Policies

Disclaimer

This site is mostly written by me, Scott Carpenter. There are also comments from other people, which fall under the comments policy below. But speaking in this section for myself, this is my personal web site. The opinions and views expressed here are my own and do not represent my employer or anyone else that I’m affiliated with.

(Note also that it is a policy of this web site that prepositions are great for ending sentences with.)

Any advice I give, technically or philosophically or otherwise, will be undertaken by you at your own risk and with no liability to me whatsoever. That may have zero legal standing, but the idea is that you don’t have to be here and you don’t have to read anything on this site, and you certainly don’t have to take action based on what you find here. Take it like you should anything on the Internet, with caution and care.

If it’s technical advice I’m offering, I’ll try my best to give sound advice, but I only have my own experience to go on and can’t guarantee that you won’t run in to problems with your particular situation. And maybe I won’t understand the security risks of a particular action. Keep good backups, and use this web site at your own risk.

Also! Fictional works can be found on this web site. Fiction may or may not be clearly indicated by inclusion in the fiction category. For those works that are fictional, let’s say “All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.”

(See also this standard disclaimer which is not mine.)

With the fiction stuff, be aware that characters and “guest bloggers” may express opinions and viewpoints that I don’t hold myself. They may do things that I wouldn’t do. (For example, maybe they’ll get away from the computer occasionally. Or maybe they’ll commit murder.)

Privacy

I care about privacy in general and your privacy specifically, but you should always remember A) you’re on the Internet, and B) this is a publicly accessible web site. I don’t have the resources to make and stand behind any kind of privacy guarantee when it comes to government and/or legal coercion and/or malicious hacking attempts against my hosting provider or even my own PC.

Your web browser blabs certain things about you and these things are stored in logs on the web server. This includes things like your IP address and the type of web browser you’re using and the web site that referred you here. When you post comments, you might provide additional private information like your email, which is stored in a database on the server. I use third party services like Google Analytics that collect and store even more information about you.

I won’t disclose your email address (whether real or fictional) voluntarily. I will not sell your email address to anyone. However, if John Law* comes to my door with a warrant for the email addresses that have been collected, I probably won’t strenuously resist handing them over. If the EFF wanted to take the case and pay for all the defense costs, maybe then I’d have some backbone about the whole thing. But I’m sorry, this web site is just a personal undertaking and I’m not going to fight to the ends of the earth to hide your email address. So please keep that in mind before submitting your comment. At this time, the only way I can see myself using your email address is to write you a personal response to you or contact you on a related topic.

I will do what I can to keep your information private. I assume my hosting provider will likewise treat this information as private. However, I may view and transfer server logs and database backups via insecure methods over the Internet to my local PC and network. The data may reside unencrypted on various kinds of storage media in my possession.

* John Law = The Man = The Government. The men in black. The legal authorities. The people who can put me in jail if I don’t meekly obey them.

3rd Party Privacy Policy Considerations

In addition to my own meager capability to collect information about you, notice that I may have third party code and scripts on this site. Advertising and affiliate programs and etc. These are covered by the privacy policies and terms and conditions of the third parties, including, but not limited to: Google, Amazon, and FeedBurner. (FeedBurner is now part of Google.)

Cookies and Web Bugs, Oh My!

Third party services (usually ad networks) tend to use cookies and web bugs (otherwise known as web beacons) for tracking purposes.

Most browsers allow you to disable cookies (although the web becomes harder to use then). You can read about web bugs in this EFF Web Bug FAQ. It’s dated November 1999, but still seems fairly accurate. It says the best defense against web bugs is to turn off cookies, and mentions that some browsers may continue to send out existing cookies after disabling, so that you should manually delete cookies on your machine after you disable them.

I don’t think there should be many web bugs here. For Amazon, I tend to use local images instead of loading from their site. I do use a few Amazon IFrames, though.

Javascript

Javascript opens up a lot of opportunities for tracking and information collection, not to mention all kinds of malicious attacks against your web browser and computer. There is a nice plugin for Firefox called “NoScript” that blocks Javascript from web sites until you whitelist the site.

FeedBurner

I use FeedBurner to manage email and feed subscribers. They may also collect available information about you, and you’ll have to provide a functional email address if you want to receive email updates of new posts. FeedBurner and I will both have the list of email subscribers. I’ll treat these addresses the same as those that are received with comments. FeedBurner was aquired by Google in 2007. There is no longer a separate privacy policy for this service; see Google’s privacy policy.

Google Ads

Google’s AdSense policy tells me I should mention that third parties may use cookies and web beacons in the process of serving ads. I’m only using Javascript for Google ads, so I’m not sure if we’ll see web bugs from this. They also say to provide information about cookies and options for cookie management, which I think was covered well enough above

On 12 March 2009, I was informed by Google that they would start using “interest-based” advertising, and I should inform you of this in turn. This would be a more advanced form of monitoring where they watch what pages you visit through any number of Google sites (the “Google content network”) and use that information to deliver ever more targeted advertising. Here’s some page that talks about the kinds of things we’re supposed to know about all of this tracking.

