Effective Date: May 9th 2025

Effective Date: March 6, 2026

At Cosmic Broomstick (accessible from cosmicbroomstick.com), one of our main priorities is the privacy of our visitors. This Privacy Policy document contains types of information that is collected and recorded by Cosmic Broomstick and how we use it.

1. Data Collection and Usage

Comments and Forums

When visitors leave comments on the site (via wpDiscuz) or post in our community forums (wpForo), 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.

An anonymized string created from your email address (also called a hash) may be provided to the Gravatar service to see if you are using it. After approval of your comment or forum post, your profile picture is visible to the public in the context of your post.

Media

If you upload images to the website, you should avoid uploading images with embedded location data (EXIF GPS) included. Visitors to the website can download and extract any location data from images on the website.

Contact Forms

If you use our contact forms (WPForms Lite), we collect your name and email address to respond to your inquiries. This data is not used for marketing purposes unless you explicitly opt-in to a newsletter.

2. E-commerce and Shopping (WooCommerce)

While you browse our shop, we’ll track:

  • Products you’ve viewed: we’ll use this to, for example, show you products you’ve recently viewed.
  • Location, IP address and browser type: we’ll use this for purposes like estimating taxes and shipping.
  • Shipping address: we’ll ask you to enter this so we can, for instance, estimate shipping before you place an order, and send you the order!

When you purchase from us, we’ll ask you to provide information including your name, billing address, shipping address, email address, phone number, and credit card/payment details. We’ll use this information for purposes, such as:

  • Sending you information about your account and order.
  • Responding to your requests, including refunds and complaints.
  • Processing payments and preventing fraud.
  • Complying with any legal obligations we have, such as calculating taxes.

3. Cookies and Tracking Technologies

We use cookies to enhance your experience.

  • Account Cookies: If you have an account and you log in to this site, we will set a temporary cookie to determine if your browser accepts cookies.
  • Shopping Cookies: If you use our shop, we use cookies to keep track of cart contents while you’re browsing our site.
  • Analytical Cookies: Through Site Kit by Google, we use Google Analytics to understand how visitors interact with the site. These cookies track anonymized data such as time spent on site and pages visited.

You can choose to disable cookies through your individual browser options or manage them via our Complianz cookie banner.

4. Third-Party Services and Security

We share data with third-party providers who help us operate:

  • Akismet: We use Akismet anti-spam service. The information collected typically includes the commenter’s IP address, user agent, referrer, and Site URL.
  • Wordfence: To keep our site secure, Wordfence processes visitor IP addresses to identify and block malicious activity.
  • Jetpack: Used for site performance and internal analytics.
  • Castos/Seriously Simple Podcasting: May collect playback data and IP addresses for podcast analytics.

5. Data Retention

If you leave a comment or forum post, the content and its metadata are retained indefinitely. This is so we can recognize and approve any follow-up comments automatically. For users that register on our website, 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).

6. Your Rights Over Your Data

If you have an account on this site, or have left comments/forum posts, you can request to receive an exported file of the personal data we hold about you. 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.

Please contact us at: contactus@cosmicbroomstick.com

7. Children’s Information

Cosmic Broomstick does not knowingly collect any Personal Identifiable Information from children under the age of 13. If you think that your child provided this kind of information on our website, we strongly encourage you to contact us immediately and we will do our best to promptly remove such information.

8. Consent

By using our website, you hereby consent to our Privacy Policy and agree to its terms.