Privacy policy
Last updated: 27 May 2010.
We take the issue of Internet privacy (what happens to people's personal information) very seriously.
Here (in plain English) are full details explaining what information our site collects from you and what happens to it after that.
What information do we collect?
Like every other website on the Net, our site is hosted on a web server (a powerful computer at our ISP) that keeps a log of all the pages and graphics it serves and where it sends them to. This information is essentially anonymous and statistical: it tells us how many people from Iceland looked at our site last Thursday, but it doesn't tell us anything personal about them. We don't know who those people were, whether they were fishermen or fighter pilots, or what colour socks they were wearing at the time.
The logs don't tell us who you are or where you live—but they do record your IP number (a number that uniquely identifies your computer). They also note what you looked at or downloaded, the operating system and browser you're using, the date and time of your visit, how you came to our site, and so on. Here is an example of one line from our log, recording one hit from one visitor using the (made-up) IP number 12.34.56.78:
12.34.56.78 - - [25/May/2010:13:05:41 +0100] "GET /transformers.html HTTP/1.0" 200 19986 "http://www.google.co.in/search?hl=en&q=why+we+use+transformers&meta=&aq=4m&aqi=g-c1g-m4&aql=&oq=use+transformers&gs_rfai=" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1)"
What can we deduce from this? That someone using computer 12.34.56.78 wanted to find out "why we use transformers" at 13:05 on Tuesday May 25 2010. They used Google India to get to our site, which they viewed using a Mozilla/Firefox browser running under Windows. That's about it. The information logged here is not personally identifiable, so we don't know who made this search or why—and frankly, we don't care.
How do we use this information? Contrary to what we've said, we don't actually look at our raw access logs: a typical day's log has hundreds of thousands of entries like the one above! Instead, we run the logs through a statistical package called AWStats to show up daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly patterns in how people use our site. (If you're really interested, you can see a demo of the kind of statistics that we can see.) What does this tell us? If we know certain pages are unpopular, we can improve them or discontinue them. If we know our server is about to crash because too many people are looking at our global warming page again, we can get a bigger server. If we know our RSS feeds are growing in popularity, we will start to update them more often. This is the kind of thing we do with our logs. Broadly speaking, they help us improve our website so it better meets your needs.
Our website hosting system keeps each log until the end of the current month and then erases it before starting a new one for the next month. So the absolute maximum amount of time for which information about your visit to our site is retained on our system is one month. (If you visit on the 31st of the month, the information is kept for only a day.)
We do not use cookies—but our advertisers and affiliate partners do
Explainthatstuff.com does not use cookies (small files stored on a web browser). That means we don't offer a way for you to opt-out of having your information collected or a way to remove your personal information from our records—simply because we don't collect any information about you. None whatsoever.
Please be aware, however, that our website runs advertisements on most pages and we sometimes participate in affiliate programs (partnerships with online shopping websites). The advertisers and affiliate partners we work with use cookies to help them serve up their advertisements, to track your browsing behavior, to make it easier for you to buy things from them (for example, if you use a shopping cart on a website, that needs a cookie to make it work), and to record the fact that it's our website that sent the traffic to them.
We have no control over these "third-party cookies" (as they are known). We do not see or have access to any information they may store or collect. They pass directly between your computer and the servers run by our advertisers and affiliate partners. If you would like to know more about how our advertisers and affiliate partners may be using cookies, please refer to the privacy policies on their websites for more information.
At the moment, Google and Amazon are the only advertisers and affiliate partners we are working with.
- Google, as a third party vendor, uses cookies (including the DoubleClick DART cookie) to serve advertisements on our website. Google's use of the DART cookie enables it to serve ads to our users based on their visit to our site and other sites on the Internet. You may opt out of the use of the DART cookie by visiting the Google ad and content network privacy policy. You can learn more about how Google safeguards your privacy by visiting Google's Privacy Policy website.
- For detailed information about Amazon's use of cookies and personal information, please visit the Amazon.com Privacy Notice page.
How can you control your privacy?
If you're concerned about cookies, you can change the options in your Web browser to restrict how websites can use them. You can switch off certain cookies, instruct your browser to keep them only for certain periods, or delete cookies altogether. You can set the level of privacy controls you want by looking under Privacy in your browser's options, preferences, or settings. Please be aware that if you do this you may prevent some parts of some websites (such as shopping carts and personal preferences) from working properly.
How can you find out more about privacy issues?
These sites may help you:
- How Cookies Work: From Howstuffworks.
- HTTP cookies: Wikipedia has a fairly lengthy explanation of the issue and links to further information.
We hope this answers any concerns you have about privacy. If you have any further queries, please don't hesitate to contact us at the email address shown on our about us page.