Disclosure and Privacy Policy

Disclosure

This policy is valid from August 1, 2016, and last edited on May 22, 2018.

Trimm Travels is a personal blog written and edited by me, Heather Trimm, owner. For questions about this blog, please contact me by using the Contact Page .

Unless otherwise noted, all photos on this site are taken by me, the site owner, and all rights are reserved. If in a rare occurrence, a photo not taken by me is posted on this site, the owner of that photo will be fully credited.

This blog sometimes accepts forms of cash advertising, sponsorship, paid insertions or other forms of compensation.

This blog abides by word of mouth marketing standards. I believe in honesty of relationship, opinion, and identity. The compensation received may influence the advertising content, topics or posts made in this blog. That content, advertising space or post will be clearly identified as paid or sponsored content.

I may be compensated to provide opinions on products, services, websites and various other topics through this blog. Even though I may receive compensation for my posts or advertisements, I always give my honest opinions, findings, beliefs, or experiences on those topics or products. The views and opinions expressed on this blog are purely my own. Any product claim, statistic, quote or other representation about a product or service should be verified with the manufacturer, provider or party in question.

This blog does not contain content which might present a conflict of interest.

Trimm Travels LLC is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to amazon.com and affiliated sites.”

Privacy Policy

Trimm Travels is committed to safeguarding your privacy. Contact us by using the Contact Page if you have any questions or problems regarding the use of your Personal Data and we will gladly assist you.

By using this site and/or our services, you consent to the Processing of your Personal Data as described in this Privacy Policy.

Table of Contents

1. Definitions used in this Policy
2. Data protection principles we follow
3. What rights do you have regarding your Personal Data
4. What Personal Data we gather about you
5. How we use your Personal Data
6. Who else has access to your Personal Data
7. How we secure your data
8. Information about cookies
9. Contact information

Definitions

Personal Data – any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person.
Processing – any operation or set of operations which is performed on Personal Data or on sets of Personal Data.
Data subject – a natural person whose Personal Data is being Processed.
Child – a natural person under 16 years of age.
We/us (either capitalized or not) – Trimm Travels travel blog (https://trimmtravels.com, www.trimmtravels.com or just trimmtravels.com) and its owner.

Data Protection Principles

We promise to follow the following data protection principles:

• Processing is lawful, fair, transparent. Our Processing activities have lawful grounds. We always consider your rights before Processing Personal Data. We will provide you information regarding Processing upon request.
• Processing is limited to the purpose. Our Processing activities fit the purpose for which Personal Data was gathered.
• Processing is done with minimal data. We only gather and Process the minimal amount of Personal Data required for any purpose.
• Processing is limited with a time period. We will not store your personal data for longer than needed.
• We will do our best to ensure the accuracy of data.
• We will do our best to ensure the integrity and confidentiality of data.

Data Subject’s Rights

The Data Subject has the following rights:

1. Right to Information – meaning you have to right to know whether your Personal Data is being processed; what data is gathered, from where it is obtained and why and by whom it is processed.
2. Right to Access – meaning you have the right to access the data collected from/about you. This includes your right to request and obtain a copy of your Personal Data gathered.
3. Right to Rectification – meaning you have the right to request rectification or erasure of your Personal Data that is inaccurate or incomplete.
4. Right to Erasure – meaning in certain circumstances you can request for your Personal Data to be erased from our records.
5. Right to Restrict Processing – meaning where certain conditions apply, you have the right to restrict the Processing of your Personal Data.
6. Right to Object to Processing – meaning in certain cases you have the right to object to Processing of your Personal Data, for example in the case of direct marketing.
7. Right to Object to Automated Processing – meaning you have the right to object to automated Processing, including profiling; and not to be subject to a decision based solely on automated Processing. This right you can exercise whenever there is an outcome of the profiling that produces legal effects concerning or significantly affecting you.
8. Right to Data Portability – you have the right to obtain your Personal Data in a machine-readable format or if it is feasible, as a direct transfer from one Processor to another.
9. Right to Lodge a Complaint – in the event that we refuse your request under the Rights of Access, we will provide you with a reason as to why. If you are not satisfied with the way your request has been handled please contact us.
10. Right for the Help of Supervisory Authority – meaning you have the right for the help of a supervisory authority and the right for other legal remedies such as claiming damages.
11. Right to Withdraw Consent – you have the right withdraw any given consent for Processing of your Personal Data.

