Last updated: May 27, 2022
Who we are
Our website address is: https://spearblade.com. We are a platform or website to discuss games and more specifically, gaming hardware. We care for your privacy. Here is how we collect, handle, manage, and protect your data.
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 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
We have contact forms available on the website. Any data submitted through these contact forms is kept on our hosting server. This data is not shared with any third-party, used for any marketing purposes, or sold to anyone. The purpose of this data is limited to the intent of the form in question. For example, the “Contact Us” form is for contacting the team at Spearblade. If you fill this form with your information, we might or might not use your details to get back to you, solve a query, provide support, etc.
The most popular usage of the contact form is by gamers looking for troubleshooting after reading one of our technical articles or guides, and in response, we try to provide our best attempt at troubleshooting for them.
Apart from the Contact Us form, we also have a form for people who wish to contribute (as authors) to Spearblade. This data is used to facilitate communication, understand proficiency and motivation, and to approve/reject/interview potential writers/contributors for the platform.
Your contact data is safe with us.
Cookies
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 visit our login page, 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 tracking your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that website.
Analytics
We use Google Analytics code on our website to track user behavior and monitor website traffic statistics. This data includes no personal information. The data includes things such as the number of visitors in a day, the graph of country-wise breakdown of the traffic, the graph of device used by the traffic, and so on.
All this information is utilized to improve and grow the platform by understanding what works best, how do users interact with our content, and more.
We do NOT have Facebook Pixel or any other third-party tracking or analytics component apart from Google Site Kit – a suite of Google-built tools meant for webmasters. This suite includes four components:
- Google Analytics – to find out about user behavior on the website.
- Google PageSpeed Insights – to find out website loading speed issues before they can hamper user experience.
- Google AdSense – to run ads on our website in order to monetize our content.
- Google Search Console – to help us understand how our website performs on Google search.
Who we share your data with
We do not share your data with any company, business, agency, or organization. We have Google Site Kit installed on our website which allows Google to study user behavior, serve ads, test page loading speeds, and gather Google search related data automatically.
Google Ads
Google uses cookies to help serve the ads it displays on the websites of its partners, such as websites displaying Google ads or participating in Google certified ad networks. When users visit a Google partner’s website, a cookie may be dropped on that end user’s browser.
- Third party vendors, including Google, use cookies to serve ads based on a user’s prior visits to your website or other websites.
- Google’s use of advertising cookies enables it and its partners to serve ads to our users based on their visit to the platform and/or other sites on the Internet.
- Users may opt out of personalized advertising by visiting Ads Settings. Users can also opt out of a third-party vendor’s use of cookies for personalized advertising by visiting www.aboutads.info.
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.
Where we send your data
Visitor comments are checked through an automated spam detection service called Akismet.
Contact information
If you wish to contact us regarding anything mentioned in this document or any other query whatsoever, kindly use the “Contact Us” page to get in touch.