Privacy

I love writing privacy policies.

You always have to make everything look so legal and formal, promising never to do anything naughty with your users' personal information, yet leaving plenty of loopholes for when the marketing department decides to sell everything to the highest bidder.

Well, not us. Let me spell it out in plain english: Your personal information does not belong to us. We will never disclose it to anybody for any reason. In a perfect world, that would be enough, but I'll go into detail anyway. First up is your...

Email Address

We ask for your email address during registration so that we can forward private messages to you from other users. It's also handy to have your email in case something goes wrong and we need to get ahold of you, or if you forget your password and we need to send you a new one.

That's it. That's all we'll do with your email address.

We will not let anybody see your email address under any circumstance. Ever. Not in a million billion zillion years. Not even to the Sultan of Oman, even if he promises me a palace by the sea and a harem of 1000 hand picked maidens. No, sir. You've got enough to worry about. We're not going to add to it by spamming you.

Cookies

We are a website. Websites use cookies. We use cookies. People are scared of cookies, and I cannot for the life of me understand why. Somewhere on your machine, there lives a small file called a cookie. Each time you log into our site, we'll ask your browser to place a number in this file that we can use to determine who you are. From there on out, every time you load a new page on our site, your browser will tell us the number from that file and we'll use it to remind us who you are and what we should show you on that page. That's it. That's all cookies do. Try not to be afraid of them.

User Generated Content and Photos

Here's how it works: you write stuff and upload photos. We show your stuff to the world. Now, if you didn't want your stuff shown to the world, you probably wouldn't have uploaded it to the internet, but for some reason we're obligated to spell this out in detail.

We'll publish your content in various places on our site, but we'll always make sure we stick your name next to it so that nobody thinks we're taking credit for it. We might stick advertising next to your stuff, but we'll try to keep it as low-key as possible.

That's about it. I doubt it would stand up in court, but that's not really the point. If you trust us not to mess with your privacy, you'll continue to use this website. If not, you'll leave. Personally, I hope you stick around.

Jason Kester
Expat Software Consulting Services