Data We Gather

Information you have provided us with
This might be your e-mail address, name, billing address, home address etc – mainly information that is necessary for delivering you a product/service or to enhance your customer experience with us. We save the information you provide us with in order for you to comment or perform other activities on the website. This information includes, for example, your name and e-mail address.

Information automatically collected about you
This includes information that is automatically stored by cookies and other session tools. For example, your shopping cart information, your IP address, your shopping history (if there is any) etc. This information is used to improve your customer experience. When you use our services or look at the contents of our website, your activities may be logged.

Information from our partners
We gather information from our trusted partners with confirmation that they have legal grounds to share that information with us. This is either information you have provided them directly or that they have gathered about you on other legal grounds. (We currently do not gather information in this way from any partners. Should this change in the future, we will disclose and update that information here.)

Publicly available information
We might gather information about you that is publicly available.

How We Use Your Personal Data

We use your Personal Data in order to:

• provide our service to you. This includes, for example, registering your account; providing you with other products and services that you have requested; providing you with promotional items at your request and communicating with you in relation to those products and services; communicating and interacting with you; notifying you of changes to any services.
• enhance your customer experience
• fulfill an obligation under law or contract

We use your Personal Data on legitimate grounds and/or with your Consent.

On the grounds of entering into a contract or fulfilling contractual obligations, we Process your Personal Data for the following purposes:

• to identify you
• to provide you a service or to send/offer you a product
• to communicate either for sales or invoicing
• to get back in touch with you after you have first contacted us

On the ground of legitimate interest, we Process your Personal Data for the following purposes:

• to send you personalized offers (from us and/or our carefully selected partners)
• to administer and analyze our client base (purchasing behavior and history) in order to improve the quality, variety, and availability of products/ services offered/provided
• to conduct questionnaires concerning client satisfaction

As long as you have not informed us otherwise, we consider offering you products/services that are similar or same to your purchasing history/browsing behavior to be our legitimate interest.

With your consent we Process your Personal Data for the following purposes:

• to send you newsletters and campaign offers (from us and/or our carefully selected partners)
• for other purposes we have asked your consent for

We Process your Personal Data in order to fulfill obligation rising from the law and/or use your Personal Data for options provided by law. We reserve the right to anonymize Personal Data gathered and to use any such data. We will use data outside the scope of this Policy only when it is anonymized. We save your billing information and other information gathered about you for as long as needed for accounting purposes or other obligations deriving from the law, but not longer than 26 months.

We might process your Personal Data for additional purposes that are not mentioned here but are compatible with the original purpose for which the data was gathered. To do this, we will ensure that:

• the link between purposes, context, and nature of Personal Data is suitable for further Processing
• the further Processing would not harm your interests and
• there would be an appropriate safeguard for Processing

We will inform you of any further Processing and purposes.

Who Else Can Access Your Personal Data

Third Parties

We do not share your Personal Data with strangers. Personal Data about you is in some cases provided to our trusted partners in order to either make providing the service to you possible or to enhance your customer experience. We share your data with:

• Google Analytics: We use this third party to measure traffic on our website. We do this to find out things such as the number of visitors to the various parts of the site. This information is only processed in a way which does not identify anyone. We do not make and do not allow Google to make, any attempt to find out the identities of those visiting our website. If we do want to collect personally identifiable information through our website, we will be upfront about this. We will make it clear when we collect personal information and will explain what we intend to do with it. Google has their own Privacy Policy which you can review here. If you’d like to opt out of tracking by Google Analytics, visit the Google Analytics opt-out page.
• WordPress: We use WordPress.org to publish this blog and allow comments on our site. WordPress requires visitors who want to post a comment to enter a name and email address.
  • Data Collected: 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, outbound link clicks, referring URLs, 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.For more information about how WordPress processes data, please see the WordPress.org Privacy Policy.
  • Jetpack: In addition to the above, we use Jetpack to allow you to follow response comments after you have commented on the site. If you opt-in to follow the comments, Jetpack stores your name, email address, site URL (if provided via the comment form), timestamp, and IP address.
  • Gravatar: 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.
• MailChimp: We use this third party email service to deliver our weekly updates (sometimes referred to as a “newsletter”) and other correspondence. We gather statistics around email opening and click-throughs within the emails to help us monitor and improve our updates. For more information, please see MailChimp’s Privacy Policy.

