Prolific Press Inc. Privacy & Cookie Policy:
This policy relates to all the websites owned or leased by Prolific Press Inc., including but not necessarily limited to Prolific Press (prolificpress.com), Three Line Poetry (threelinepoetry.com), Haiku Journal (haikujournal.org), Poetry Quarterly (poetryquarterly.com and poetryquarterly.org), Inwood Indiana (inwoodindiana.com), Jitter Press (jitterpress.com), 50 haikus (50haikus.com), Dual Coast Magazine (dualcoastmagazine.com), Tanka Journal (tankajournal.com).
What are cookies and why should I care? Cookies are tiny files that exist on your computer, smart phone, or other internet device. What makes cookies unique is that these tiny files have special permissions that allow websites and internet accessible programs to read and write information. This means that you could visit one website that writes data to a cookie that resides in your computer and then the next website you visit can read that information. In this way, a website that reads the cookies in your computer can gain insights into your activities, like what website you came from, how many times you recently visited a website, and even some identifying information. This is why cookies are a big deal! The use of cookies comes with privacy concerns.
On the other hand, cookies are necessary for many websites to function. They set a session that separates your activity from other users, so that you can buy goods and services on websites like Ebay, Amazon, and others, including the Prolific Press bookstore. Without cookies, your online experience would be very different, and many services you are used to using, like search engines, email or shopping popular websites and social media wouldn’t be possible.
Prolific Press understands that privacy is very important. It is for this reason that we have adopted a very reasonable privacy policy that helps to ensure the privacy of our users.
What kinds of data do we collect? Prolific Press collects the data that you give to us when you place an order, or otherwise enter data into any form from any of our websites, and this may include a temporary cookie. This does not include credit card data, we don’t collect that kind of sensitive data. Instead, we allow PayPal to process payments, and they alone retain that data. That part is completely obvious. We also use common website technologies, like WordPress software, Zencart shopping software, and general accessibility for browsers like Firefox, Internet Explorer, Chrome and others. These technologies require cookies to function, and the default settings for these technologies collect the data necessary to allow the websites to function properly. This kind of information is not read by humans. Moreover, the servers we host websites on include built-in standard software technologies provided by Cpanel Inc. and vendors like Apache. These technologies collect data such as how many visitors come to our websites etc. All of these technologies are Internet Standard, which means that they are pre-packaged and widely used by millions of websites all over the world. Prolific Press Inc. has no control over the cookies these mechanisms use for functionality. Prolific Press also retains any email you send us, and emails contain header information that identifies the sender. This is also obvious to most people, but in the interest of transparency, we thought we’d mention it.
Retention… Prolific Press Inc. retains information voluntarily provided by users, and does not allow users to delete certain kinds of information we retain. This is because some data is required for our services to function. For example, a user submits a poem through a form, asking us to publish the submission. The information submitted is retained to fend off future concerns about copyrights, to check against duplicate submissions, or simply to archive for publishing rights. This kind of data is collected in an obvious manner, via a purposeful act on behalf of the user who submits the data through our website, by US mail, or other active means.
Data that is collected in a less obvious manner expires over time and is automatically deleted from our servers. Periodic backups exist for the protection of our system, and those are also replaced and deleted over time, eventually resulting in the complete erasure of all session data and cookies, etc. This kind of data isn’t read by humans, and doesn’t contain identifying information. We only mention it for transparency.
What Prolific Press Inc. doesn’t do… We never alter programming to collect extra information, nor do we track users across websites, not even across our own network. We don’t employ any extra tracking, other than those pre-built into software we use, like WordPress, etc. We do not actively share or sell any data to outside companies. We never make efforts to collect unnecessary information, nor do we make extra efforts to interpret back-end data resulting from standard software technologies. Session cookies are used for user sessions, and that is all. The use of cookies is for the sole benefit of the user, and are not leveraged in any way to benefit Prolific Press Inc., or any other company, except to provide a functioning and pleasant user experience.
In the simplest terms, like millions of other websites online, we use standard programming that relies on cookies to function, and we don’t make any efforts to collect extra data. What data we do collect is necessary, and we don’t actively share or sell any of it.