Privacy Policy

Who we are

Our website address is https://gsrra.com. GSRRA is the Global Silk Route Research Alliance. For any question about this policy, or about the personal data we hold, please use our contact form: https://gsrra.com/contact-us/

What we collect and why

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.

An anonymised string created from your email address (also called a hash) may be provided to the Gravatar service to see whether you are using it. Gravatar is operated by Automattic Inc. in the United States, and its privacy policy is at https://automattic.com/privacy/. After your comment is approved, your profile picture is visible to the public in the context of your comment.

Media

If you upload images to the website, 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.

The signup form on this site is our own form: it is processed by this website, not by a third-party form service. When you submit it we collect the email address you type and your consent, and we pass the address to Brevo (Sendinblue), an email service provider based in France, which stores it in the European Union.

Brevo holds the GSRRA Weekly subscriber list and sends the weekly email. The email comes from newsletter@news.gsrra.com. Every issue carries an unsubscribe link, and using it removes you from the list at Brevo. We do not sell your address and we do not give it to anyone else for their own marketing.

Contact form

If you contact us through the contact form we collect the name, email address and message you provide. We use them only to answer your enquiry, and we do not add you to any mailing list unless you subscribe separately.

Cookies

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 last for one year.

If you visit our login page we will set a temporary cookie to determine whether your browser accepts cookies. This cookie contains no personal data and is discarded when you close your browser.

When you log in, we will also set up several cookies to save your login information and your screen display choices. Login cookies last for two days, and screen options cookies last for a year. If you select “Remember Me”, your login will persist for two weeks. If you log out of your account, the login cookies will be removed.

If you edit or publish an article, an additional cookie will be saved in your browser. This cookie includes no personal data and simply indicates the post ID of the article you just edited. It expires after one day.

This site does not set advertising or analytics cookies of its own. However, the Jetpack plugin loads a small statistics script from WordPress.com (stats.wp.com) on every page, which reports the page view to WordPress.com. WordPress.com’s privacy policy is at https://automattic.com/privacy/.

Embedded content from other websites

Articles on this site may include embedded content (for example videos, images or articles). Embedded content from other websites behaves in exactly the same way as if the visitor had visited the other website. Those 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 it if you have an account and are logged in to that website.

Who we share your data with

We do not sell personal data. These are the outside services that process data for us:

Brevo (Sendinblue), France, European Union – stores the email addresses of newsletter subscribers and sends the weekly email.
Automattic Inc., United States – operates WordPress.com and Jetpack. Jetpack provides the visitor statistics for this site and the image delivery for some of the images on it, so loading a page makes a request to WordPress.com (stats.wp.com and i0.wp.com). If you leave a comment, the Gravatar service may be asked whether your email address has an avatar.
Google, United States – some pages load a web font from fonts.googleapis.com, which means Google receives your IP address when the page loads.

If you request a password reset, your IP address will be included in the reset email.

Where your data is processed

The website and its database are held on our web hosting account. The newsletter list is held by Brevo in the European Union. The visitor statistics, the image delivery and the web font described above are requested from servers in the United States (Automattic and Google).

How long we retain your data

If you leave a comment, the comment and its metadata are retained indefinitely, so that we can recognise and approve any follow-up comment automatically instead of holding it in a moderation queue.

Newsletter addresses stay in Brevo until you unsubscribe or ask us to remove them. Messages sent through the contact form are kept only as long as needed to deal with the enquiry.

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.

What rights you have over your data

You can ask us for a copy of the personal data we hold about you, and you can ask us to correct or erase it. Please use the contact form: https://gsrra.com/contact-us/

Newsletter subscribers can also unsubscribe from the link in any issue, or ask us to remove the address. This does not include data we are obliged to keep for administrative, legal or security purposes.

Where we send your data

Visitor comments may be checked through an automated spam detection service. As described above, page views are reported to WordPress.com by Jetpack, and newsletter addresses are held by Brevo.

Last updated: October 2026