Introduction

This is the combined privacy policy for A Consuming Experience, A Health Experience and A Human Experience - blogs owned by Improbulus, who can be contacted by email at Gmail.com via the username Improbulus. It applies to information collected about visitors to any of these blogs.

If you visit one of these blogs, you'll get a cookie; probably more than one. Sorry, you can't eat it. Your computer can, though. See below for more on cookies, how to stop getting them and how to delete them.

In the section below, "we" means "me", Improbulus, because it's just little me here at ACE and AHEx2 so "we" sounds a lot more important and a lot less lonely. It would also be nice to be royalty, too, but we're not holding our breath.

This privacy policy / privacy notice page may get updated from time to time, especially if privacy laws change or if the companies mentioned below change their practices.

Privacy policy / privacy notice

When anyone visits one of our blogs, details of standard routine administrative information like internet logs and visitor behaviour patterns are automatically collected via cookies, see further below, so that we can find out things like how many visitors viewed a particular blog post (no one visited that post today at all? But I sweated blood over it. Wail).

That information is collected in such a way that it doesn't personally identify anyone specifically. In fact, we don't try to personally identify any of our visitors.

Visitor statistics

These blogs incorporate the Google Analytics and Statcounter tools to help analyse how our blogs are used. They're analytical tools which employ "cookies" (text files saved on the visitor's computer) to collect standard internet log information and visitor behaviour information, all in an anonymous form.

Information generated by their cookie about visitors' use of our blogs is sent to Google or Statcounter, whosever saved the cookie. It has to be, because they send their own cookies and host the analytical tools which they offer on their own websites.

The info collected by those tools is then used to produce statistical reports for us (not viewable by the general public), with pretty graphs and maps, relating to website activity and visitors’ use of our blogs (e.g. did lots of people visit this new post? Yay! And - aha, so this is the most popular blog post ever. Or - Ooh this post is really popular. Maybe we oughta write more on the subject).

The standard info collected includes the date and time you visited, the web browser and operating system of the computer you used (e.g. Internet Explorer and Windows Vista), your IP (Internet Protocol) address (which is the numerical internet address of the computer you're using to visit the blog), and the Internet address of the website from which you clicked a link to reach our blog, so that we can send the referring website a real cookie - or a "thank you", at least. But the info collected can't and won't include details of your name, email, address or phone number.

We won't use the tools to track or collect any personally identifiable information about visitors to any of our blogs (don't know how, don't think it's possible based on the info collected by the tools anyway).

We won't link or try to link any data collected from our blogs with any personally identifying information from any other source (ditto, plus we can't think what other sources we might have, which sounds a little sad, but we did say we're all on our ownsome here).

Google says that it won't associate your IP address with any other data it holds, and both Google and Statcounter each say that they won't link or try to link an IP address with the identity of an individual computer user (see Google's privacy policy and Statcounter's privacy policy).

Other Google stuff - ads, comments, search

Our blogs are signed up with Google AdSense so that blog posts will display ads to visitors. That's how we fund the internet connection we need to put up the posts and to do the background research for the blogs.

Google is, wouldja believe it, a third party - not even remotely owned or controlled by us. We wish; we could certainly do with the dosh. And the Segways.

The information gleaned about visits to our blogs and to other websites, which is stored in the DoubleClick DART cookies, is used by Google and its partners to serve ads on these blogs (and on other web sites) to visitors, based on their visits to these blogs and/or other sites on the Internet. Hopefully the goods or services advertised will be of interest to you, although we got an ad about pole dancing lessons displayed in Gmail once, and the email concerned had nothing to do with pole dancing. Honest.

If you want more information about DART cookies, including your option to not let Google use your information, go to the Google ad and content network privacy policy page and follow the instructions there, e.g. click the Opt Out button. Links about cookies generally are provided later below. (Google might use web beacons too - we're not sure as this page refers to them, but this page doesn't. Anyway, if they have 'em they'll serve the same function as the cookies. For more on web beacons see the link in the Yahoo! section below.)

Comments. If, in order to comment on a post in one of our blogs, you log in to your Google Account (instead of just commenting anonymously), then, well, you've logged in to your Google Account haven't you, so Google's privacy policy will apply. (Same thing if you log in via OpenID - you'll need to check the privacy policy of your OpenID provider in that case.) The comments pages of our blogs just let you login with third parties; once you've logged in, your privacy as between you and them is, of course, between you and them. Not us. We'd be surprised if cookies weren't involved though.

Search. If you use the search boxes on our blogs, the search facility is provided by Google / Blogger so from a privacy viewpoint it's pretty much the same as if you did a search direct on Google's search pages, except that you'll just be searching the webpages of the blog you're on rather than the whole Googlified InterWebs, and you'll still get the DART cookies unless you opted out. In other words, it ain't us guv, it's down to Google, who might collect your search info in the way they normally do when you search direct on their site. In case you want those links again: Google's privacy policy; Google ad and content network privacy policy page.

