Personal information collected by this site

Who cares?

This page is an attempt to comply with the European Union’s GDPR privacy laws. 

All site visitors

The web server hosting this site logs your IP address, page views, and browser and hardware information. Please be aware that almost every web server under the sun does this by default. Below I refer to this information as the usual stuff.

Blog comments

When you leave a comment, this site collects everything you enter in the comments form, along with the usual stuff.

Embedded content from other websites

Pages on this site may include embedded videos hosted by YouTube. 

I embed videos in a manner that does not allow cookies. This limits the information that YouTube can collect about you. It also prevents them from collecting anything unless you click on the video. If you click, Youtube logs the usual stuff and your interactions with the video. If you happen to be logged in to Youtube or any other Google site, then Youtube will know exactly who you are. 

YouTube has its own privacy policy; it’s a friendly and long-winded way of saying they own your soul. If this troubles you, you should avoid watching videos on the web, unless you’re using private browsing mode and a VPN.

Analytics

This site uses Google Analytics, mostly to satisfy my curiosity about the amount of traffic, where it’s coming from, and what pages people are viewing. Google analytics uses cookies, which can identify you as a unique user, although they don’t know who you are personally. Google anonymizes this identifying data, which means that while they record it along with your approximate geographic location and all the usual stuff, they perform their analysis after your data is aggregated with everyone else’s. Google does not share any data with me that might be used to identify you personally. 

You should be aware that most websites use Google Analytics or the equivalent. 

Content delivery network

This site comes to you via Cloudflare’s content delivery network, which speeds performance and enhances site security. Cloudflare uses cookies, and logs all the usual stuff. Cloudflare promises in its own privacy policy to use this information only for purposes critical to its function.

Other automated systems that see your data

Comments and their metadata are vetted by Akismet, an automated cloud-based spam detection service, which may retain some data for up to 90 days. Data includes all the usual stuff, plus the comment and everything else entered in the form. Akismet promises in their own privacy policy to use this this information only for purposes critical to the software’s function. 

Who else I share your data with

No one.

How long I retain your data

If you leave a comment, the comment and its metadata are kept indefinitely. Server logs store the usual stuff for 35 days, in case it’s needed for troubleshooting. This information includes an IP address but nothing I can use to identify you personally. 

What rights you have over your data

If you have left comments, you can ask me to send an exported file of your personal data stored by this site. You can also request that I delete it. This does not include any data collected by third parties such as Google (analytics), or YouTube (video watching data), or Akismet (spam-detection service). I do not have access to this data.

If you have not left comments, then this site stores no personalized data about you, and there’s nothing that I can send you or delete.

How I protect your data

Your data is kept alongside my own critical data, on a server protected by a firewall, anonymized behind a global content delivery network that conceals the origin server’s location and IP address. This network includes an additional firewall that rejects suspicious traffic. Site data is protected by password and accessible only to me. All communication with the site is encrypted by SSL. 

For what it’s worth

Ordinary website operators (like me) won’t be able to identify you by your IP address and the other usual stuff, as long as you’ve never left a comment with your name or created an account. But someone doing more serious digging might be able to figure it out, and anyone with subpoena power can do it easily. If your anonymity is truly important, you should use TOR or a good VPN.

Please resist the urge to share your social security number, your revolutionary conspiracies, or the combination to your wall safe in the blog comments. Thank you.