Our Processing Partners:

• SiteGround, our web hosting provider, is a data processor. They own the servers where our customers’ data is stored, so they also have access to this data. SiteGround, as a web hosting provider, may occasionally need to process the data, whether manually (fixing a problem somewhere) or automatically (creating backups). You can read SiteGround’s full Privacy Policy here.
• SurveyMonkey: We use SurveyMonkey to send out our annual reader surveys and other isolated surveys. They process data such as IP addresses, email addresses (when optionally provided), survey patterns, opening of the surveys as well aggregation of the data you submit in the survey itself. For more information please read SurveyMonkey’s Privacy Policy here.
• PromoSimple: We use PromoSimple to host occasional giveaways. They process data such as IP addresses to monitor entry activity, email addresses when provided and the data you submit as part of the giveaway requirements. For more information read PromoSimple’s Privacy Policy here.

Advertising and Affiliate Partners:

Some of our advertising partners and/or affiliate programs may use cookies and web beacons on our site. Trimm Travels LLC has no access to or control over cookies that are used by third-party advertisers and affiliates. Some of the affiliate or referral programs we use operate by use of a referral link. When the link is clicked, any purchases made by a visitor can be tracked back to Trimm Travels and its owner in order to provide us payment for the referral. Our advertising partners/affiliate programs include:

• Amazon Associates: (Affiliate Partner and Native Site Ads.) Trimm Travels LLC is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to amazon.com and affiliated sites. You can read Amazon’s Privacy Policy here.
• Google Adsense: (Site Ad Provider) Google Adsense provides ads on Trimm Travels travel blog. Ads are tailored to the individual and do provide a means for us to earn money based on ads clicked on and pages viewed. Google AdSense uses what is called a DoubleClick Cookie. A DoubleClick cookie is a cookie that gets placed on a user’s device when the user clicks on an ad on a partner’s website. Google’s use of the DoubleClick cookie enables it and its partners to serve ads to your users based on their visit to your sites and/or other sites on the internet. Users may opt out of the use of the DoubleClick cookie for interest-based advertising by visiting Ad Settings. (Alternatively, you can opt out of a third-party vendor’s use of cookies for interest-based advertising by visiting aboutads.info) You can read Google Adsense’s Privacy Policy here.
• CJ Affiliates: (Affiliate Partner) Trimm Travels LLC is a participant with CJ Affiliates which is an affiliate network platform that provides a means for sites to earn commission by linking to affiliated sites and products. You can read CJ Affiliate’s Privacy Policy here.
• Awin: (Affiliate Partner) Trimm Travels LLC is a participant with Awin which is an affiliate network platform that provides a means for sites to earn commission by linking to affiliated sites and products. You can read Awin’s Privacy Policy here.
• Rakuten Marketing: (Affiliate Partner) Trimm Travels LLC is a participant with Rakuten Marketing which is an affiliate network platform that provides a means for sites to earn commission by linking to affiliated sites and products. You can read Rakuten Marketing’s Privacy Policy here.
• Booking [dot] com: (Affiliate Partner) Trimm Travels LLC is a participant with Booking [dot] com which is an affiliate program that provides a means for sites to earn commission by linking to affiliated sites and products. You can read Booking [dot] com’s Privacy Policy here.
• VigLink: (Affiliate Partner) Trimm Travels LLC is a participant with VigLink which is an affiliate network platform that provides a means for sites to earn commission by linking to affiliated sites and products. You can read VigLink’s Privacy Policy here.

Note: Each advertising partner and affiliate program has its own privacy policy in place. You should consult the respective privacy policies of these third-party ad servers for more detailed information on their practices as well as for instructions about how to opt-out of certain practices.

We do our best to only work with third parties that will keep your Personal Data safe but can not make any guarantees in this respect. Again, you should consult the respective privacy policies of third-party advertisement partners and affiliate programs for more information on their practices and for instructions on how to opt out of certain practices.

We disclose your Personal Data to third parties or public officials when we are legally obliged to do so. We might disclose your Personal Data to third parties if you have consented to it or if there are other legal grounds for it.

