Privacy Policy

Privacy is an increasingly important consideration when we are online. To build trust in our product we have a number of policies in place that we hope taken together show that we are genuinely committed to protecting your privacy.

We have a few fundamental principles:

• We don’t ask you for personal information unless we truly need it. (We don’t understand why some services that ask you for things like your age, gender, first school or income level for no particular reason.)
• We don’t share your personal information with anyone except to comply with the law, develop our products, or protect our rights.
• We don’t store personal information on our servers unless required for the on-going operation of one of our services but for no longer than is necessary.
• In our blogging / website product, we aim to make it as simple as possible for you to control what’s visible to the public, seen by search engines, kept private, or permanently deleted.
• When you decide to leave, you can export your content and delete your account permanently.
• When a bad blogger tries to sign up, perhaps to peddle SPAM or worse, we will intervene quickly to protect our users and the integrity of our platform.

Below is our privacy policy which incorporates these goals: (Note, we’ve adapted this privacy policy, available under a Creative Commons Sharealike license, which means you’re more than welcome to repurpose it for your own use, we acknowledge our debt to our friends at Automattic and WordPress.com).

If you have questions about accessing or correcting your personal data please contact our support team.

Sustaining Dunbar operates several websites. It is Sustaining Dunbar’s policy to respect your privacy regarding any information we may collect while operating our websites.

Website Visitors

Like most website operators, Sustaining Dunbar collects non-personally-identifying information of the sort that web browsers and servers typically make available, such as the browser type, language preference, referring site, and the date and time of each visitor request. Sustaining Dunbar’s purpose in collecting non-personally identifying information is to better understand how Sustaining Dunbar’s visitors use its website. From time to time, Sustaining Dunbar may release non-personally-identifying information in the aggregate, e.g., by publishing a report on trends in the usage of its website.

Sustaining Dunbar also collects potentially personally-identifying information like Internet Protocol (IP) addresses for logged in users and for users leaving comments on OurLocality.org websites and blogs. Sustaining Dunbar only discloses logged in user and commenter IP addresses under the same circumstances that it uses and discloses personally-identifying information as described below, except that blog commenter IP addresses are visible and disclosed to the administrators of the blog where the comment was left.

Gathering of Personally-Identifying Information

Certain visitors to Sustaining Dunbar’s websites choose to interact with Sustaining Dunbar in ways that require Sustaining Dunbar to gather personally-identifying information. The amount and type of information that Sustaining Dunbar gathers depends on the nature of the interaction. For example, we ask visitors who sign up for a blog or website at OurLocality.org to provide a username and email address. Those who engage in transactions with Sustaining Dunbar – by purchasing access to the Akismet comment spam prevention service, for example – are asked to provide additional information, including as necessary the personal and financial information required to process those transactions. In each case, Sustaining Dunbar only collects such information only insofar as is necessary or appropriate to fulfill the purpose of the visitor’s interaction with Sustaining Dunbar. Sustaining Dunbar does not disclose personally-identifying information other than as described below. And visitors can always refuse to supply personally-identifying information, with the caveat that it may prevent them from engaging in certain website-related activities.

Aggregated Statistics

Sustaining Dunbar may collect statistics about the behavior of visitors to its websites. For instance, Sustaining Dunbar may monitor the most popular blogs on the OurLocality.org site or use spam screened by the Akismet service to help identify spam. Sustaining Dunbar may display this information publicly or provide it to others. However, Sustaining Dunbar does not disclose personally-identifying information other than as described below.

