Privacy Policy

1. Who runs this site

The Usual Good is a personal gardening journal written and operated by Heather Brannon in Asheville, North Carolina, United States. In this policy, "I", "me" and "my" mean Heather Brannon, "this site" means theusualgood.com and every page on it, and "you" means the person reading it or writing to me.

I am the controller of the personal information described here. This is one person with a website, not a company with a privacy department, and the person who makes these decisions can be reached directly at heather@theusualgood.com.

This policy does not cover other websites I link to, or the social platforms where I also post. Those are dealt with in section 8 and section 9.

2. The short version

This site was built to collect as little as it reasonably can. In plain terms:

• You can read every page here without giving a name, an email address or anything else.
• There are no ads, no third-party fonts, no embedded social widgets and no tracking pixels.
• There is no comment section, no account, no newsletter form and no checkout on this site.
• The hosting provider keeps ordinary server logs, which include IP addresses, so that pages can be delivered and the site protected from abuse.
• If you email me, I have your address and whatever you wrote, and I keep it so I can reply.
• Nothing is sold, rented, or shared for cross-context behavioural advertising. There is no data broker in this picture.

The rest is the detailed version. If a part of it is unclear, write to me and I will explain it in ordinary words.

3. What is collected

3.1 What you choose to send

The only way to send me anything through this site is to write to heather@theusualgood.com. If you do — with a question, a correction, a permission request, or a note about your own garden — I receive your email address, your name if your mail program includes it, the contents of your message, and any attachment you send.

I never ask for payment details, government identification, health information or any other sensitive category of data on this website, and there is no form here that could collect them.

3.2 What the server records

Like effectively every site on the internet, this one is delivered by a hosting provider whose servers log technical details of each request. Those logs generally contain:

• your IP address, possibly truncated or anonymised depending on the provider's settings;
• the date and time of the request and which page or file was requested;
• the response code and the amount of data sent;
• your browser's user-agent string, which names the browser, its version and your operating system;
• the referring page, if you arrived by a link somewhere else.

These logs are used to serve the site, find errors, and spot abusive traffic such as scraping or denial-of-service attempts. They are not used to build a profile of you, and no attempt is made to work out who any individual reader is.

3.3 Measurement

I am interested in whether a piece was read, not in who read it. Any measurement used on this site is limited to privacy-respecting, aggregate statistics that set no advertising cookies, follow you to no other website, and do not try to identify you. Google Analytics, advertising networks, remarketing tags and conversion pixels are not used here.

4. Cookies and browser storage

This site sets no advertising or tracking cookies and uses no browser storage to follow you between visits or between sites.

Strictly necessary cookies may be set by the hosting provider or its content delivery network for security reasons — filtering malicious traffic, for example, or balancing load. These are needed for the site to work safely and are not used for marketing. You can block or delete cookies in your browser at any time and this site will carry on working normally.

If cookies that are not strictly necessary are ever introduced, your consent will be asked for first and this policy updated before it happens.

5. Why it is used

No automated decision-making that produces legal or similarly significant effects takes place here, and readers are not profiled.

6. Legal bases (UK and EU)

If you are in the United Kingdom or the European Economic Area, the bases relied on under the UK GDPR and the EU GDPR are:

• Legitimate interests — running, securing and improving a small personal site, and answering the people who write to it. The processing is limited and, I think, unsurprising; you may object to it at any time (see section 12).
• Consent — wherever consent is ever asked for, meaning anything beyond what is strictly necessary. You can withdraw it at any time, which does not affect processing already carried out.
• Legal obligation — where information must be kept or handed over to comply with applicable law.

7. Who else sees it

Personal information is not sold, rented or traded. It reaches other parties only in these situations:

• Service providers. The company that hosts this site and the company that carries my email necessarily process information in order to provide those services. They act on instructions and are not permitted to use it for their own purposes.
• Legal requirements. Where disclosure is required by law, or is necessary to establish or defend a legal claim, or to protect someone's safety.
• With your agreement. For example, if you ask me to put you in touch with someone, or agree to have a note of yours quoted on the site.

8. Social platforms

This journal is also posted to social platforms, Facebook among them. Anything you do on those platforms — following a page, liking a post, leaving a comment, sending a direct message — happens under their privacy policies and their data practices, not this one, and I have no control over what they collect or how they use it.

What I see on a platform is what its interface shows me: your public profile, your comment, or your message. If you would rather not deal with a platform at all, email is always an alternative.

To be clear about the direction of travel: no social platform tracking pixel, conversion API, or embedded widget is installed on this website. Visiting this site does not report your visit back to any social network.

