Privacy policy
Summary
This site collects no more data about you than most other websites.
We use the information we collect to, among others, improve and analyse our site through tracking how our site is used and to try to reduce or eliminate spam and abuse of our site.
Comments, trackbacks, and pingbacks are published, and except in very limited circumstances, will be a permanent part of this site. If you decide to comment, link, or pingback to a post, you must keep this in mind.
This privacy policy will be reviewed, and may be revised, from time to time. You may wish to revisit it regularly to keep up to date with our policies.
Public data and publishing
Browsing this site doesn’t reveal your identity publicly, though see Private Logging later in this document for more information.
Author identification
When posting a comment, a name and email address are required. You do not have to select your real name. Your email address will not published.
Comments, trackbacks, and pingbacks will be identified by your IP address. These numbers could potentially be traceable to identifying information about you, whether it is your home ISP or the University or Work account where the IP address is registered. Your IP address could potentially be used in conjunction with other data to identify you.
If you are concerned about attempts to match your IP address to your identity, you may wish to use an anonymous browsing service or attempt some means to obfuscate your real IP address.
If so, you might like to try Tor, an anonymous browsing service. Please see http://tor.eff.org/ for more details.
Cookies
WordPress, which this site runs, uses cookies if you comment on the blog. This is a convenience for you so that you do not need to type in the same information the next time you comment. For more information, see the WordPress Codex.
You may wish to clear these cookies and the browser cache if you wish to refrain from revealing any identifying information, especially if you are using a public or shared computer. Your browser may also allow you to refuse all cookies, including for this site, should you wish to do so. Please consult the documentation for your browser to find out how to do so.
Private logging
Any time you visit a page on the Internet, you send quite a bit of information to the server, including your IP address. The webservers that host this site and statistics software or services that we use maintain access logs with the information that you send. This information is used to provide site statistics and to get an idea of popular pages and what sites link here, as well as where our visitors come from and how frequently they visit. We do not intend to use these logs to directly identify legitimate users of this site.
The data logged may be used by us to solve technical problems with the site and, in cases of abuse of this site, to investigate the abuse. We may also use this data for internal purposes in order to improve this blog and broadly analyse trends among our visitors. Logging this information and analysing our site statistics may necessarily involve this information being used or collected by third parties, such as through use by a web statistics providers such as Google Analytics.
Again, if you are concerned about attempts to match your IP address to your identity or about the information you may reveal when you visit this site, you may wish to use an anonymous browsing service or investigate ways to limit the information shared about you through the tools you use to visit this site.
Data release policy
Our policy is to only release the data we collect in the following circumstances:
- As required by law, such as in response to a valid request from law enforcement.
- To designated third parties to resolve or investigate abuse complaints.
- When the information is related to spiders or bots (usually this is when investigating technical issues).
- For abusive users, we may release information to assist in attempting to block the abusive user or to complain to that user’s Internet Service Provider or to legal authorities.
- If necessary to defend legal claims against us by third parties.
- When we deem it necessary to protect the property or rights of the user community, or this website.
Note that we may use third party statistics software and services such as Google Analytics to track use of our site for statistics reasons. For more, see Private Logging above.
No selling of information
We will not sell information collected via this site, such as your name or email address, to third parties.
Information security
We make no guarantee that the information that you provide us will be secure.
You are required to give your email address when you post a comment. We do this in part to help reduce the level of spam we receive and to make this site more enjoyable for everyone.
If you are concerned, you may wish to get a free email account through the web or attempt to use a remail service in order to hide your identity.
