI’s appearance by making a few small tweaks to our pages. This cookie tells us when to do that, and it never expires.
- Quote play control (quotePlay): Our site features a quote at the top of the page that changes when you navigate to a new page. Using the play/pause icon near the quote, you may control whether the quote also periodically changes as you stay on one page. This cookie is set only if you click the pause/play icon, and it contains no personal data.
- Cookie test (wordpress_test_cookie): This is a temporary cookie to determine if your browser accepts cookies. It contains no personal data.
- Spam and attack prevention (siteSecurity_*): Our site uses the product WP Cerber Security as a protection measure to reduce the risk of spam and attacks on our site. This product may set one or more cookies to assist in identifying various types of hacking attempts. These cookies do not contain any personal data and they expire after two weeks.
- Browsing continuity (lli): On our server (i.e., not in your browser), we temporarily maintain information to allow our site to make smooth transitions as you navigate between site functions, such as the state of your browsing session and any data associated with it. This data is stored only on our server; it is never stored on your device/computer. Instead, we set a session cookie containing a random identifier which the server uses to retrieve the specific data for your session. This cookie contains no personal data.
- Login session (wordpress_logged_in*, wordpress_sec*): If you create an account and log into our site, we set up multiple cookies to save your screen display choices and identify your login session. Screen options cookies last for a year and contain no personal data. If you select “stay logged in,” your login cookies will persist for two weeks, otherwise they expire within two days. When you log out of your account, login cookies are removed. Login cookies contain your login username, but no other personal data.
- Published articles: Should we enable you to publish articles on our site, we will set a cookie containing an identifier for articles you create. These cookies contains no personal data and expire after one day.
Cookies and Advertising
None of our advertisers use cookies on our site, but Spotify does. We specifically select the ads displayed on our site and, when used in this way, our advertisers cannot and do not set cookies unless you click on an advertisement. Our site tells them when we display one of their ads, so even if you do not click an ad, they may be able to anonymously correlate information from our site and other web pages visited from a given local network (e.g., a coffee shop wifi, your home wifi). Because these services do not set cookies, there are no cookies to control.
Spotify (optional cookies). If there is a song that relates to an article on our site, the article may embed Spotify’s music player, which sets certain cookies (see below for links to Spotify’s privacy policy and its cookie policy). You may disable our use of Spotify player, and thus prevent its cookies, by going to our cookie settings page. You may also reference Spotify’s cookie policy below, which includes instructions for controlling Spotify cookies.
Who we share your data with
We do not actively or directly share your data with anyone or any firm in any form, other than to comply with mandatory requests from bona fide public authorities in the United States. In such cases, our policy is to challenge any requests we believe to be unlawful (within our limited resources), to disclose the minimum data possible, and to document and notify you of any such requests and disclosures.
That said, there are two scenarios where other firms may indirectly collect anonymous or personally identifiable data as you use our site:
- Social login (personal data): If you login to our site using a social id, that firm may record each time that you login to Life Love Illusion. We do not provide any data to the firm about your use of our site, nor do we embed any social tracking capabilities in our site. However, advertisers on our site may cooperate with the firm to provide such data. You should be familiar with the privacy policy for your social id, specifically anything having to do with how they cooperate with other parties to collect data about you when you are not on their website.
- Advertising and media (anonymous data): Advertising and media services used on our site may capture anonymous data (but, see the previous point if you use social login). These services may collect information not about you personally but based on your internet address (which changes as you move from place to place — but if you commonly use the internet from the same wifi network, it may anonymously approximate a family or personal identity) and thus observe patterns of web browsing and app usage including how you interact with our site. They may use this data for a variety of purposes, such as personalization of offers or advertisements, analytics about how you engage with websites or ads, and other commercial purposes. Furthermore, if you visit other websites that use these same advertisers, they may correlate and analyze browsing patterns across sites. For more information about the collection, use, and sale of your personal information, as well as your rights, please refer to this list of our advertising services:
| Advertising service | Privacy links |
|---|---|
| Amazon Associates ** | Amazon.com privacy notice |
| Conversant ** |
Conversant privacy policy |
| Rakuten Marketing ** |
Rakuten privacy policy/rights Rakuten user rights / opt-out page |
| Spotify |
Spotify privacy policy Spotify cookie policy |
How long we retain your data
If you create a Life Love Illusion account, we maintain the personal data outlined in “registration and account data” above. You may see and edit your personal information at any time, although you cannot change your login username. We have not yet created an account delete function, but you may manually request account deletion (see contact information below). Our website administrator can see and edit your account data (but has no reason to do so).
If you leave a comment on an article, the comment and data about it are retained indefinitely. If you delete your Life Love Illusion account, your comment remains but the comment author is displayed as “former LLI member,” allowing anonymity for you and ongoing continuity of the discussion for the Life Love Illusion community.
See the section above on email subscriptions to learn how we retain email list data.
The rights you have over your data
If you have created an account on our site, you may request to receive an exported file of the personal data we hold about you. You may further request that we erase any personal data we hold about you, although comments you have made on our site require special handling like this: We highly value the continuity of discussions on our site, so we seek to avoid having holes in a discussion where a comment used to be. So, if you delete your account, we retain the text of your comments but instead of your display name, the comments are identified as being by a “former LLI member.” If you have embedded personally identifiable data in your comments, and you wish to have such data removed, you must specifically identify the words in specific comments that personally identify you. We will then delete, mask, or modify such data so that it is no longer personally identifiable. Note that, none of this paragraph applies to data that we are obliged to keep for administrative, legal, or security purposes.
Where we send your data
If you comment on an article, the text of your comment may be checked through an automated spam detection service. We may send a hash of your email address to the Gravatar service to search there for a profile photo for your account.
Our contact information
For any concerns about our site or requests regarding your account, you may contact us at this email address (you will have to convert the following into a valid email address because, to discourage spam, it is not formatted as an email address): l l i –a-t– lifeloveillusion.com (remove spaces, change “–a-t–” to “@”).
How we protect your data
We protect your data in a variety of ways, including use of the following mechanisms:
- We configure all of our site’s web pages with “https” to encrypt and protect data as it is transmitted between your web browser and our web server.
- For long-term storage, we place your data in a password-protected database with the password securely stored in a secret location that cannot be accessed through our web server.
- We do not directly store your password; we convert it into a hashed string.
- To foster overall security of our site (and thus your data), we use a well-supported website product (WordPress) together with a website security package built specifically for WordPress (WP Cerber Security).
Data breach procedures we have in place
In case of a data breach, we will:
- Change all passwords and security credentials associated with administration of our site.
- Reset passwords for all Life Love Illusion user accounts. Users that login using a social id will not be affected by this step, since their logins use the usernames and passwords maintained by the social id firm.
- Invalidate all active logins to our site, thus requiring users to create fresh user sessions by logging in again.
- Notify all Life Love Illusion users via their registered email addresses of the nature and extent of the breach.
- Initiate investigative activities to identify the root cause of the breach and perform corrective actions as appropriate to prevent any such breach in the future.
Thank you
Thank you for your interest in what we are doing at Life Love Illusion. Our hope and prayer is that your life is enriched in some small way by what you find here.
— the Life Love Illusion team
Life Love Illusion is a project by Randall Heffner