My Totally Amazing Privacy Policy

I'm genuinely surprised when anyone clicks these things.

Because most of the time, there's not much point in reading a privacy policy. The kind of jargon in these documents might be great for dispensing with legal obligations - but it's too ridiculous to genuinely communicate anything to anyone.

This time around, instead of doing that, I will try using plain English to explain what visitor data I collect and what I do with it.

Google Analytics

I have Google Analytics installed on this website.

This is a wildly popular web analytics and statistics service. It uses a combination of javascript and browser cookies to spy on you.

None of the information collected by Google Analytics is personally identifying in any way. It's more or less just stuff about what browser you're using, how you found the site and what pages you're looking at and so on. Nothing sensational.

It's possible to use Google Analytics to do genuinely useful things like measuring how different bits of content are performing or to track which sources of traffic provide the most money. When I'm working for a client that's exactly how I use it.

When it comes to this site though, I usually use Google Analytics only to see how many people from how many countries are reading my stuff, and then have a good long think about how great I am.

This data gets stored on a Google server somewhere. I'm not sure where exactly: they're Google, they've got a lot of computers. I'll guess it's the USA? Honestly I don't know.

If you're really that fussed about it, you could read Google's privacy policy and have a think about what it must be like to be one of the lawyers who writes this kind of stuff full time. I assume they get paid well but geez that must be a painful job. One of the nice things about being an independent contractor is that if you want to just gratuitously mention your testicles in the middle of your privacy policy then there's really nothing stopping you.

I don't sell or give this visitor data to anyone else. Nobody has access to these juicy details about your screen size and the city you live in except for myself, Google, and probably the NSA.

Server Logs

Apart from Google Analytics, some visitor data gets recorded to the server logs. I don't look at these, but I'm vaguely aware that they're there.

I have no idea what specific information gets recorded on a server log. I hope I never find out. It sounds really boring.

I guess if you were really anxious to know what gets written to a server log then you could go and learn Apache and get right into the nitty gritty of it. I'm happy to leave that one to you.

Call me on +61 421 551 080 or email me using the contact form.

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