A Note on Links to Other Websites:

Trimm Travels contains links to outside websites. Once you have left our website, be aware that each individual website will have its own privacy policy and terms and conditions that are not governed by the Trimm Travels Privacy Policy. We have no control over how an outside website will use information that you provide. Therefore, proceed with caution, and only provide information to outside websites once you have read and understood their privacy policy and terms and conditions.

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.

An example of embedded content on Trimm Travels includes (but is not limited to) our YouTube videos.

How We Secure Your Data

We do our best to keep your Personal Data safe.  We use safe protocols for communication and transferring data (such as HTTPS). We use anonymizing and pseudonymizing where suitable.

SSL Certificate: A service provided and installed through our web host, SiteGround. Hyper Text Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS) is the secure version of HTTP, the protocol over which data is sent between your browser and the website you are connected to. The “S” at the end of HTTPS stands for “Secure” meaning all communication between your browser and the website are encrypted.

We monitor our systems for possible vulnerabilities and attacks in the following ways:

SG Site Scanner: A service provided through our web host, SiteGround, scans Trimm Travels daily for malware and other possible vulnerabilities and attacks.

Akismet: This anti-spam plugin is used on the Trimm Travels website to protect against spam.

Two-Factor Identity Authentication: Trimm Travels uses this security feature where offered. A good example of this is with our email service MailChimp.

Even though we try our best we can not guarantee the security of information. However, we promise to notify suitable authorities of data breaches. We will also notify you if there is a threat to your rights or interests. We will do everything we reasonably can to prevent security breaches and to assist authorities should any breaches occur.

If you have an account with us, note that you have to keep your username and password secret. (Please Note: We currently do not require the use of accounts on our site. If this changes in the future, this information will be updated here.)

Children

We do not intend to collect or knowingly collect information from children. We do not target children with our services.

Cookies and Other Technologies We Use

We use cookies and/or similar technologies to analyze customer behavior, administer the website, track users’ movements, and to collect information about users. This is done in order to personalize and enhance your experience with us.

A cookie is a tiny text file stored on your computer. Cookies store information that is used to help make sites work. Only we can access the cookies created by our website. You can control your cookies at the browser level. Choosing to disable cookies may hinder your use of certain functions.

Advertising partners and other third parties may also use cookies, scripts and/or web beacons to track visitors to our site in order to display advertisements and other useful information. Such tracking is done directly by the third parties through their own servers and is subject to their own privacy policies.

We use cookies for the following purposes:

• Necessary Cookies: These cookies are required for you to be able to use some important features on our website, such as logging in. These cookies don’t collect any personal information.
• Functionality Cookies: These cookies provide functionality that makes using our service more convenient and makes providing more personalized features possible. For example, they might remember your name and e-mail in comment forms so you don’t have to re-enter this information next time when commenting.
• Analytics Cookies: These cookies are used to track the use and performance of our website and services
• Advertising Cookies: These cookies are used to deliver advertisements that are relevant to you and to your interests. In addition, they are used to limit the number of times you see an advertisement. They are usually placed on the website by advertising networks with the website operator’s permission. These cookies remember that you have visited a website and this information is shared with other organizations such as advertisers. Often targeting or advertising cookies will be linked to site functionality provided by the other organization.

You can remove cookies stored in your computer via your browser settings. Alternatively, you can control some 3rd party cookies by using a privacy enhancement platform such as optout.aboutads.info or youronlinechoices.com. For more information about cookies, visit allaboutcookies.org.

Contact Information

If you have any questions or comments about this Privacy Policy, please email Trimm Travels via the Contact Page.

Changes to this Privacy Policy

We reserve the right to make changes to this Privacy Policy.
Last modified on May 22, 2018.

Disclaimer

1. Information on this site is accurate to the best of my knowledge at the time I visited the destination, ate the food, or used the product. All advice and information on this site are recommendations only and are to be taken at your own risk. Trimm Travels LLC and its owner are not responsible for any changes in information that might occur after the publishing of a post.

2. Trimm Travels LLC is not a travel agency and is not responsible for actual travel. All travel plans and actual travel are done at your own risk.

3. If there are any questions about this you may contact me at heather [at] trimmtravels [dot] com.