All Your Data Are Belong To Us
On a serious note, this is practical.trading1. And of course we follow the applicable laws, however convoluted and contradictory they may turn out to be. We make that a lot easier by having third party service providers manage all transactional aspects on their sites. That way you don’t need to enter anything private here unless you absolutely want to. We can’t stop you, but we can make it a bit more difficult.
Comments
When visitors leave comments on the site we collect the data shown in the comments form, and also the visitor’s IP address and browser user agent string to help spam detection.
An anonymized string created from your email address (also called a hash) may be provided to the Gravatar service to see if you are using it. The Gravatar service privacy policy is available here: https://automattic.com/privacy/. After approval of your comment, your profile picture is visible to the public in the context of your comment.
We, the government, aliens, companies claiming not to be evil, or other third parties are likely to also scan your comments to establish what sort of person you are, who you are likely to vote for, how much money you have, what your IQ is, how many pets you have, if you are willing to pay $14.99 to sign up for some streaming service, or anything else that might come to some enterprising mind.
Media
If you upload images to the website, you should avoid uploading images with embedded location data (EXIF GPS) included. Visitors to the website can download and extract any location data from images on the website. Sometimes we’ll scan for that stuff and remove it, but it’s not guaranteed. If this makes your favorite “hidden” hideout the favorite of half of the internet, it’ll be on you, not us. If you are a terrorist looking to get to meet them virgins sooner rather than later, please ignore this entire section.
Cookies
If you leave a comment on our site you may opt-in to saving your name, email address and website in cookies. These are for your convenience so that you do not have to fill in your details again when you leave another comment. These cookies will last a year, a decade, or forever, depending on how the cookie policy retention policy happens to be set. It’s probably a good idea for you to set the security preferences in your own web browser to automatically delete any cookies that haven’t been used in a while.
If you visit our login page, we will set a temporary cookie to determine if your browser accepts cookies. This cookie contains no personal data and is discarded when you close your browser. Or so they say. Your mileage may wary. But we don’t intend to use that cookie for marketing or other tracking beyond the one session.
When you log in, we will also set up several cookies to save your login information and your screen display choices. Some of these cookies will be deleted if you log out, or after some predetermined delay. Others might be there forever, or until you delete them from your cookie cache. See above relating to security settings and cookies.
If you edit or publish an article, an additional cookie will be saved in your browser. This cookie includes no personal data and simply indicates the post ID of the article you just edited. It expires after 1 day (as of this writing), but it might stick around longer by accident, or even intentionally if some tool that uses it decides that it’s needed. See above relating to security settings and cookies.
While we’ll likely not include third party advertising on this site, we might change our mind if the volume of visits justifies it. Third party advertising comes in evil, really evil, and absolutely evil varieties, depending on the types of tracking they undertake on unsuspecting visitors. We won’t necessarily know what level of evil our advertising entails, so you might want to consider using browser extensions that limit ad tracking and remove some types of advertising entirely. We use that stuff ourselves, too.
If we happen to link to any third parties, or use their libraries, or get hacked, there will also be other cookies. Most likely they are intended to establish your exact on-line behavior, for example by tracking what sites you visit. Some of those third parties motivate us to enable such cookies by giving us “easy to use tools” to track site visits. Others might pay us some token amount for “advertising”. We will try to limit those things, but they seem to be here to stay. You can limit the effectiveness of such cookies with various web browser extensions, but that topic is beyond the scope of this page and assumes that you are still holding onto the hope of having some privacy left.
If your family circle includes a Girl Scout, you will be subjected to periodic cookie storms even if you are not using our site. Those cookies will not be automatically deleted, and must be consumed by you, your family members, friends, or unsuspecting coworkers. Throwing them into the trash brings bad karma. Don’t do it.
Embedded content from other websites
Articles on this site may include embedded content (e.g. videos, images, articles, etc.). Embedded content from other websites behaves in the exact same way as if the visitor had visited the other website.
Those websites may collect data about you, use cookies, embed additional third-party tracking, and monitor your interaction with that embedded content, especially if you have an account on that third party site, and are logged in to that website.
A good rule of thumb for accessing third party content (and the internet in general) is to think about it as a replay of the careless years of your youth. You can blissfully ignore the dangers for a while, but the longer you do, the more likely you are to be sorry later on. The more appealing something looks, the more you need to be on the lookout. There is no free lunch or Santa Claus. Stay vigilant and assume everyone is out to get you (because they are).
Who we share your data with
If you request a password reset, your IP address will be included in the reset email. If a government three letter agency gives us a National Security letter, if we get sued, if we get subpoenaed, or if we are otherwise forced to surrender data, it’s likely that all your data are belong to them, too. In some cases we can let you know that it’s happening. In others we can’t. We don’t make any promises that we would do so either way.
How long we retain your data
If you leave a comment, the comment and its metadata are retained indefinitely. This is so we can recognize and approve any follow-up comments automatically instead of holding them in a moderation queue.
For users that register on our website (if any), we also store the personal information they provide in their user profile. All users can see, edit, or delete their personal information at any time (except they cannot change their username). Website administrators can also see and edit that information.
Backup copies of the site and databases, and our systems, might retain even deleted data indefinitely. However, if we need to use such backup data, we will try to not include things that were deleted after the backup was made. But for obvious reasons that’s not always going to be possible.
What rights you have over your data
You can request that we erase any personal data we hold about you. This does not include any data we are obliged to keep for administrative, legal, or security purposes.
Also, anything you say or do on the internet might be used against you at one point or another. There are services such as the Internet Archive that archive any public data they can get their hands on. Other companies spend enormous amounts of time to index and otherwise scan the internet for any bits of data they can get their hands on. Governmental 3 letter agencies love to store the entire internet for later retrieval. We have no control over such services, companies, governments, and aliens from outer space.
Where we send your data
Visitor comments may be checked through an automated spam detection service. Some of our web site performance enhancement features might also require for us to send your data to them, though we try to stay away from services that we know to use that data for something other than just making our site perform better. We have no intention of selling your data to anyone, and plan to delete this sentence if that intention were to ever change. Not that we expect anyone to really care about an obscure little site like ours enough to fork over money for its user data.
FOOTNOTES
- We used to be “practicaltrading.com” until an inept hosting provider allowed the registration to expire without notices to us. ↩︎