At Year of Geography (https://yearofgeography.com), we work hard to earn your confidence and trust. Keeping your personal data safe is a key part of that goal. This privacy policy explains how we collect and use personal information via our website, newsletter, social media accounts and other services. It discusses the few instances when we may disclose it to others and explains how we keep it secure.
Who is Year of Geography?
Year of Geography is a website based in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, that provides entertaining information on countries and cultures around the world. It is owned and managed by Laura Paquet, who writes the majority of posts and the e-newsletter. Other writers contribute posts from time to time.
Our mailing address is as follows:
P.O. Box 77002
1166 Bank Street
Ottawa ON K1S 3X0
Canada
How does Year of Geography collect personal information?
We collect data when you enter information on a contact form, subscribe to our newsletter, submit a comment or interact with Year of Geography on social media.
How does Year of Geography use my personal information?
We use your information to run the website, distribute the newsletter, answer your questions, do research, and provide useful content and ads.
What types of personal information does Year of Geography collect?
We try to keep the personal information we collect about you to a minimum, to enhance your privacy.
Cookies
Year of Geography uses cookies to store your preferences, record information on the pages you visit, and customize content based on your browser type or other information you share with us. Third-party services may also use these cookies.
When someone visits Year of Geography, we use a third-party service called Google Analytics to collect standard Internet log information and details of visitor behaviour patterns. We do this to find out how many people are visiting particular posts on the site, for instance. This information is only processed in a way that does not identify anyone. We do not try, nor allow Google to try, to learn the identities of visitors to our website. For more details on Google’s use of personal data, see Google’s privacy policy.
You can control the collection of cookies, or delete existing cookies, at any time using the privacy settings of your web browser (such as Chrome, Firefox or Internet Explorer). If you do so, however, you may not be able to use all of the functions on the Year of Geography website.
Newsletter mailing list
When you subscribe to our weekly e-newsletter, we collect personal information. We use it to send you the newsletter; to contact you if we need to get or provide additional information; and to check occasionally that you’re still enjoying the newsletter and the website.
We use a third-party provider, MailChimp, to deliver our newsletter. To improve the newsletter and keep it relevant, we gather statistics on e-mail opening and clicks using industry-standard technologies. For details, please see MailChimp’s privacy policy. You can unsubscribe to the newsletter at any time by clicking the “unsubscribe” link at the bottom of the Year of Geography newsletter or by sending an e-mail to Laura Paquet.
Does Year of Geography share my personal information with others?
Personal data
We do not share your personal data—such as your name, e-mail address or IP address—with third parties, or sell or rent it to anyone, unless we are required to do so for legal reasons.
Anonymized data
“Anonymized data” means statistics from which all identifying personal information has been removed. For instance, we can see the number of people who have viewed a certain Year of Geography post on a particular day, but we can’t see their names or e-mail addresses.
We may share anonymized personal information with other organizations, particularly potential advertisers who want to know how many people visit the site in order to decide whether it is useful to advertise with us. We may also share such information with professional organizations, such as travel writers’ associations, for the purposes of qualifying for membership.
How does Year of Geography keep my personal information secure?
To protect the security, confidentiality and integrity of your personal data, we use various safeguards, including the following:
- ensuring the physical security of our offices and other sites
- ensuring the digital security of our devices by using passwords and other protective measures
- using standard security mechanisms—such as secure socket layer (SSL) encryption—to transmit sensitive data
How I can get access to my personal information with Year of Geography?
At any time, you are entitled to view, amend or delete the personal information that we hold. Please e-mail your request to Laura Paquet.
How does Year of Geography handle information submitted by children?
Year of Geography does not knowingly collect any personally identifiable information from children under the age of 16. If a parent or guardian believes that we have such information in our database, please contact Laura Paquet immediately and we will remove that data from our records as quickly as possible.
Can this policy be modified?
Year of Geography reserves the right to update this privacy policy at any time. We will do our best to let you know about these updates—via the weekly e-newsletter, for example. Please check this page periodically for information on any changes.
This policy was updated on January 1, 2023.