Privacy Policy and Cookies

for www.portuguesemusic.info


Table of contents

1. Definition of terms
2. Scope of this document
3. Advertising and information collected
4. General privacy policy of this site
5. External links
6. GDPR statement
7. Cookies and how to control them
8. Other cookies set by external websites
9. All legal pages
10. Contact information


1. DEFINITION OF TERMS

"This site", "the site", "we", "us" or "I" means www.portuguesemusic.info. It is the same thing as ListenToPortugueseMusic.com, which is an alias name which points to the same content.

Both are owned by Ian Stobie, who is a blogger based in the UK. The site is legally based in the UK and obeys the law of England and Wales.

"You" are a visitor to this site, someone browsing the content.

This document sets out the Privacy policy of www.portuguesemusic.info and describes the information collected and cookies set. It should be read in conjunction with the Terms of Use

2. SCOPE OF THIS DOCUMENT

Note that if you post public comments or participate in the forum, also known the "discussion area" you also need to read two additional documents. These are available at Comments and Forum Privacy Policy and Comments and Forum Terms of Use. This is because the provision of a comments and forum facility require the collection of more information as a necessary part of providing the service. If you don't post comments or participate in the forum this extra information is not collected. The general Privacy Policy and Cookies statement on this page, which applies to all users of the site, is all you need.

3. ADVERTISING AND INFORMATION COLLECTED

This site carries no advertising. It is not monetized, gets no commissions and contains no affiliate links. Because its purpose is not to trade, it doesn't need your contact details or personally identifiable information. At this time it doesn't have a newsletter.

4. PRIVACY POLICY OF THIS SITE

I am not remotely interested in violating your privacy. This site collects the minimum information needed to operate. It mostly doesn't need to know who its visitors or users are. It generally doesn't need and doesn't keep your personal information.

However, there are three occasions when it does or might - these are detailed in the GDPR statement below under three legitimate interest purposes of providing you with information, ensuring necessary security and communicating with you.

There are links on this site that take you elsewhere. For example, if you click on a video link you are likely to be dealing with YouTube, owned by Google. I may also provide links to music streaming services such as Deezer and Spotify, and song lyrics sites such as Musixmatch. These generally trade and sell adverts but they are nothing to do with me, apart from the link. They have their own Terms of Service and Privacy policies (see under Cookies below for more details). I'm not responsible for them, and don't receive money from them.

6. GDPR STATEMENT

Neither www.portugusemusic.info nor Ian Stobie is voluntarily either a "controller" or "processor" of data under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) that came into force in May 2018. We don't want your information! We are not a commercial entity.

However, much as we'd like to avoid having any of your personal data, Internet technology means we sometimes have some thrust into our unwilling hands. In these cases we are the data controller, and the lawful basis we have for processing your data is called Legitimate Interest. The purposes for which we might have a legitimate interest in processing your data fall under three headings - (1) providing information to you, (2) security - both ours and yours, and (3) communicating with you.

Processing is necessary to provide you with information from this web site and ensuring necessary security while doing so. You IP address, which may be personal to you and which contains some crude geographic location information, is logged temporarily by the web server and other infrastructure we use. This is to serve information to you, ensure adequate performance wherever you are located and protect our web site and the infrastructure we use from unusual patterns of activity and cyber attacks.

Third party partners involved in this are Ghost.org, the web hosting arm of the non-profit Ghost Foundation headquartered in Singapore, and Cloudflare, a US-based corporation that provides the global content delivery network we use. Both provide well above average levels of security for any data they hold. Ghost.org is our data processor under the GDPR for any of personal data we may hold for purposes connected with operating the site outlined above. Ghost stores this data within the EU and complies with EU rules.

The third purpose where we have the lawful basis of Legitimate Interest for processing your data is to communicate with you about any issue that you raise with us or which follows from some other interaction between us. The sort of data collected might include names, contact details and the content of any emails. The partner operating the email account for this site at the moment is Aluminati Network Group, based in Suffolk in the UK.

Note that if you leave a public comment or participate in the discussion forum this use comes under different terms of service and a different privacy policy applies. See the links to All Legal Pages below.

The partner providing the comments and forum service is Talkyard, based in Sweden. The legitimate interest we have in processing your data falls under the same three headings - (1) providing information to you, (2) security and (3) communicating with you.

7. COOKIES AND HOW TO CONTROL THEM

This site does use cookies. Cookies are small text files that are saved on YOUR machine and that provide a way for the web sites you visit to remember things. For example, my government (UK) like all EU governments compels me to pop up an annoying notice asking you about cookies. The best way to prevent this notice popping up again and again on every page once you have clicked on it to say you Agree is for my site to get your browser to place a cookie on your device. (If you don't say Agree it won't place a cookie on your device - and the message will keep popping up because it's a legal requirement to get your consent!)

Apart from this annoyance the site should basically keep working without cookies, so you could try turning them off. The main drawback might be bandwidth usage going up, because with no cookies to tell it what it has already done it might do it again. So it might load images, fonts and other bulky files more than it needs to, which would also slow it down. So by turning the whole lot off you make the website dumb.