Other third party widgets - Yahoo, MyBlogLog, Del.icio.us

A Consuming Experience uses widgets for Delicious (the tagometer) and MyBlogLog (Recent Readers widget), both of which are owned by Yahoo. We might add those widgets to our other blogs too if and when we ever get the time.

Those widgets use cookies and web beacons, all of which go back to Yahoo, Delicious and/or MyBlogLog.

MyBlogLog's Privacy Policy says:

"When you visit a site that is using MyBlogLog's Recent Readers widget, our system will add your profile picture to the widget, where it will be displayed for a period of time. The only way that the site knows that you have visited is to view the widget as you can. No person-specific information is provided to the site in any other way. Site-by-site control of where your profile picture appears will be provided, but is not available yet. Similarly, the site publisher will be able to ban the appearance of specific profile pictures from the widget and will no longer know when those individual MyBlogLog users visit their site. That feature is also not yet available."

In addition, MyBlogLog is supposed to help blog owners track which and how many outgoing links in their blog posts have been clicked, and show total clicks to visitors who hover over the link, but the display doesn't seem to be working at the moment, and even if it works we have no idea if Yahoo records IP address information together with the click. Yahoo really ought to explain that.

Yahoo do collect IP addresses of visitors who just view any of our blogs, like Google Analytics and Statcounter do (see the MyBlogLog privacy policy for what they do with the IP addresses, looks pretty innocuous to us though they don't seem to guarantee not to identify visitors personally). Anyway, you can opt out of MyBlogLog's data collection if you like. And/or delete their cookies, see below.

Yahoo don't provide a specific privacy policy statement for the Delicious tagometer (they really ought to), so see the general Del.icio.us privacy policy. We just use the tagometer to make it easier for visitors to add a blog post quickly to their Delicious bookmarks, and also to check out who else has already bookmarked that post and how many.

Obviously, this means that the Delicious profile of anyone who has bookmarked one of our blog posts on Delicious can be found from that post by just following the link, but that link goes to the Delicious site, which alas is not part of the vast Improbulus empire but belongs to Yahoo, so your privacy there is up to them. Obviously you'll only be identifiable there to the extent you gave your personal details when you signed up with Delicious. When you bookmark a webpage or blog post via Delicious, obviously Delicious know about it. Again, see the Delicious privacy policy for more info. And here's the Yahoo general privacy policy for luck.

Actually collecting personal info

If we ever decide we'd like to collect personally identifiable information from you via any of our blogs, we'll make it very clear that we're going to do it and we'll explain the purpose of the collection and what we intend to do with the info. (It won't be to sell your details to the highest or indeed any bidder, that's fer sure.)

Very likely, it will only be for a (very infrequent) survey of readers' views, where you can give (or not give) your name or any other info as you wish.

If we run a survey or questionnaire it'll all be entirely voluntary as to whether you take part or not. And it'll be entirely up to you how much if any of it you want to fill in - no coercion, no whips, no cuffs (not without fully informed free consent and the submission of a real chocolate chip cookie, at the very least).

Cookie management for privacy control

By now you'll have gathered that cookie management has nothing to do with hiding your favourite biscuits away from your child, partner, friend, parent or dog.

In order to control your privacy you can set your Web browser (like Internet Explorer) so that it won't accept any cookies. The links below will explain how, and also how to remove existing cookies from your browser. However, some of our blogs' features (and probably other websites) may not work as a result.

For more information on cookies, see www.aboutcookies.org or www.allaboutcookies.org.

Links out to other websites

Our blogs often contain links to other websites (but contain no nuts or seafood).

Obviously this privacy policy only applies to our blogs, so when you click a link to go to another website it'll be their privacy policies which apply in that event as you'll be there, not here (or on any of our blogs), innit.

And equally obviously we're not responsible for, and can't control, the privacy practices, policies or indeed any content of third party websites. So it might be a good idea for you to read their privacy policies.

Important information

No privates were harmed in the making of this privacy policy.

We're in very good odour with the Royal Society for the Protection of Privates.

Note (this is a "clearly separated" comment on the ICO privacy policy):

Some bits of this privacy policy are very, very, very loosely based on ideas in the UK Information Commissioner's excellent privacy policy for their own website, but clearly have been altered and amended by us virtually beyond recognition. Of course the ICO have nothing to do with us or vice versa, and they certainly can't be held responsible for this privacy policy or any of these blogs, nor have they approved any part of them in any way. Just in case this paragraph is needed for any ICO copyright issues...


Last updated 16 August 2009