25 Years of Programming Privacy Policy

Who operates the website

This website is owned by an individual, Steven Whitney, who is sole operator and webmaster. In the future, any persons engaged to assist with the site will be required to understand and comply with the site's privacy policy.

I am located in the United States. The server hosting the website is in the United States. 

The site's principal activity is publishing open source software and other content on the internet. It also is the online presence of my consulting business.

For questions or comments about this privacy policy, contact us from the Feedback page.

The short version of our Privacy Policy:

• You can browse this site and use most of its features without disclosing any personal information.
• We only receive personal information about you if you choose to provide it.
• If we do receive personal information from you, we will only use it for the purpose that it appears you intended.
• We will protect your personal information from disclosure to the maximum degree we can, which is a substantially lesser degree than a large corporation with a secure server can provide.
• We will not sell, rent, or give your personal information to anyone else without your consent unless required to do so by a legal obligation or by an investigation into a serious violation of the Terms of Use in which you appear to be involved.
• Your visit to the site generates information that does not identify you personally. That information is used for site usage analysis and other purposes.
• Our Discussion Forum uses a browser cookie to keep you logged in.
• We use the Google Analytics statistical service, which uses a cookie that collects anonymous traffic data. 
• Most of the advertisements on our website use cookies. Some of those are of the type known as "tracking cookies".

You can use the site if you are less than 13 years old, but please do not provide personal information about yourself to anyone while you are here.

If you attempt to hack this site or otherwise violate its Terms of Use, this privacy policy does not apply to you, and information about you will not be kept confidential.

The detailed version of our Privacy Policy:

What information we collect

Active information (information submitted by you)

1. You are free to browse the website without providing any personally identifying information. We only receive personally identifying information about you if you choose to provide it. 
2. If you send us an email, it will contain your return email address. 
3. In order to post messages to the discussion forum, you are required to provide your name and valid email address during a registration process.
4. If you make a donation, we will see your email address that PayPal used for processing your donation.
5. There may in the future be additional areas of the website where you have the option of providing personal information, and there may in the future be features of the website that require it.  

Passive information (information collected automatically when you visit the site)

6. Click-stream data and HTTP protocol elements. When you visit this website (when your browser sends a request to view one of its pages), information that does not identify you personally is sent to this website's server as part of your request. This information includes some items in the following list. Other items in the list may be determined from the information that is automatically sent:

• The unique IP address of your computer. It tells our server which computer to send the requested page to. Your IP address also reveals the name of your Internet Service Provider and where they are located.
• The operating system and browser you are using and their version information.
• The date and time.
• The URL of the webpage you clicked to this site from (the referrer). If the referrer was a search engine, the URL usually contains the search terms that caused this site's page to show up in the results.

Cookies

Cookies are text files that websites write to your computer in a folder that is specially designated for storing them. After a cookie is created, your browser automatically sends it back to the server with each page request. The most important thing a cookie does is uniquely identify your browser in order to maintain continuity during your visit to the site. There is more about cookies at Wikipedia.

There are two types of cookies. Session (temporary) cookies are automatically deleted whenever your close your browser. Persistent cookies remain on your computer to be reused later.

Most browser programs give you the option of allowing or disallowing persistent cookies, session cookies, or both.

The only part of this site where cookies (from 25yearsofprogramming.com) must be allowed is the forum. If you block persistent cookies, you can browse the pages but can't log in. If you also block session cookies, the forum pages won't display properly.

To analyze our traffic statistics, we use Google Analytics which creates a cookie on your computer that collects anonymous site traffic data.

Most of our advertisements are served by outside companies such as Google and Amazon.com. Your browser retrieves each ad from a website that is not ours. Most of the advertisements use cookies that are written and read by the advertiser. Those cookies are not readable or writeable by us. In addition, some of the ads may use web beacons, sometimes known as clear GIFs. 

Google serves ads to our pages from its AdSense program and also from companies that may use what are known as "tracking cookies". By placing their ads on many websites, and reading and writing their cookie on each visit, they can log which sites and pages a user visited. This allows them to deliver ads relevant to a user's interests. One of the tracking cookies used by AdSense is the DoubleClick DART cookie. Google provides a way to "opt out" from the DART cookie being used in your browser (on all sites, not just ours). However, the opt out mechanism uses a cookie and therefore requires that cookies be enabled. We provide a much better alternative in how to block tracking cookies in Internet Explorer and Firefox.

