Privacy policy
Last updated: 30 March 2008
We take your privacy very seriously.
Here (in plain English) are full details explaining what information our site collects from you and what happens to it after that.
What information do we collect?
Like every other website on the Net, our site is hosted on a web server
(a powerful computer
at our ISP) that keeps a log of all the
pages and graphics it serves and where it sends them to.
This information is essentially anonymous and statistical (it tells us
how many people from Iceland looked at our site last Thursday), but it
doesn't tell us anything personal about them. We don't
know who those people were, whether they were fishermen or fighter
pilots, or what colour socks they were wearing at the time.
The logs don't tell us who you are or where you live—but they do record your IP number (a number that uniquely identifies your computer). They also note how much information you downloaded, the operating system and browser you're using, the date and time of your visit, how you came to our site, and so on. None of this information is personally identifiable. We can figure out some things about what computer 12.34.56.78 was doing at 5am on Thursday, October 5 2007, if we really want to, but we don't know who that computer belongs to—and frankly we've got much better things to do with our time.
How do we use this information? We view the access logs in a very
general way using a statistical package called AWStats. (If
you're really interested, you can see a demo of
the kind of statistics that we can see.) What do they tell us? If we
know
certain pages are unpopular, we can improve
them or discontinue them. If we know our server is about to crash
because too many people
are looking at our global warming page again, we can get a bigger
server. If we know our RSS feeds are growing in popularity, we will
start to update them more often. This is the kind of thing we do with
our logs.
We do not use cookies—but our advertisers and affiliate partners do
Our website does not use cookies (small files stored on a web browser). That means we don't offer a way for you to opt-out of having your information collected or a way to remove your personal information from our records—simply because we don't collect any information about you!
Please be aware, however, that our website runs advertisements on most pages and we participate in several affiliate programs (where we earn a small amount of money if you buy a product by following a link from our site to somewhere like Amazon.com). The advertisers and affiliate partners we work with use cookies to help them serve up their advertisements, to track your browsing behavior, to make it easier for you to buy things from them (for example, if you use a shopping cart on a website, that needs a cookie to make it work), and to record the fact that it's our website that sent the traffic to them. Please also be aware that if our advertisers and partner companies didn't use cookies, we couldn't use their advertisements and affiliate programs and we couldn't afford to run the site. Simple as that.
We have no control over these "third-party cookies" (as they are known). We do not see or have access to any information they may store or collect. They pass directly between your computer and the servers run by our advertisers and affiliate partners. If you have concerns about how our advertisers and affiliate partners may be using cookies, please refer to the privacy policies on their websites for more information:
How can you control your privacy?
If you're concerned about cookies, you can change the options in your
Web browser to restrict
how websites can use them. You can switch off certain cookies, instruct
your browser to keep them only for certain periods, or delete cookies
altogether. You can set the
level of privacy controls you want by looking under Privacy
in your browser's options, preferences, or settings. Please be aware
that if you do this you may prevent
some parts of some websites from working properly.
How can you find out more about privacy issues?
These sites may help you:
- Privacy.net: A demonstration of cookies and how they work.
- How Cookies Work: From Howstuffworks.
- HTTP cookies: Wikipedia has a fairly lengthy explanation of the issue.
- Cookie Central: Lots of info about the cookie issue.