P3P Privacy Policy for brucew.com
Updated Wednesday December 8, 2004
What is P3P?
The Platform for Privacy Preferences Project (P3P), developed by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), is emerging as an industry standard providing a simple, automated way for you to gain more control over the use of your personal information on Web sites you visit.
At its most basic level, P3P is a standardized set of multiple-choice questions, covering all the major aspects of a Web site’s privacy policies. Taken together, they present a clear snapshot of how a site handles personal information about its visitors.
P3P enabled Web sites make this information available in a standard, machine-readable format. P3P enabled browsers can “read” this snapshot automatically and compare it to your own set of privacy preferences.
P3P enhances user control, with documents such as this one, by putting privacy policies where you can find them, in a form (we hope) you can understand, and most importantly, it enables you to act upon what you see.
About Us
This is the privacy policy for brucew.com. Our homepage on the Web is located at http://www.brucew.com/. You are reading the full text of our privacy policy on the Web at http://www.brucew.com/w3c/privacy.shtml.
Except for the Scenic Route Notify List (see below), we do not have an “opt-in” or “opt-out” page because we don’t collect data about our visitors other than by the access logs (see below) that are a built-in function of Apache HTTP Server. There is nothing to opt-in to or opt-out of.
We invite you to contact us if you have questions about or issues with this policy. You may contact us by postal mail at the following address:
Bruce Wilbur brucew.com 228 Goodman St N #7 Rochester, NY 14607-1157 USA
You may contact us by e-mail at .
Dispute Resolution and Privacy Seals
We have no privacy seals or other assurance mechanisms.
In plain English, this means we cannot afford to pay the outrageous fees charged by the various authentication services. You’ll just have to trust that we are who we say we are, that the statements made in this policy are true and that we’ll do our best to resolve any disputes over this policy that you may have.
Data Collection
P3P policies declare the data they collect in groups (also referred to as “statements”). This policy contains one (1) data group.
Group “Access Log Information”
Our web server collects the following data each time any file on our site is accessed:
Navigation and click-stream data
User’s interaction with a page or resource
More specifically, it collects and saves information is what is known as “Apache HTTP Server combined log format”. This includes:
Client’s IP address or hostname
Request date and time
URI of requested resource
HTTP request method
Data bytes in response
Response status code
Last URI requested by the user
Search terms
User agent (browser) information
Computer operating system information
These data are used for the following purposes:
Completion and support of the current activity
Web site and system administration
Research and development
Anonymous user analysis
Anonymous user profiling and decision-making
These data are used by ourselves and our agents and are retained in a private directory of our server for up to three (3) months and are archived offline indefinitely. The following explanation is provided for why these data are collected:
Our Web server collects access logs containing this information.
Note: In the passworded sections of brucew.com, we additionally log usernames from both valid and invalid attempts to access the passworded directories. This is to grant access to legitimate subscribers and deny access to those who do not subscribe. Further, we analyze this information, in concert with that described above, in order to determine whether or not passwords have been shared with unauthorized persons or organizations.
Additional Information
This policy is valid for one (1) week from the time it is loaded by a client. In other words, if your web browser supports this feature, it will check no more than once a week for an updated version of this policy.
Cookies
A cookie is an element of data that a Web site can send to your browser, which may then in turn, store it on your system.
“Good” cookies are a technology which can be used to provide you with tailored information from a Web site such as shopping carts or remembering your personal preferences.
“Bad” cookies enable a party to collect personal information about you and track your web browsing activity on sites other than their own without your consent or knowledge.
You can set your browser to notify you when you receive a cookie, giving you the chance to decide whether or not to accept it. Newer browsers (see below) let you change your privacy settings to automatically accept or refuse cookies based upon their nature and origin.
We do not make use of HTTP cookies.
Just on general principles, we recommend you change your browser’s privacy settings to automatically refuse all “third-party” (also called “foreign”) cookies.
For information on how to view and change your cookie privacy settings:
in Firefox and Mozilla, see Using Privacy Features.
in IE6, see Microsoft’s Security and Privacy page.
in Netscape, see Netscape Security Center.
in Opera, see Protect Your Personal Information and Security.
Policy Evaluation
Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 will evaluate this policy’s compact policy whenever it is used with a cookie. IE6 examines whether the cookie’s policy is considered satisfactory or unsatisfactory, whether the cookie is a session cookie or a persistent cookie, and whether the cookie is used in a first-party or third-party context. The actions IE will take depends on what privacy level you have selected, (Low, Medium, Medium High, or High; the default is Medium).
Satisfactory policy: This policy is considered satisfactory according to the rules defined by Internet Explorer 6. If we were to use cookies, (remember that we don’t) IE6 would accept cookies accompanied by this policy under the privacy settings High, Medium High, Medium, Low, and Accept All Cookies.
E-mail Addresses
Although not part of the P3P specification, what we do with your e-mail address if you send us mail is an important consideration. Whenever you send e-mail to anyone, you are also giving them your e-mail address. If that didn’t happen, how would they reply?
So what do we do with yours? The answer is, nothing. Except, of course, using it to reply to your note. When you e-mail us we treat your reply address as confidential. We hate spam as much as most people do. We will never sell or give your address to spammers, or to anyone else for that matter. We may, from time to time, send you a personal note, just as any other friend might.
NOTIFY LIST: The Scenic Route Notify List service may look like an outside service, but that’s only because we have been too lazy to customize the software. The script runs entirely on our server and sends no information to the programmer who wrote the script.
This is a private list. Brucew is the only one who can post to it. Subscribers receive an e-mail each time I update the Journal. Expect to get mail from the list every week or so. That’s about how often I’ve been updating lately.
I don’t use the list or your e-mail address for any other purpose and I certainly won’t give your address or access to the list to spammers or anyone else. There are no tracking mechanisms contained in the emails sent from the list. The address list is stored in a secure directory on the server and backed-up offline every time there is a subscription or unsubscription.
This is a “double-opt-in” list, which means you must sign up here and follow the instructions you’ll receive in the confirming email. You may unsubscribe from the list using the same screen where you sign up or by clicking the unsubscribe link sent in every email from the list.
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