Some ads these days are in the form of Flash movies. Flash provides scripting capabilities that can make it a security and privacy hazard. Google asserts that it monitors the ads served through its network so that maliciously scripted ads cannot slip into the system. Nonetheless, such ads have slipped into other advertising networks, and we provide instructions how to disable Flash.

How personally identifying information is used

Active information

1. We will not sell, rent, or otherwise give your personal information to any third party without your permission except in situations where a) we are required to do so by a legal obligation or b) a preliminary investigation determines that you may be responsible for a site hack attempt or other violation of the site's Terms of Use. If you attempt to hack this site or violate its Terms of Use, this privacy policy does not apply to you, and you cannot expect any of your information to be kept confidential.
2. As a general policy, we will use your personal information only for the purpose for which it appears you provided it.
3. Completion and support of the current activity. If you provide personal information such as your name and email address in an email and wish a reply, we may use it to reply to your message or respond to your request. 
4. Donations privacy. If you make a donation through PayPal, we receive your email address as part of the transaction confirmation. We won't use it to contact you unless a) some aspect of completing the transaction requires it, or b) you ask us to reply.
5. We have no guidelines for how long to keep personal information that you provide. We delete information in the normal course of events at whatever time it seems to be no longer needed.

Passive information

6. We may use logged or tabulated click-stream, HTTP protocol, and site usage reports in the course of system administration, to analyze site usage and traffic patterns, to identify referrers (which external site this site's visitors are coming from), and to improve site functionality.
7. Data that is aggregated or not personally identifying may be provided to third parties. Hypothetical examples of such information would be, "90 people viewed the Vintage Computing page last week" or "38% of this site's traffic last month came through ISPs located in New York City." 
8. We review the search terms that caused this site to turn up in search engine result pages, primarily to determine what new information should be added to the site to make it more useful.
9. In general, the restrictions that do and should apply to the use of information that personally identifies site visitors do not apply to information that is not personally identifying or that is aggregated. 

Other information

If you submit an email Feedback request, comment, or a suggestion that we think is of general interest, we may edit and use your comments on the FAQ page or elsewhere, but we will not use your name or other information that identifies you without your permission. If the nature of the comment itself would tend to identify you, we won't use it without your permission.

Opt In, Opt Out

We do not have a newsletter or mailing list. There is nothing you need to opt out of. As a general policy, any such features added to the site are "opt in". You will have to make a specific request if you want to receive them. 

If you join the forum, you will receive a registration email, and after joining you will have the option of receiving certain notifications by email, such as when someone replies to a topic you are watching. 

Revising or updating your personal information

You are able to view, revise, or delete the personal information that you provide when you register for membership in the discussion forum.

Site security

This site does not use a secure server (https://) and it does not offer a secure encryption method for data transmission. This means that information sent between your browser and the site could potentially be intercepted and read by others.

If you provide personal information, it may be stored:

1. On the website server. Websites can sometimes get hacked. If this were to happen, personal information stored on the server could be compromised. You should not put unnecessary personal information in emails or other communications.
2. On a website administrator's computer that is used to access and maintain the site. This is likely to be a personal computer in a residence and thus inherently insecure.

Children's privacy

This website is not directed at children, but it may be used by persons of any age, and its content is intended to be suitable for persons of any age who can understand it.

We do not knowingly collect personally identifying information from children under the age of 13. If personal data is inadvertently collected from or about anyone under the age of 13, it will be promptly deleted.

If you are under the age of 13, please do not give personal information about yourself on this website. Please don't use your full name, and don't give anyone your email address.

Violations of this website's Terms of Use

If you attempt to hack this site or otherwise violate its Terms of Use, this privacy policy does not apply to you, and information about you will not be kept confidential.

Changes to this privacy policy

Changes to this privacy policy will appear in the form of changes to this web page. Changes will not be announced by email. Significant revisions may be announced in the News section of the Home page.

Outside sites

This site contains links to other websites, including advertisers, that have different privacy policies. You should always review the privacy policy of a website, especially before you give it any of your personal information.

Privacy Best Practices

1. Any information, personal or otherwise, that you post to a message board or forum becomes visible to anyone on the internet. It can be collected and used, or misused, by others. Do not post anything that you do not want to become public. 

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Copyright ©2009 Steven Whitney. Last modified 04/06/2009.