By law, any place where data is collected about an individual must be governed by a privacy policy. This makes lawyers feel all moist because they still have a job, and makes the rest of us feel inadequate. It’s largely to do with legalese being the fifth cousin, twice removed, of Bengali.
To counter this and hopefully put a few overpaid lawyers out of business, this policy is as laymanesque as possible. It goes.. a little something… like this:
Before you complain
I will not rent, steal, sell, swap, disclose, inject, imbibe or otherwise give a second glance at your name, IP address or email address unless your comments inspire a response. I may, however, taunt your record collection. Under the circumstances whereby I deem your communiqué worthy of a reply, I may hit a such-named button in my email client and, if that fails for whatever reason, reserve the right to copy ‘n’ paste your name and email address from your original message into a fresh ‘un in order to communicate with you.
Past that, I don’t give a rat’s arse who you are. If you swallow your legs, I will not be held liable for your stupidity: deal with it and move on. If you send an s.o.s. to the world, Stef Dawson will not be held liable for your musical tastes should you get caught. Similarly, I wasn’t there when you tripped over that penguin. Let litigation lie (and also avoid alliteration).
Reading large quantities of text can damage your eyesight, as can poking swordfish into your eyes. Do neither and you should be okay. If everything goes blank while reading this site, check the power supply or your batteries; you are not necessarily blind as a result of the words. If that fails, try opening your eyes.
Please note that your home is at risk if you do not follow the advice on the bottle. Do not exceed the stated dose and seek medical attention if terms and conditions apply. Manilla envelopes are not a basic food group. The editor’s decision is to keep up repayments on any loan secured against him. No correspondence about ending sentences with prepositions shall be entered into. There is no ewbank.
At the end of the day, I’m a storyteller and hobbyist coder doing my bit for open source software and writing for my own amusement and my clients. My server collects basic IP address information about every page view for automated detection of fraudulent hacking/access attempts by scripts and bots, and for spam control. That’s it. I can barely remember the last time I looked at them.
The logs are purged periodically – disk space isn’t cheap and keeping useless data around slows down the site. Records are only logged in the unlikely case I ever need to do any forensics to unearth hacking attempts, and can be bothered to do so.
If any of that makes you feel uncomfortable, fuck off.
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