Privacy Policy

Privacy Policy

Your privacy is important to us. Therefore, we minimize any intrusions while balancing this with the need to keep the site operating securely and free of charge.

In order to do that, we adhere to industry standards and follow that evolution.

Logs

The logs kept on this website are industry standard logs and are used for statistical purposes as well as troubleshooting of issues with the server and/or the interaction of the server with users reporting problems.

Access logs that contain your IP address are removed on a daily basis after statistical analysis. The analysis does not keep track of your IP address. Error logs are kept for a week. This period can be extended during the investigation of (security) incidents as needed up to a maximum of a month.

Logs could also accidentally end up on backups and remain there for a longer period of time off-line. These logs will not be accessed and will be wiped should the backup ever be used.

Cookies

We use session cookies to enhance your experience and to allow statistical analysis of visitor behavior. This analysis is anonymous and aimed to allow to enhance the website and improve your experience.

Session cookies expire at the end of a browser session and hence cannot be used to track you long-term nor across websites. We use only standard tools like Google Analytics or heatmap tools which are collecting anonymous data.

EU and EEA considerations

Forum

Due to the GDPR becoming enforceable, we terminated our forum on May 24^th 2018. We cannot assume the risks this legislation poses to us, and hence suggest our visitors to interact with us and each other via a Facebook group.

We are aware of the irony of suggesting our visitors to use Facebook in order for us to comply with a law that is supposed to increase privacy.

Google Adsense

We use Google Adsense tool provided by Google for displaying ads.

Cookies

• We use Google Analytics to understand user’s behavior on the page
• We have globally removed direct advertising from our partners Amazon and Apple and replaced it with our own implementations where the partner cannot track you as long as stay on our website.

We use cookie warning pop-ups for our EU or EEA based visitors.

Contact form

We have disabled our contact form for visitors from the EEA as we do not want to collect personal identifiable information. Users in the EEA are suggested to contact us through e-mail or thru our Facebook page instead.

Youtube embedded content

We have replaced youtube embedded content with content we are serving ourselves where possible.

Where we don’t have the needed rights to serve such content ourselves, we have removed the embedded content for users in the EEA. The embedded content that cannot be replaced by our own content remains available for users outside of the EEA.

Embedded content

As a result of removing embedded content from:

• Amazon advertising
• Apple advertising
• Google custom search engine

for all visitors, and:

• Youtube embedded videos
• Google reCaptcha

for our visitors from the EEA, we are confident we have no more embedded content that any of our partners could use to track our EEA based visitors while they remain on our site.

Facebook

Facebook pages and groups offer “insights” to administrators based on anonymous statistics that give population insights on gender, age, location and language. We cannot disable this information from being made available to us by Facebook, but we pledge not to process, store or make use of it ourselves.

Google Adsense

Google Adsense is a critical revenue source in order to keep this website free for its visitors.

In order to implement Adsense, we have to allow Google to run scripts that will attempt to set cookies when you visit one of the pages with such ads on them.

The content of these cookies and the manner they are handled is completely in control of Google, not of this website.

We do not use any 3rd party network within Google Adsense.

We have disabled interest-based ads: this means that we do not allow Google to use our site to build a picture of what you’re interested in. To completely get rid of it, you have to disable showing what you are interested in built up on other sites directly with Google yourself (see below).

Google Adsense requires this site to warn that Google can use cookies and/or web beacons to collect data in the ad serving process.

These cookies (“DART“) can be used by Google to track your visits on other websites, gauge your interest and allow Google to deliver you ads based on that interest.

You can opt out of interest based advertising.

Read more on Google privacy policies …

More information …

• http://www.youronlinechoices.eu/
• http://www.aboutcookies.org/

California considerations

For our Californian visitors, we have instructed Google Ads to restrict their processing of all traffic from our Californian visitors to be compliant with the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) without the need to opt-out by any individual user.

We believe we have excellent privacy protections in place, well above the industry standards. Hence, we do not react any different to any DNT signals we receive from browsers.

This policy was last updated on Dec 31^st 2020. Effective immediately.