Google Analytics

I use Google Analytics for information and statistics about visitors to this site. Google will attempt to use cookies on your computer to track things such as the number and frequency of visits. Services like this are usually for e-commerce sites and other businesses that want to improve their marketing and sales efforts. Moving to Freedom isn’t an e-commerce site and my motivation isn’t primarily about making money, but GA is a free service and I’m interested to learn about visitors in the aggregate and see how people use the site as it grows and gains readers. I like analyzing data and this is mostly just out of curiosity, although it would be nice if it helps me provide a better web site for y’all.

I may publish aggregate information or even information about individual data points, but will not post anything obviously traceable to an individual person. That means no IP addresses, and no search terms that point to a non-celebrity. I’m probably going in to too much detail on this one. I just want to be clear that I’ll share interesting information from Analytics, but I won’t post anything that I think could be used to identify a specific visitor. However, again remember this is the Internet, and it’s possible that the sum of your comments and visits to a number of web sites and the things revealed by those sites may somehow point to you. You’re out in public, after all.

I realize that many people have reservations about services that track what you’re doing on the web. Who knows what all Google might be doing with the data they collect when they start comparing and aggregating it across thousands of web sites. As far as I can tell, GA is covered by Google’s standard privacy policy. I tend to trust Google to do the right thing, or at least to not be evil. If you don’t like the idea of GA tracking your activities, search for block google analytics and you’ll find many entries that talk about how to use your Hosts file to stop GA from tracking your visit to this and many other web sites. (It’s as easy as adding the line: 127.0.0.1 www.google-analytics.com.) You can also disable cookies and javascript in your browser.

Licensing / Copyright

In general, my writing and photographs and the contributor comments on this site are covered under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License. Here’s a formal statement:

But it doesn’t have to be like that. If you use my writing or photos, I’d appreciate the attribution and a link back to this web site.

Note: From 9 March 2007 forward, this site uses the CC-BY-SA-3.0 license. Material published from July 2006 through 9 March 2007 can be licensed either under CC-BY-SA-3.0 or the original CC-BY-SA-2.5 license. (Including pictures with “cc-by-sa-25″ in the name.)

Software here is generally released under the GNU General Public License (GPL) or put into the public domain.

Comments

By posting your comments on this web site, you agree to license them under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, version 3.0 or later as published by the Creative Commons organization. You retain copyright, of course.

(Comments previous to 9 March 2009 are licensed under the 2.5 version of the BY-SA license.)

If you post copyrighted material for which you don’t have the rights, I may have to remove it if the copyright owner requests the removal and it doesn’t fall under fair use (or I decide not to mount an expensive legal defense to prove fair use).

For those that reject copyright, that’s cool. You don’t have to agree to the license. You can place your comments in the public domain. No problem!

I hope it is clear and obvious that comments belong to commenters and do not necessarily represent my own views. I can’t be responsible for comments by others. I’m just providing a forum. If you have a specific objection to a comment left on the site that can’t be remedied by a well-crafted response to the offending comment, please let me know and we can discuss what (if anything) can be done about it.

Moderation may or may not be used for discussions, but if a comment is held and allowed to go through, that still doesn’t mean I approve of or endorse it. (Also note that it’s possible someone else cleared the comment through moderation.)

I reserve the right to delete any comment for any reason. I may copyedit your comment for spelling and grammar or other aesthetic reasons. I won’t materially alter the intent of your comment. Although again, I may delete it.

Advertising and other ways this site may attempt to make money

Along with a few million other people, I’d like to make money from blogging and other web-related activities. I realize this is difficult to do, and that many “monetization” techniques are extremely annoying and not especially profitable. Here are some ways I might try to make a buck:

Advertising. Advertising is on-again off-again on this site. I use Google AdSense, at a minimum with search results because you have to if you want to host Google search results on your site. (As far as I know.) Sometimes I show other AdSense blocks. And I’ll try other ad networks from time to time.

If you know of any reason that you think I shouldn’t use an advertiser, please let me know. I may not agree with you, but I want to know if it’s something I was unaware of. For example, I briefly considered using Text Link Ads, but then found out it is essentially link selling. I know that some people see nothing wrong with this, but I think it’s questionable. Had I not been careful and started using TLA, I would have appreciated it if someone pointed out the issue with that kind of ad.

Please keep in mind the concept of separation between editorial and advertising functions. I may not agree with or endorse advertised products and services.

Affiliate Programs. Currently, through the Amazon Associates program. I think I can speak more freely about this. If you click on affiliate links to Amazon in various posts (usually associated with a book cover image) and then make a purchase, I’ll earn a percentage of the sale price. If you buy books or other things from Amazon, this is an easy way to financially support my work on this web site. It doesn’t cost you any more to purchase the item. If you want to buy something other than shown, you can follow an affiliate link and then browse to other items. As long as you add the item to your shopping cart in that session, I’ll get the credit if you later purchase it.

I generally disclose when a link is an affiliate link. I make almost no money from these things, and I don’t think the links affect my recommendations or non-recommendations. That is, I’d like to think I write about the linked product the same as if I wasn’t getting a commission on it. It’s just nice to pick up a few pennies this way when possible.

Updated: 16 October 2011