Privacy Policy

Just today, a popular blogger that I read often (Lloyd Kahn) came to the revelation that his privacy and even his ownership of his own photographs and content were being compromised by his participation in social media. Long ago, I realized that Gooble, Yahell, Facecrook, and all the others were only out for themselves, and were mining the content of the entire internet for their own gain and purposes. I soundly refused to participate and began my own campaign to thwart as much invasion of my privacy as possible while online.

This came in the form of proxy software on my computer (Proxomitron), software firewalls on my computers, proxy relays of my page requests, and writing scripts to sanitize my browsers breadcrumbs while surfing.

On this site, I use a customized suite of spam-prevention software that keeps away bad players and minimizes spurious page requests and outright blocks hacking and other exploits. (apologies to anyone viewing who has gotten caught up in the spam protections, they can be devastatingly effective, but need fine-tuning to allow legitimate viewers to browse the site unrestricted.) These protections are so tight, that it's not possible even for me to log into this site unless I'm on one of my own computers that supply a pass phrase that can't be hacked.

The end purpose of this is to assure any readers that this site gathers absolutely no personal information about the person or preferences of anyone who enters and views content. There are no analytic scripts keeping track of where you've been, no invasive persistant cookies, no nosy javascript, nothing that will follow you around and tattle on your activities. In fact, it's perfectly possible to view the entire site with cookies and javascript turned off. I know, because that's how I surf ~every~ web site, including my own.

Here's what I *can* see about page views:

• I can see what page you asked for, what time it was requested, and if it was successfully delivered.
• I can see your IP address. This tells me very little about you, other than maybe what your ISP's name is.
• I can see the "user agent" of your browser. (This can be easily faked, so it tells me very little).
• I can see what link (if any) you clicked to get to the page you viewed. (Many browsers let you disable this)
• If your page request fails, I can see why.

Other than that, you've got complete anonymity on this site. None of the above information is publicly viewable, it can only be accessed by the administrative interface, or by viewing the database directly.

An interesting aside is that when the Gooble-bot, Bling-bot, and Yahell-bot come to visit, they are recognized and assigned roles. These roles actually allow me to more fully restrict what they can see and where they can go, and allows me to more fully follow their activity on the site! Turn-about is fair play!! (many bad-player bots are outright banned)

Years ago, I tried to create an account at Facecrook. Multiple times, I attempted to enter and register my name, but each time, was greeted by the message "Your name is not acceptable to our automated registration process". So I quit trying. As it turns out they were doing me a great favor. Nobody that I want to be in contact with is going to be searching for me by my birth name, and I wasn't going to give them that anyway.

Some people think that dinosaurs are stupid. I think we are smart...