Privacy Policy
Updated 14 January 2012.
Tuesday 07 December 2010 at 22:52
The Apache web server maintains logs of all accesses - every PHP page, every HTML page, every image file, every JavaScript snippet gets logged with your IP address, like so:
192.168.1.254 - - [30/Aug/2008:21:45:44 -0400] "GET /pivotx/index.php HTTP/1.1" 200 14346 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.0.1) Gecko/2008081820 Gentoo Firefox/3.0.1"
My web hosting provider keeps logs for six (6) days - the current day is the active one, the previous day's are kept on disk, and the three days' before that are compressed for the purposes of usage tracking, security auditing, and debugging. I analyze usage tracking because I'm curious about how people use my site and what they look at most often. Every day the oldest archived log file is automatically and the next oldest is deleted. Various pieces of analytic software are used to digest the logs for usage tracking; analyses are archived for one (1) calendar year and the oldest are automatically erased.
When you leave comments on posts your e-mail address is not publicly exposed. It's used internally by PivotX so that you can be contacted if anyone responds to one of your comments. By no means do you have to put real info in these fields.
Every once in a while I'll link to things sold on Amazon which are associated with my Amazon Associates account. If you happen to buy whatever is linked to, I'll get a few cents of credit which goes toward books or music. If you just click on the link, I don't get anything. I don't know who clicks on them, so I can't use them for data mining or usage tracking. You're not under any obligation to buy anything (but if you do buy me something from my wishlist I'll be grateful and think you're awesome).
I make use of Google Analytics on my site, which means that most every PHP and HTML file has a link to a chunk of Javascript hosted on one of Google's servers. That Javascript is used to gather usage information which I examine periodically to see what people are looking at on and how they're making use of my site. If you disagree with this, I recommend that you a) run Firefox and b) make use of the Optimize Google or Ghostery add-ons which disable Google Analytics to protect your privacy. I happen to use both of them and recommend them highly for this reason.
That's it. If this changes anytime in the future, I'll update this post and tell everyone that it's been edited.