9. Links to other sites

Entries sometimes link to other websites — a preserving-safety reference, a native plant society, a public garden. Following one of those links takes you somewhere I do not run and whose privacy practices are its own. It is worth reading their policy if you plan to give them anything.

10. How long it is kept

• Server logs: kept for the short period the hosting provider retains them, typically a matter of days to a few weeks, then deleted or aggregated.
• Email: kept as long as the exchange is useful — usually up to about two years — and then deleted. Correspondence about permissions or a legal matter is kept for as long as the record may be needed.
• Aggregate measurement: retained in non-identifying form, since it no longer relates to an identified person.

You can ask for your correspondence to be deleted sooner, and it will be unless there is a legal reason to keep it, which I would then explain.

11. Where it is processed

I write from the United States, and the hosting and email providers used here process information on servers in the United States and possibly elsewhere. If you write from the United Kingdom or the European Economic Area, your information will be transferred outside it.

Where such transfers require a safeguard, the providers involved rely on mechanisms such as the European Commission's standard contractual clauses, the UK addendum, or an applicable adequacy decision.

12. Your rights

Depending on where you live, you may have the right to:

• ask what personal information I hold about you and get a copy of it;
• have inaccurate information corrected;
• have information deleted;
• restrict or object to certain processing, including processing based on legitimate interests;
• receive information you gave me in a portable format;
• withdraw consent, where the processing relies on it;
• not be discriminated against for exercising any of these rights.

Write to heather@theusualgood.com and say plainly what you want. There is no charge, and I will reply within 30 days — or within 45 days for requests under California law, extendable once where the law allows, in which case I will tell you.

Because there is no account system here, the practical way to verify a request is that it comes from the email address the correspondence is in. If I cannot reasonably connect a request to information I actually hold, I will say so rather than ask you for identification I have no business collecting.

If you are in the UK or EEA and think this has been handled badly, you may complain to your national data protection authority — in the UK, the Information Commissioner's Office. I would rather you came to me first, but that is your right and not conditional on doing so.

13. California residents

Under the California Consumer Privacy Act as amended by the CPRA, and for the twelve months preceding the date of this policy:

• The categories of personal information collected are identifiers (an IP address; an email address if you write) and internet activity information (server log records of pages requested).
• It is collected directly from you, or automatically from your browser when a page is requested.
• It is used for the purposes in section 5, and disclosed only to the service providers in section 7 for those business purposes.
• No personal information is sold or shared as those terms are defined by the CCPA, and none has been in the preceding twelve months. Personal information of minors under 16 is not sold or shared, knowingly or otherwise.
• No sensitive personal information is collected for the purpose of inferring characteristics.

You may exercise your rights to know, delete, correct and opt out by writing to heather@theusualgood.com. An authorised agent may submit a request on your behalf with written permission. Exercising these rights will not get you worse treatment; there is no differentiated service to give.

14. Children

This site is meant for adults and is not directed at children. I do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 13, and no part of this site invites it. If you believe a child has sent me personal information, write to me and it will be deleted.

15. Security

This site is served over HTTPS, so what passes between your browser and the server is encrypted in transit. Accounts connected to the site and its email use strong, unique passwords and two-factor authentication where it is offered.

No website can promise perfect security, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. What I can say is that the amount of personal information held here is deliberately small, which limits the damage any failure could do.

16. Do Not Track and Global Privacy Control

There is no industry agreement on how sites should answer a browser "Do Not Track" signal, so this one does not respond to it specifically — though since no cross-site tracking happens here, the practical result is what a DNT signal asks for.

A Global Privacy Control signal is treated as a valid opt-out of sale or sharing under California law. As nothing is sold or shared, there is nothing for it to switch off.

17. If anything is ever sold here

At the date of this policy this site sells nothing. There is no shop, no checkout, no payment processing and no order data.

If that changes, this policy will be updated before any purchase is possible, to describe what a transaction collects, which payment processor handles it, and how long order records are kept. Payment card details would be handled by the payment provider and would not be stored by me. Terms covering sales, shipping and refunds would be published alongside this policy at the same time.

18. Changes to this policy

This policy will change as the site does. When it changes in a way that matters, the effective date at the top changes with it and a short note at the top of the front page will say so for a while. Continuing to use the site after a change means the current version applies to you.

Earlier versions can be requested by email if you want to compare.

19. How to reach me

Privacy questions, requests under any of the rights above, or an opinion that something here is wrong:

• Email: heather@theusualgood.com
• Written from: Asheville, North Carolina, United States
• Postal address: available by email where a written request genuinely requires one

It is one person answering, so give it a few days.

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