Privacy Policy

Overview

The purpose of this Privacy Policy is to inform site visitors about management of personal information collected on this website. It also contains required disclosures related to third-party software and services used by the website including, but not limited to, Google AdSense and Google Analytics.

Law

Being an Australian resident, I am bound by Australian law. Specifically, information privacy is regulated by the Privacy Act 1988. I have actually read all the relevant parts of it and discovered that my actions, as the website operator in my personal capacity, are not covered by the Act. Therefore, all obligations stated below should be interpreted as my voluntary aspirational targets.

The Scope of the Policy

The Policy applies to all collected personal information with the following exceptions:

This website, wordpress-25179-53805-166025.cloudwaysapps.com, is built on WordPress platform. WordPress, especially if you add themes and plugins to the mix, is a complex piece of software. It may collect and store some personal information that I am not aware of. This Policy applies only to collected personal information that I know about.
Some personal information that you enter when you submit a comment is made available to general public. This includes your name, your website and any personal information that you specify in the text of the comment. I assume that by submitting a comment you implicitly give me the consent to publish that information. Such information is then regarded as generally available publication and is not covered by this Policy.

All further references to collected personal information should be interpreted as collected personal information within the scope of this Policy as defined above.

Collected Personal Information

As far as I know, WordPress software collects the following personal information about people leaving comments on the website:

Email address.
IP address of a client’s computer.
Contact information (for registered users).
Biographical information (for registered users).

Additionally, third-party software may collect other personal information about website visitors. Please refer to relevant privacy policies listed in Third-Party Software section.

Website Browser Cookies

WordPress uses cookies to verify who you are. Those cookies do not include any personal information which is not specified in Collected Personal Information section above.

Purpose of Personal Information Collection

Unless expressly stated otherwise, I collect and record email addresses of people, who leave comments or send messages through Contact Me form, for the sole purpose of contacting them in relation to their comments or messages. In case of comments my first preference is to reply by posting another comment. However, I may decide to contact a blog commentator directly by email if I want to keep my reply private. In case of messages, visitors are not required to specify their email addresses, but if they choose to, then I may send them an email reply.

I collect and record visitors’ IP addresses for two reasons:

Spam filtering.
Determining their geographical location. A visitor’s country and city is derived from their IP address using GeoLiteCity data created by MaxMind and Visitor Maps and Who’s Online WordPress plugin created by Mike Challis. I use that information to better understand the background of my audience and adjust my replies accordingly.

Contact and biographical information entered by registered users in their profiles is not mandatory and I have no intention to collect it. However, users are free to provide such information by way of introduction which I regard as their consent for me to collect it.

Access to Collected Personal Information

I do not disclose collected personal information to anyone except when required or allowed by law applicable to organisations. One notable exception is an earnest request from an individual about his/her own personal information stored on the website. Although WordPress does not have a simple user interface which presents all collected personal information about a person, I will make a reasonable effort to retrieve and provide it. Please note that I identify visitors by their email addresses, not by names. Therefore, an enquirer must provide his/her email address. Associated personal information will then be sent to that address.

Third-Party Software

DreamHost

This site is run on the hardware and software provided and supported by DreamHost. Their privacy policy can be found here:

http://www.dreamhost.com/privacy.html

Google AdSense

This site publishes Google AdSense ads which can be provided by Google or by other ad-serving companies. Google requires to communicate the following information to site visitors:

Third party vendors, including Google, use cookies to serve ads based on a user’s prior visits to this website.
Google’s use of the DART cookie enables it and its partners to serve ads to the website’s users based on their visit to this site and/or other sites on the Internet.
Users may opt out of the use of the DART cookie by visiting the advertising opt-out page.

Google’s ad-related privacy policy can be found here:

http://www.google.com/privacy/ads/privacy-policy.html

Google Analytics

This site uses Google Analytics which is covered by general Google privacy policy. There is also a privacy overview specific to Google Analytics.

Changes To This Privacy Policy

I can change this Privacy Policy at any time. The only notification of the change that I will provide is updating the date at the bottom of this page.

Contact Information

You can contact me by leaving a comment to any blog post or page, including this one, or sending me a message through Contact Me form.

This document was last updated on January 15, 2011.