Welcome to the privacy policy for the Damien Lamar website (damienlamar.com) and the Damien Lamar Newsletter. This policy spells out how we use your personal information when you visit our website or sign up to receive our email newsletter.

Two core commitments on user privacy and data protection

Before we get to the details, you should know that we have two core commitments on user privacy and data protection:

1.  We will never sell, rent, distribute, or make public your personal information.

2.  We will contact you directly only if we have something meaningful and relevant to share with you.

Now, let’s get on with the particulars.

Who we are

The Damien Lamar website (www.damienlamar.com) is the official website of author Damien Lamar. The website offers information on his books, articles, and videos about work, business, and life that he finds worth sharing.

The Damien Lamar Newsletter is an email newsletter, usually sent once or twice a month, that features ideas, tools, book recommendations, short videos, and other items of interest to readers. The newsletter, which is free of charge and free of advertising, is distributed by email only to individuals who have specifically requested a subscription.

Data processing for the Damien Lamar website and newsletter is controlled by ProfessorClock Media, a company that helps authors develop websites and other media platforms, to assist in music production, designing and developing the website and the newsletter.

Data we collect when you visit our website and why we collect it

Cookies.  Like most websites, ours uses cookies. A cookie is a small data file stored on your computer or device that holds information about your prior use of a particular website. We do not store personally identifiable information in the cookies that we create, but we do use encrypted information from these cookies to improve your experience on the website. For example, cookies help us know if you have already subscribed to our newsletter, so that when you return to the Damien Lamar website, you will not see an annoying pop-up asking you to subscribe. We also use cookies to gather information — again, aggregated, not individual — on how visitors use the site. For instance, cookies help us understand which pages users visit most often and whether users are receiving error messages from certain pages. Cookies provide the sort of information that helps us improve the site and make it more useful and relevant. That said, if you don’t like cookies, you can set your browser to refuse them, delete them, or warn you each time a cookie is being sent. Just go to the Help menu on your browser.

Site visitation tracking.  Like most websites, ours uses a tool called Google Analytics to track and better understand in the aggregate our users’ interactions with the site. Google Analytics collects technical data about visitors to our site, including geographic location, device, internet browser, and operating system. However, none of this information identifies you personally to us. Google Analytics records your IP address when you browse our site, but Google Analytics does not give that information to us. We use the anonymous aggregate data from Google Analytics to understand how visitors find the site, how many people visit the site, and which pages visitors spend time on and which they ignore. This information helps us improve the design and content of the website.

Personal data we collect when you subscribe to our newsletter and why we collect it

Anyone can subscribe to the Damien Lamar Newsletter by completing a short form on our website. If you choose to subscribe to the newsletter, the personal data you provide is forwarded to MailChimp, a data processor we enlist to distribute the newsletter. We keep a back-up copy of the email subscriber data on our system in case of a data loss or other calamity on the part of our data processor.

In addition to storing the personal information provided by our newsletter subscribers and distributing the newsletter, MailChimp uses tracking technologies called web beacons to tell us when newsletter subscribers have opened our emails or clicked certain links. MailChimp also uses cookies to track when subscribers have visited the website. These web beacons and cookies record subscribers’ email address, IP address, date, and the time associated with each open and click of a newsletter or activity on the website. MailChimp uses this data to give us aggregate information on whether items in the newsletter and on the website were of interest to  subscribers. We use that information to improve the newsletter because we don’t want to send you things you don’t want to read.

As mentioned above, you can set your browser to refuse or delete cookies. To do that, look at your specific browser’s Help menu. As for the web beacons that MailChimp uses, you will need to unsubscribe from the newsletter to avoid those. You can unsubscribe at any time. Or you can email us at mgmt@damienlamar.com to request that you be removed from the list. (When requesting removal, please send your email to us directly from the email account that is subscribed to the newsletter.)

If you subscribe to the newsletter, your personal data will remain in MailChimp’s database for as long as we continue to use MailChimp’s services.

Disclosures of your personal data

As we said at the top, we will not sell, rent, distribute, or make public your personal data. We share data only with MailChimp and ProfessorClock Media, whom we enlist to help us design and manage our website and distribute our email newsletter. We do not allow these third-party service providers to use your personal data for their own purposes, and we permit them to process your personal data only for the purposes we have explained in this policy.

Your legal rights

If the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) applies to you because you are in the European Union, you have certain rights in relation to your personal data, including:

The right to be informed by us about how we use your personal data (that’s what we’re doing now with this privacy policy);

The right of access — that is, a right to request a copy of the personal data we hold about you;

The right to rectification —  that is, a right to make us correct personal data about you that is incomplete or inaccurate;

The right to erasure —  that is, a right to ask us to delete the personal data we have about you.

You can find more information about these and other rights under the GDPR on the GDPR’s official website (https://www.eugdpr.org).

How to contact us about privacy

If you have questions or requests concerning this privacy policy, please email us at mgmt@damienlamar.com or write to us at:  Data Privacy at damienlamar.com.

Changes to this privacy policy

The date of this privacy policy is December 1, 2019. The EU’s General Data Protection Regulation is new, and guidance on best practices for data protection is changing constantly, as is the technology that we all use. You may see updates to this policy in the coming months.