Welcome to BushLife - From Fiscal to Forest

Privacy & Legal Policy

For those that read my first blog post, you’ll know that I was a corporate executive for a long time. What you may not know is that I spent countless hours reading, reviewing and signing thousands of convoluted and boring contracts and leases over the course of my career. Naturally, I decided to do my own Privacy & Legal Policy.

And so I started writing all the typical legal non-sense that no one understands, including the very people that write them and I realized, wait a minute, this is a blog so let’s do this in plain(er) English and try to make a proper page others should model.

Definitions

For simplicity, let’s define a few things:

“I” means Stelios Lazos, Founder and Principal of BushLife.

“BushLife” means a blogging service operating as “BushLife” and reporting any income or expense to a parent company.

“Contributors” means myself, guest authors, any third party contributions of text, photos, or videos, editors, programmers and graphic designers.

Disclosure of Legal Entity & History

BushLife and its visitors are not technically conducting business as BushLife is simply a free service providing information for its readers. There is no monetary transaction. This may change one day should BushLife elect to sell its own product directly.

As an entity, BushLife is wholly owned by a private corporation which has limited liability. This corporation was created around the same time as BushLife and has no prior history.

Limited Use of Information

The content of this site is for informational purposes only and is of the sole opinion of its authors. While all information on the site is considered of good quality and accuracy, to the best of the author(s)’ knowledge and at the time of writing, it is and shall always be considered opinion only.

The reader is to form their own opinions at all times, do their own research and make their own educated decisions. The reader is also to seek their own independent financial, legal and medical advice if and where applicable.

Under no circumstance is BushLife or its contributors liable for any damages direct or indirect in relation to any content contained on this site, our social channels, marketing and electronic communications.

By visiting, reading and/or engaging and sharing our content the reader hereby automatically and irrevocably accepts these policies and holds harmless myself, BushLife and it’s contributors of any warranty and/or legal liability whatsoever of the use of any information contained on this site, our social channels, marketing and electronic communications.

Privacy

This is a very interesting topic these days. I would venture to say that most websites and/or companies are using a templated or blanket policy to address privacy. I would also venture to accurately guess that most people don’t truly know what data is captured and how it is stored. So let’s cover what we do know and realistically address this topic.

Basic Data

While my computer networking days are pre-historic, I do remember the basics and when browsing the internet, you automatically transmit information such as but not limited to country of origin, IP address, browser and device information, etc. Our servers do capture this, but so does every other website on the planet.

Cookies

We use WordPress to create and maintain our site which by the way is the provider of 37% of websites and 60% percent of content management systems in use on the internet today.

WordPress uses cookies to facilitate logins and preferences. It is not intended to “track” our visitors. If this is a concern, you may check WordPress’ cookie policy directly as our policy is by default the same as theirs.

What I do know for a fact is that we DO NOT purposely use cookies to track or gain any information from our visitors nor have we ever modified the WordPress defaults from its standard functions other than plugins we use to gain functionality in the site.

Storing of Information

As already mentioned, our servers will store basic browsing information that is standard across the internet. This facilitates some anonymous traffic information. In addition, if there is information storing in the other headings below, that info will be addressed in its respective category.

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. This is stored on our servers. Visitor comments may be checked through an automated spam detection service.

Subscribers

The only information we may ask of our visitors is their name and email address. This is to facilitate an opt in for those that choose to receive our newsletter. Our newsletter manager is Creative Mail which is an arm of Constant Contact. The information is stored in their secure database. Their data policies can be found on their website.

Media and Text

Any contributions of photos, video or text to our site will also be stored on our servers. If you upload images to the website, you should avoid uploading images with embedded location data (EXIF GPS) included.

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.

Sale of Information

BushLife and its contributors will NEVER sell your information to anyone, ever.

Safeguarding of Information

In plain English let it be clear that we did not program the internet, WordPress, CreativeMail nor any other service we may use and as such we cannot guarantee the absolute security of information from malicious attackers as it is held by a third party.

What we can say is that we use quality services with good reviews, history and we pay for upgraded security measures wherever possible to protect what basic information we do have about our visitors. In other words, we will make every best effort we can to safeguard your information.

General

Every effort is made to protect the privacy of our readers and subscribers.

Affiliates

BushLife uses affiliate links to third party websites. This is a disclaimer that affiliates can and may send a small commission to BushLife for generating this traffic. No information about our visitors is shared with affiliates, the links that lead to products from our affiliate partners simply have a unique ID embedded in the link to identify BushLife as the sender.

BushLife only recommends products or services that its contributors actually use themselves. In the event its contributors cannot find that same exact item, we may substitute the next closest match if we feel the quality is comparable. Or if we feel extremely strongly about certain items from time to time, we may refer them based on strong reviews from other trusted sources.

While every best effort is made to refer our visitors to quality items sold by quality vendors, BushLife and its contributors cannot be liable for any products or services referred to from our site.

This should be considered fair and understandable to our visitors as we have no control over the actions, behaviours or follow through of any person or company beyond the point of leaving our site. If however, you do follow an affiliate link and run into a problem, rather than blame us for it, please let us know so we may consider no longer referring the item or vendor.

Lastly, our visitors must be aware that once they leave our site and follow any affiliate links, they will obviously need to be mindful of the affiliate’s privacy and legal policies.

Amazon

As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.

Copyright

All text, images, graphics and any other content on our site and social media channels is copyright and the sole property of BushLife. Nothing on our site may be reproduced without our explicit written permission.

This does not apply to any embedded content which will follow the copyrights of their respected owners.