Ben Fountain

Award-winning and bestselling author of Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk

Privacy Policy

Our website address is: https://benfountain.com/. This page is to inform you of our policies regarding the collection, use, and any disclosure of your personal information that we may collect from you.

The security of your personal information is important to us, but remember that no method of transmission over the internet, or method of electronic storage, is 100% secure. While we strive to use commercially acceptable means to protect your information, we cannot guarantee its absolute security.

We reserve the right to update or change our Privacy Policy at any time and you should check this page periodically. Your continued use of the website after we post any modifications to this page will constitute your acknowledgment of the modifications and your consent to abide and be bound by the modified Privacy Policy.

By using this site, you agree to the collection and use of information in accordance with this policy.

If you have any questions, please contact us.

What personal data we collect

We collect information from you to provide a better user experience, manage our content, operate efficiently, and improve our website and services.

LOG DATA / NON-PUBLIC PERSONAL INFORMATION

Like most websites, we collect information that your browser sends whenever you visit our website, referred as “log data”. This log data may include information such as your computer’s Internet Protocal or “IP” address, browser type, browser version, the pages of our site you visit, the time and date of your visit, the time spent on those pages and other statistics.

We may also collect other non-public personal information from you, such as your name, address, e-mail address, or other information.

EMBEDDED CONTENT FROM OTHER WEBSITES

Pages 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.

Why we collect personal data

TO COMMUNICATE WITH OUR CUSTOMERS

Contact Form

While using our site, we may ask you to provide us with certain identifiable information that can be used to contact or identify you. Personally identifiable information may include, but is not limited to your name, address, or email address. For example, you may enter your name and email address when you use our contact form. In this case, your name and email is used only to contact you if you have requested a reply.

Newsletters / No Unsolicited Emails or Phone Calls

We will not contact you via email for marketing or promotional materials unless you have opted in to receive newsletters from us. We will only contact you by email or phone if you have requested us to do so.

Comments

If you leave a comment on this website, 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.

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.

TO ANALYZE DATA & PROVIDE A BETTER USER EXPERIENCE

We use third party tracking services, Google Analytics & WordPress.com Stats, which collect, monitor and analyze website data and user information.

Google Analytics – You can view Google’s Privacy Policy here.

From JetPack/WordPress.com regarding Stats

Data Used: IP address, WordPress.com user ID (if logged in), WordPress.com username (if logged in), user agent, visiting URL, referring URL, timestamp of event, browser language, country code. Important: The site owner does not have access to any of this information via this feature. For example, a site owner can see that a specific post has 285 views, but he/she cannot see which specific users/accounts viewed that post. Stats logs — containing visitor IP addresses and WordPress.com usernames (if available) — are retained by Automattic for 28 days and are used for the sole purpose of powering this feature.

Activity Tracked: Post and page views, video plays (if videos are hosted by WordPress.com), outbound link clicks, referring URLs and search engine terms, and country. When this module is enabled, Jetpack also tracks performance on each page load that includes the JavaScript file used for tracking stats. This is exclusively for aggregate performance tracking across Jetpack sites in order to make sure that our plugin and code is not causing performance issues. This includes the tracking of page load times and resource loading duration (image files, JavaScript files, CSS files, etc.). The site owner has the ability to force this feature to honor DNT settings of visitors. By default, DNT is currently not honored.

TO DETECT AND LIMIT SPAM

Visitor comments may be checked through an automated spam detection service. Our website uses Akismet to reduce spam. Akismet is the most widely-used spam catching service for WordPress sites. Only the personal data needed to carry out its core function of protecting us against comment spam is collected. Akismet does not sell the personal data collected through Akismet. For more details, please review their Privacy Policy here and more details on Akismet-specific policy terms here.

Please note that Akismet does not keep the data for very long. They have short retention periods of between two weeks and ninety days for the vast majority of their spam-related data, at which point it is automatically deleted from our databases. Anyone can opt-out of all long-term tracking for the very small subset of data they do keep longer by using their contact form.

How we collect personal data

SUBMISSION OF SITE FORMS

You may share willingly personal information on our website through our contact forms or newsletter sign up forms.

COOKIES

Cookies are files with small amount of data, which may include an anonymous unique identifier. Cookies are sent to your browser from a website and stored on your computer’s hard drive.

Like most websites, we use “cookies” to collect information. Cookies are used for a variety of reasons, for example some cookies are essential for the website to perform basic functions, and other cookies store preferences set by users, some provide help in identifying potential security risks. Cookies also collect information on how users interact with our website, providing analytical data.

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.

You can instruct your browser to refuse all cookies or to indicate when a cookie is being sent. You can also configure your browser to block all cookies from a specific domain or all domains. However, if you do not accept cookies, some portions of this site may not work properly.

You can change your cookie preferences at any time.

Besides cookies, we may also use tiny electronic images (called “single-pixel GIFs” or “Web beacons”), which allow us to count users who have visited specific pages or access certain cookies.

Last updated 9-10-2023.

Copyright © 2024 Ben Fountain. All rights reserved.
Author photo credit: Thorne Anderson

Devil Makes Three by Ben Fountain

Devil Makes Three

by Ben Fountain

Order Now