Privacy Policy

Housing Herald is a community magazine about player housing in World of Warcraft, run by a small team. We are not affiliated with Blizzard Entertainment. This page explains what information we collect, why, who else sees it, and what you can do about it.

Housing Herald is responsible for your data. Questions or requests about it can be emailed to privacy@housing-herald.com - you don't need an account - or, if you have one, sent through our contact page.

When you log in

You log in with Battle.net, Google or Discord - we never see your password, and we do not ask any of them for your email address. From Battle.net we receive your BattleTag; from Google, your name and profile picture; from Discord, your username, account ID and avatar. We store your username and which service you used. Your profile picture is only kept inside your login cookie, and if you log in with Discord we store your Discord account ID so that editorial activity on our Discord server can be matched to your account.

What you add

• Your profile: display name, icon, banner, bio, short description and links, if you add them.
• Comments you post. New and edited comments are checked for abuse automatically (see below).
• Favourites, shopping lists and calendar RSVPs.
• Kitbashes, tours and articles you create, including the images you upload.
• Messages you send through the contact page, including the email address you enter there.
• If you are featured in an article, the interview consent form you sign and the in-game details you choose to share.

The newsletter

If you subscribe, we store your email address and send a confirmation email first - nothing else is sent until you confirm. To see how the newsletter performs, we record when an email is opened and which links are clicked, together with your IP address and browser details at that moment. Every email has an unsubscribe link. If an email bounces or is marked as spam, we unsubscribe that address automatically.

Push notifications

If you turn on notifications, we store the subscription details your browser gives us and which kinds of articles you want to hear about. Notifications only contain an article's title, type, link and image.

Page-view analytics

We count page views with our own analytics, which set no cookies. For each page view we record the page, the website that linked you there (the site name only), your browser details, your country, how long you stayed and how far you scrolled. To tell visits apart without identifying you, we combine your IP address, browser details and the date into a scrambled code that changes every day; your IP address itself is never stored. To work out your country, your IP address is sent to ipinfo.io (or ipapi.co if that fails) over an encrypted connection. Visits by our own staff are marked so they don't count as readers.

We set three cookies of our own. None of them tracks you.

We also keep your settings in your browser's local storage - theme, font size, the dyslexia-friendly font, your answer to our cookie banner, which service you last logged in with, and a few editor settings. These never leave your device.

When ads are shown, Google sets its own cookies, and its consent message stores the choice you make in a cookie too - see Advertising below.

We show ads through Google AdSense to every reader who does not browse ad-free. Whether they are based on tracking you is your choice:

• In the EEA, the UK and Switzerland, Google asks for your consent first, through its consent message. If you decline, you still see ads, but not ones based on tracking you. Google may still use cookies to limit how often you see the same ad and to count ads shown, but only where you have allowed it.
• Everywhere else, our own cookie banner asks. Accept and ads may be personalised; decline, or don't answer, and you still see ads, just not ones based on tracking you.
• You can change your choice at any time with the "Privacy and cookie settings" link at the bottom of every page, or in your preferences. The link appears while ads are shown to you.

Third-party vendors, including Google, use cookies to serve ads based on your prior visits to this and other websites. Google's use of advertising cookies enables it and its partners to serve ads to you based on those visits. You can opt out of personalised advertising in Google's Ads Settings, and read how Google uses information from sites that use its services.

Readers who browse ad-free never load any ad code.

We don't sell your data. These services receive some of it:

• Amazon Web Services hosts the site, its database and uploaded images in Ireland (EU), and sends our emails.
• Google serves the ads - see Advertising above.
• OpenAI receives the text of each new or edited comment to check it for abuse.
• ipinfo.io and ipapi.co receive IP addresses to look up countries for analytics.
• Discord: our editorial Discord server is notified about articles and kitbashes, including the names of their authors and creators.
• Your browser's push service (for example Google or Mozilla) delivers notifications if you turn them on.

Google, OpenAI, ipinfo.io and ipapi.co are based in the United States, so the data they receive leaves the UK and the EU.

Some content is loaded straight from other services, which means your browser shares your IP address with them: fonts from Google Fonts (and cdnfonts.com if you turn on the dyslexia-friendly font), item images from Wowhead, YouTube videos embedded in articles (in YouTube's privacy-enhanced mode), and profile pictures from Google or Discord.

• Your account and what you add: until you delete them or your account.
• Page-view analytics and newsletter open and click records: 3 years.
• Newsletter: if you unsubscribe, we keep your address marked as unsubscribed so that we never email it again.
• Server logs: 7 days. Database backups: 7 days.
• Emails to privacy@housing-herald.com: a copy is kept for 30 days while it is passed on to our team's inbox, and then deleted.
• Contact messages and comment reports: until we delete them. We have not yet set a fixed period for these.

You can delete your account from your preferences, choosing one of two options:

• Anonymous: your profile is deleted, along with your API tokens. Your comments stay but are shown as written by a deleted user, and kitbashes you made are credited to "Anonymous".
• Keep my name: your profile picture, banner, bio, short description and links are removed, along with your API tokens, your calendar feed link and the link to your Discord account, but your name stays on what you wrote.

Either way, your calendar events and RSVPs, contact messages and reports are deleted, and any newsletter subscription is unlinked from your account (unsubscribe separately if you want the emails to stop). At the moment, deleting your account does not yet remove your favourites, shopping list, notification subscriptions or uploaded profile images - we are fixing this, and until then you can ask us to remove them at privacy@housing-herald.com.

Logging in also gave Battle.net, Google or Discord a record of your permission. The account-deleted page explains how to remove that permission with each service.

You can ask us for a copy of your data, to correct it, to delete it, or to stop using it for a particular purpose - email privacy@housing-herald.com. We rely on your consent for personalised advertising where the law requires it (given or refused through our cookie banner or Google's consent message) and for the newsletter, and you can withdraw either at any time. When you use your account, we rely on providing the service you signed up for. For analytics and comment moderation, we rely on our legitimate interest in running and protecting the site.

If you are unhappy with how we handle your data, you can complain to your local data protection authority - in the UK, that is the Information Commissioner's Office.

Housing Herald is not aimed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect their data.

When this policy changes, we update the date at the top. If what we do with cookies changes, our cookie banner appears again so you can make a fresh choice.