Protection of Certain Personally-Identifying Information

Sustaining Dunbar discloses potentially personally-identifying and personally-identifying information only to those of its employees, contractors and affiliated organizations that (i) need to know that information in order to process it on Sustaining Dunbar’s behalf or to provide services available at Sustaining Dunbar’s websites, and (ii) that have agreed not to disclose it to others. Some of those employees, contractors and affiliated organizations may be located outside of your home country; by using Sustaining Dunbar’s websites, you consent to the transfer of such information to them. Sustaining Dunbar will not rent or sell potentially personally-identifying and personally-identifying information to anyone. Other than to its employees, contractors and affiliated organizations, as described above, Sustaining Dunbar discloses potentially personally-identifying and personally-identifying information only when required to do so by law, or when Sustaining Dunbar believes in good faith that disclosure is reasonably necessary to protect the property or rights of Sustaining Dunbar, third parties or the public at large. If you are a registered user of an Sustaining Dunbar website and have supplied your email address, Sustaining Dunbar may occasionally send you an email to tell you about new features, solicit your feedback, or just keep you up to date with what’s going on with Sustaining Dunbar and our products. We primarily use our various product blogs to communicate this type of information, so we expect to keep this type of email to a minimum. If you send us a request (for example via a support email or via one of our feedback mechanisms), we reserve the right to publish it in order to help us clarify or respond to your request or to help us support other users. Sustaining Dunbar takes all measures reasonably necessary to protect against the unauthorized access, use, alteration or destruction of potentially personally-identifying and personally-identifying information.

Cookies

A cookie is a string of information that a website stores on a visitor’s computer, and that the visitor’s browser provides to the website each time the visitor returns. Ourlocality uses cookies to help us identify and track visitors, their usage of the website, and their website access preferences. Ourlocality and subsite visitors who do not wish to have cookies placed on their computers should set their browsers to refuse cookies before using Ourlocality’s websites, with the drawback that certain features may not function properly without the aid of cookies.

Ads

Ads no longer appear on any of our websites, since we’ve suspended our use of Google Search tools.

All other advertising, especially affiliate ads should be reported to us, as they are prohibited by our Terms of Service.  For completeness cookies allow the ad server to recognize your computer each time they send you an online advertisement to compile information about you or others who use your computer. This information allows advertising networks to, among other things, deliver targeted advertisements that they believe will be of most interest to you. This Privacy Policy covers the use of cookies by Ourlocality, also covers the use of cookies by any advertisers, though if you followed what was said above this an academic point.

Some of our sites have Addthis, with social plugins like G+, Twitter and Facebook Like, we don’t actively promote these services any longer.

We feel that any tracking activity on our hosted websites which is beyond our or your control may not be in keeping with our policies. Bear in mind that you as a user can selectively block cookies, but in practice only a handful know what this really involves. Rather than forcing our consent mechanism on all our hosted sites we will allow site owners to decide themselves whether they wish to get users consent.

Comments

Comments and other content submitted to the so-called Akismet anti-spam service are not saved on our servers unless they were marked as false positives, in which case we store them long enough to use them to improve the service to avoid future false positives.

Analytics & Logs

We use various analytics packages to gather summary statistics. We look at the ones that we have control over. If you gather your own statistics, you are still governed by this privacy statement, which to our knowledge makes it possible to get at information like an IP address, the username, but this is as personal as it gets. Our webserver collects logs of every visit, robot or human. Believe it or not we look at this from time to time, but only for the purposes of fixing problems. We have a range of security programs operating in the background that will block repeated attempts to login, track and ban IP persistent addresses and a lot more.

Privacy Policy Changes

Although most changes are likely to be minor, Sustaining Dunbar may change its Privacy Policy from time to time, and in Sustaining Dunbar’s sole discretion. Sustaining Dunbar encourages visitors to frequently check this page for any changes to its Privacy Policy. If you have a OurLocality.org account, you should also check your blog’s dashboard for alerts to these changes.

Continued use of this site after any change in this Privacy Policy will constitute your acceptance of such change.

Last Updated: 20 December 2017 Headings highlighted and a number of minor points of clarification

Previous updates

Updated: 16 September 2015 @ 10:37 by Our Locality (to announce suspension of our use of our Google Search Tool which carried adverts)

31 May, 2012 (Changes to Cookies, Analytics, Ads – mainly fuller explanations)

26 May, 2011 @ 13:33 by Our Locality
30 April, 2011 @ 23:00 by Our Locality
22 October, 2010 @ 9:36 by Our Locality
6 October, 2010 @ 9:59 by Our Locality