Policies

Updated: 9 March 2008

I’d prefer not to have a bunch of formal policies and legal stuff on this site but it’s a litigious world where you almost feel like you have to do it or a pack of lawyers will descend on you. Which of course is going to happen in any case. Maybe it’s not a terrible idea to try spelling some of this stuff out.

Disclaimer

This site contains content from me, Scott Carpenter, and from contributors (aka commenters). See more below about comments, but speaking 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.

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. Who knows what legal standing that has, 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 peddling, 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. Back things up before making changes. You should always keep good backups. You should always keep good backups. You should always keep good backups. What I say three times must be true. Same goes for any software that may be offered here. Use this web site at your own risk.

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. (Note: A public place in the sense of being open and visible to the world. Not in the sense of being owned by the public.)

There are a few things you may provide me, advertently or not. Let’s consider these and what I might do with some of them.

Let’s consider comments as a special case, they being the only way currently to interactively participate on this site. The name you give will be displayed with your posted comment. An email address is required, but nothing is preventing you from making something up. In either case, real or fictional, I won’t disclose your email address 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 your comment.

Whether or not you leave a comment, your computer will provide varying levels of information about you, including your IP address. I will do what I can to keep this information private, as with email addresses. I assume my hosting provider will likewise treat this information as private. 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.

If you gave me money, it would be through a third party and they would be responsible for your financial privacy. I would just save or spend it.

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 part of Google.)

(I’ll try to keep this page up-to-date with current “partners.”)

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. You should read FeedBurner’s privacy policy if you have concerns about how they treat collected data. (As of March 9, 2007, they say they will not use the email addresses for any reason other than to send the updates that you request. I’d appreciate hearing from you if this changes and my information is out of date.)

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.

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.

* 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.

Copyright/Licensing

The issues of copyright and licensing are important and key topics of this site and I feel like I should have something particularly striking and cogent to say here. Failing that, I’ll just say:

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

Scott Carpenter’s writings on “Moving to Freedom” may be reprinted with this notice:

Copyright © Scott Carpenter
Originally published at http://www.movingtofreedom.org
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0

…but I’m not all that worried about it for my own stuff. If you use my writing in your own work, I’d appreciate the attribution and a pointer back to this web site. (For incidental use of pictures, it is fine if my name and the license appear only in the filename of the picture. Please include more prominent attribution for more prominent use.)

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.)

I don’t have any software to offer you at the moment, but if/when I do, it will almost certainly be released under the GNU General Public License (GPL).

Comments

As also noted in the comments form, you agree to license your comments under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, version 3.0 or later as published by the Creative Commons organization. You retain copyright, of course. 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. (Comments previous to 9 March 2009 are licensed under the 2.5 version of the BY-SA license.)

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.

The “Moving to Freedom” web site is not a democracy. It’s my place on the Web. I reserve the right to delete any comment for any reason, but again there’s the hope that I’ll use this power for good and not for evil. There’s a line somewhere between deleting abusive, unhelpful comments and deleting comments that I disagree with. Sadly, it can even be hard to differentiate between spam and a brief compliment. I hope it’s not hard to tell which is which. I’ll count on your feedback if you object to any heavy-handedness or outright incompetence in my moderation/censorship. David Brin likes to cite an aphorism: CITOKATE. It’s not often pleasant to be criticized, of course, but he may be right.

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 and computer-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 for Google searches of your site. (As far as I know.) Sometimes I show other AdSense blocks. I’m interested in trying different advertising methods that are as unobtrusive as possible and above board. I think I need a lot more traffic to make any kind of decent money. Another “problem” is that I think most of my visitors are savvy browsers who don’t click on ads. :-) I know I almost never do.

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.

If you want to buy ad space directly from me for text or image ads, please send me an email. Depending on the product or service, I could find you some space above the fold. (I’d use the “no follow” tag for the links.) As of March 2007, I’m getting 300-500 pageviews per day. I can be had for cheap right now — let’s say $15-$30 per month (or two!) depending on the size and placement of the ad. (I realize I just said that my visitors don’t click on ads, but that doesn’t mean you won’t get your name out there to intelligent people with disposable income.)

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 special links to Amazon in the sidebar and 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.

Direct Payment. Currently this may be done via the Moving to Freedom Amazon Honor System page.