Tuesday, January 05, 2016

Privacy Policy

Web Developers are forced into posting privacy statements on their sites.

Personally, I find the pre-occupation with privacy statements amusing as the people who are selling user information are better at writing the statements than those who are not.

Unfortunately, I am not independently wealthy and need advertisers so I can pay my web hosting fees. One can make the argument that anyone who uses advertisers is selling user information; thus committing a crime against privacy.

But, as a small web site, I have neither direct access nor receive direct payment for the user information.

The reverse is actually true. So, let's say I was a successful affiliate marketer and ran a great campaign that resulted in hundreds of sales.

The advertisers will take the information that they gather about my campaign and figure out how to cut me out of the picture. Marketing is an ugly business.

Anyway, I hate writing privacy statements. Since I am in directly in the business of selling user information, I usually just fill the statements with silly jokes.

But, this time I decided to do something different.

Last month I wrote a program to view the web code on my site; So, I rigged my privacy policy  so that it shows the code I use to log hits and shows all of the information I've collected on the visitor's IP address. Here is the Source Code for Log_Hit().

I repeat. I have to track information on my site to monitor performance and to defend against DDOS attacks. In a DDOS attack, I have to start blocking the attacking IPs.

Small web sites don't have enough data to violate your privacy. It's the big players that you have to worry about. Unfortunately, the privacy rights advocates are forcing small sites to apologize for cookies and intrusive large companies that the small sites simply cannot control.

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