Love the Mitten collects only the information reasonably needed to run this website, respond to messages, understand how the site is performing, and connect visitors with resources they choose to use. This page explains what that means in practice.
What you provide
The contact form on this site asks for your name, your email address, a phone number if you choose to give one, the kind of question you are asking, and your message. Anything else you include in the message is collected as well, simply because you wrote it.
Please do not send sensitive information through this website. That includes Social Security numbers, bank or other financial account details, login credentials, images or copies of identification documents, and confidential transaction paperwork. If a real estate matter needs documents like these, they belong in the secure channels used by the brokerage rather than in a website form or general email.
Technical information collected with a submission
The contact form is provided by Jetpack, a WordPress plugin from Automattic. When a message is submitted, Jetpack stores it in this site’s WordPress administration area together with the date and time, the page it was sent from, and the IP address it came from. Browser and user-agent information may also be recorded as part of that submission or by spam filtering.
Akismet, also from Automattic, checks submissions for spam. That check involves sending submission details to the Akismet service so it can judge whether a message looks automated.
Email sent by the site is delivered through SureMail, which keeps a log of delivery activity such as recipient, subject, date, and whether a message was accepted for delivery. The log exists so that missing or failed mail can be traced. It is not used for anything else.
Comments on articles
Articles on this site accept comments. The comment feature is provided by Jetpack and WordPress.com, and avatar images are served by Gravatar. If you leave a comment, your name, email address, comment text, and related technical details are handled by those services as well as by this site.
How information is used
- to read and respond to your message
- to route a question to the right conversation
- to protect the site from spam and misuse
- to troubleshoot email delivery and technical problems
- to keep a record of communication that came through the website
- to understand in aggregate which pages people use, so the site can be made clearer
Love the Mitten does not sell contact-form submissions or the personal information you send through this website, and does not use it to build advertising profiles.
Site measurement
Jetpack Stats is active on this site. It reports aggregate traffic information such as page views, popular pages, and referring links. It is used to understand which pages are useful, not to identify individual visitors.
No Google Analytics or advertising tracking script is installed on this site.
Cookies and similar technologies
This site runs on WordPress and uses Jetpack and WordPress.com services. Those services may set cookies or store small amounts of data in your browser in connection with site measurement, spam protection, comments, likes, and sharing. WordPress also sets cookies for anyone who logs in, which applies to site administrators rather than ordinary visitors.
Some page assets load from services operated by Automattic and Google, including WordPress.com content and font delivery addresses, Gravatar, and Google Fonts. Requesting a file from any of those services necessarily tells that service your IP address and basic browser information.
There is no cookie consent banner on this site, so there is no on-site panel for switching individual cookies on and off. You can manage, block, or clear cookies through your browser settings.
Services this site links to
The site links out to services including Google Docs, Substack, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Etsy, and Key Realty. Once you follow one of those links you are on their website, under their terms and their privacy practices. Love the Mitten does not control those services and cannot speak for how they handle your information. The newsletter is hosted on Substack rather than on this site, so subscribing and unsubscribing happen there.
Nothing is purchased on this site. Any shop or product link sends you to an outside platform, and payment information is entered there, never here.
How long information is kept
Contact-form submissions and email delivery logs may be kept for operational, recordkeeping, spam-prevention, and troubleshooting purposes. No fixed deletion schedule is configured, so submissions stay in the site’s administration area unless they are removed.
Your choices
You may contact Melissa to ask what information was submitted through the contact form, to request a correction, or to ask whether a stored submission can be deleted. Requests are handled subject to legal, brokerage, operational, and recordkeeping obligations. Where information also sits with an outside service, such as a comment held by WordPress.com or a subscription held by Substack, that service’s own process applies.
Children
This site is written for a general adult audience and is not designed to collect personal information from children.
Security
Reasonable administrative and technical measures are used to protect information submitted through this site. No website or email system can guarantee absolute security, which is another reason not to send account numbers or sensitive documents through a web form.
Questions
Privacy questions can go to melissa@lovethemitten.com, by phone at (616) 856-6161, or through the contact page.
This page describes how this website works. It is a plain-language explanation rather than legal advice, and it does not change any written agreement you may have with Key Realty.