Foreign Perspectives

This is really in the interests of clarity so I’ll try not to let too much legalese slip in.

I’m very much a person who respects personal privacy so you’ll not be finding me selling your e-mail address elsewhere. That said, clearly if you quote your e-mail address within a comment and I approve it, then it’s obviously going to be distributed worldwide (this doesn’t apply if you enter your e-mail in the little box on the comment form). If you’d like to rescind a comment after it’s been approved I can delete it but this may not remove all traces of it from the Internet.

Any comments that you may make will be published on the Internet if I approve them ie there’s zero privacy for what you write as a comment. I’m in charge of this blog and may censor or edit any comments before or after publication; any edits will usually be noted unless it’s something trivial and I’ll not be intentionally twisting your own words to say something totally different within your comment.

If you subscribe to the RSS feed by way of a reader or by e-mail then obviously some personal information will be recorded (eg your e-mail address) but I’ll not be publishing this or selling it on elsewhere. It’s my understanding that the various services that offer this facility have some kind of privacy policy and wouldn’t be selling your details either but obviously I don’t have any control over them.

When you access the blog or click on the links or advertising, then various pieces of logging software record what you’re doing. Usually this isn’t traceable to you personally but in some cases it may be and sites which you click out to may well have entirely different approaches to what they’ll do with your personal information. I use these logs for statistical purposes and, usually, neither want to nor am capable of linking a log entry with an individual.

Information recorded as above may be processed in various countries with very different views on the privacy of personal information. I don’t have any control over that.

Finally, in the unlikely event that a competent authority requires me to hand over the information recorded as above I may have to do so. I can’t honestly see this happening anytime soon but to avoid any conflicts between my own beliefs on personal privacy and what the law says I intend to, if/when applicable, remove any e-mail addresses/IP addresses recorded for comments that appear to fall into a category that some competent authority may wish to require me to provide full details about. In principle, that would leave the relevant information only in my brain and frankly with my memory they’d be pretty unlikely to retrieve it.