Having cookies set up by your browser and stored on your device is better than the alternatives. That's why it's the standard technique. Cookies are better from a privacy point of view than having web sites store store information about you, your machine and your browsing habits somewhere else, outside of your control.

Since cookies reside on your machine and are set by your browser you can inspect them, delete any or all of them and indeed tell your browser not to set them in the first place. This web site itself only uses cookies, and doesn't try and remember you some other way.

Exactly how you control cookies depends on the browser you are using. On many modern desktop browsers a quick way to find them is to point your mouse to the left of the address bar. If there's a green lock symbol then hovering over it should produce the words "Site info" or something similar under your cursor. Clicking should produce various security information including the heading "Cookies", which you can click on to see how many cookies the site is setting, examine the content of the cookies (usually incomprehensible gobbledygook) and allow or block them.

More global preferences for all web sites can be controlled from you brower's menu system.

For example, for Vivaldi it is: Tools / Settings / Privacy / Cookies.

For Firefox: Tools / Options / Privacy & Security / History
Also Tools / Options / Privacy & Security / Tracking Protection is worth a look.

For Pale Moon: Pale Moon (blue home tab) / Preferences / Privacy / History
Also / Preferences / Privacy / Permissions gets you to a permissions control panel that lets you see and manage every site you have visited that has set cookies.

Android. Varies a lot between devices and versions. One approach is to read up on the principles and then set defaults you are comfortable with from the Setting menu.

This 2019 article on a UK site may help Browser Cookies – An Introductory Guide For All Levels Of Experience. And this US site Cookies & You has more instructions on how to disable cookies in various browsers.

8. OTHER COOKIES SET BY EXTERNAL WEBSITES

This site has no need to set a great many cookies itself, and basically should still work even if you turn most of them off. However it does use external websites to provide various features and services, which are described below. These usually set cookies of their own.

Which cookies are set depend on which pages you visit and which functions you use. I'd recommend leaving at least session cookies (the temporary ones) from the first three entities on this list on. GHOST hosts the site www.portuguesemusic.info. YOUTUBE and CLOUDFLARE increase the usefulness and performance respectively of the site. Session cookies are particularly important if you are connecting from a phone and want to keep bandwidth use low. Without cookies some data may be send again unnecessarily.

GHOST Ghost is an open source project that has written the content management software we use to operate the site. We also use Ghost.org the associated hosting provider owned by Ghost Foundation to host the site. It seems to be able to do this without setting cookies, but will temporarily log all activity as a necessary part of its routine operation and cyber defense.

YOUTUBE - Hosts most of the videos. When you click on a video you in fact link through to YouTube, even if you are viewing in a small window apparently on this site. YouTube is owned by Google, and sets lots of cookies, including ones to manage their advertising. https://policies.google.com/privacy

CLOUDFLARE - This does technical things to make this site much faster than it would otherwise be, and makes it quick from wherever in the world you are accessing the site from. It does this by storing copies of the requested data in multiple locations around the globe - Cloudflare has data centres in 150 cities. So if you are browsing this page in Singapore, Sintra in Portugal or Sidmouth in the UK the response times should be similar. Cloudflare also protects this site from common cyber attacks and keeps the link from it to your computer, tablet or phone secure. https://www.cloudflare.com/security-policy/

DEEZER - It's a French-based music streaming service. Currently I'm only using it on a few posts, where it has content that YouTube lacks. The drawback is that unless you are already a Deezer member you only get a limited clip. Deezer sets session cookies and collects data to bill subscribers. https://www.deezer.com/legal/personal-datas

GOOGLE TRANSLATE - Offers machine translation of text on this site into a variety of languages. It sets cookies, checks your location and does other things detailed in Google Privacy & Terms.

FREEFIND - Provides Search, Word Index and Site Map. Sets cookies and runs ads from its site, should you use these features. https://www.freefind.com/policy.html

STATCOUNTER - Sets cookies to track visitor behaviour on the site, which is useful when developing it. But it doesn't make much difference to the results if some people block it. This information is aggregated and anonymous. Statcounter is based in the Republic of Ireland. https://statcounter.com/about/legal/#privacy

OTHER GOOGLE SERVICES Currently this site is not using Google Analytics.

TALKYARD - Talkyard provides the public comments and discussion forum service used by this site. It is based in Sweden, complies with EU law and has the best GDPR support of any forum software I could find. Blocking their cookies shouldn't matter unless you want to leave a comment or participate in the forum. There's a whole separate Comments and Forum Privacy Policy, and Comments and Forum Terms of Use if you do - see links below. This is because a discussion function will collect more information, including comment text and IP addresses used for moderation.

9. ALL LEGAL PAGES

Privacy Policy and Cookies (this page, applies to all users of this site)
Terms of Use (applies to all users of this site)
Comments and Forum Privacy Policy
Comments and Forum Terms of Use.
Community Guidelines

10. CONTACT INFORMATION

You can contact Ian Stobie by email at portuguesemusic@cantab.net

This page last updated 17 September 2019


Fed up reading?
Listen to this song instead.

Isabel Silvestre "A gente não lê" (The people can't read)

Other versions and what the lyrics mean: Rui Veloso and Isabel Silvestre on two kinds of literacy