Who we are
We are a group of enthusiasts who have created this website to share information and to sell products and services for the exotic pet industry and more specifically the hobby of collecting, keeping and/or breeding of tarantulas / bird spiders.
We are home based hobbyists based in Centurion, Gauteng, South Africa. Our website address is: https://www.mymonsters.co.za.
What personal data we collect and why we collect it
Comments
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 with 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.
Media
If you upload images to the website, you should avoid uploading images with embedded location data (EXIF GPS) included. Visitors to the website can download and extract any location data from images on the website.
Contact forms
When using any of the forms on this website, it is necessary to force the use of certain fields like your names, contact numbers and email address as well as other information that would help us verify that you are a legitimate human being and helps us prevent and avoid spam from bots and other invasive, web crawling or spoofing software. This information may be harvested for use in our own marketing initiatives or to contact visitors, users or customers of our website for communication related to this website and it’s services only.
We will not and do not share your information with any third parties, except when using a third party service like MailChimp (Who have very strict information usage policies of their own in order to protect your information) – in order to better manage communications to and from our website, visitors and customers.
Cookies
What is a cookie? Cookies are small files which are stored on a user’s computer. They are designed to hold a modest amount of data specific to a particular client and website, and can be accessed either by the web server or the client computer.
If you leave a comment on our site you may opt-in to saving your name, email address and website in cookies. These are for your convenience so that you do not have to fill in your details again when you leave another comment. These cookies will last for one year.
If you have an account and you log in to this site, we will set a temporary cookie to determine if your browser accepts cookies. This cookie contains no personal data and is discarded when you close your browser.
When you log in, we will also set up several cookies to save your login information and your screen display choices. Login cookies last for two days, and screen options cookies last for a year. If you select “Remember Me”, your login will persist for two weeks. If you log out of your account, the login cookies will be removed.
If you edit or publish an article, an additional cookie will be saved in your browser. This cookie includes no personal data and simply indicates the post ID of the article you just edited. It expires after 1 day.
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.
Analytics
We make use of google analytics to track various user trends, which assists us in improving the user experience of our website and also to ensure that any marketing initiative we undertake are working as effectively as possible.
Who we share your data with
At this point, the only other party who will have access to your information is the MailChimp email marketing service, which is world class and has very strict policies on how to use information gathered for use in email marketing campaigns. It’s so strict, that if we delete your info by mistake, we can’t even put it back unless you give us permission.
How long we retain your data
If you leave a comment, the comment and its metadata are retained indefinitely. This is so we can recognize and approve any follow-up comments automatically instead of holding them in a moderation queue.
For users that register on our website (if any), we also store the personal information they provide in their user profile. All users can see, edit, or delete their personal information at any time (except they cannot change their username). Website administrators can also see and edit that information.
What rights you have over your data
If you have an account on this site, or have left comments, you can request to receive an exported file of the personal data we hold about you, including any data you have provided to us. You can also request that we erase any personal data we hold about you. This does not include any data we are obliged to keep for administrative, legal, or security purposes.
If a user is suspected of any illegal or dodgy behaviour that would put our website or it’s users, visitors or customers at risk, we reserve the right to block that user and edit any of that user’s user information or access details in order to prevent them from any further use of the website indefinitely or until we feel that there is no further risk from the user in question.
Where we send your data
Visitor comments may be checked through an automated spam detection service. Names and Email addresses will be sent to MailChimp in order to securely save and use this information for our marketing initiative via the MailChimp service.
Your contact information
This information is used solely for getting in touch with you when necessary or via our marketing initiatives.
Additional information
How we protect your data
We make use of various third party software plugins (iThemes Security) to ensure the safest use of this website for our visitors as possible. We are not able to prevent any and all attacks from hackers or dubious sources seeking to abuse that information, but we do have security systems in place to protect your information as best we know how.
What data breach procedures we have in place
Our security plugins will usually block and prevent a malicious user from accessing any sensitive user information. However, should there be a serious breach, we will send out communications at our earliest opportunity to all registered account users informing them of the breach and that steps should be taken immediately to change passwords or safeguard any information that could be a threat to them.
What third parties we receive data from
None at this point.
What automated decision making and/or profiling we do with user data
None at this point as all this would be done manually when and if required.
Industry regulatory disclosure requirements
All information in this website is given freely except where certain documents containing valuable information may be offered for sale and not for free.