Sociocratic Democracy Privacy Policy
This website is mine, Sharon Villines, coauthor with John Buck of We the People: Consentinng to a Deeper Democracy. The website address is: https://www.sociocracy.info and this is the privacy policy. I live in Washington DC in Takoma Village Cohousing by the Takoma Metro Station in Northwest. When the White House is ready to learn about sociocratic democracy, I’m here.
How do I, or don’t, collect personal data?
The short answer is I don’t save as much as possible because I don’t care about any personal infomation that could be of use to anyone in case it might be compromising.
Long answer as follows.
Registering and Commenting
When you register to receive updates or to leave a comment, I save your name and email address. Any other information from comments or messages to me, like organizational affiliations or expertise in hot-air ballooning, I only save off-line in my personal records. It is not available to the public or to personal friends (yours or mine).
When you register, an anonymized* string created from your email address (also called a hash) may be provided to the Gravatar service. This is so your very own Gravatar will be visible to the public in the context of your comment. The Gravatar service privacy policy is available here. https://automattic.com/privacy/.
*Means made anonymous, as in undecipherable code. That means no one knows it is yours.
If you don’t have a Gravatar or choose not to use it, I will choose a default avatar to add visual interest to the comments page. Otherwise it would be all words. And no color.
Spam and Statistics
A geeky program that protects the site from spam and keeps gross statistices on total traffice records everyone’s IP address, browser, and country. This data is only useful to answer questions like this one:
How many visits from the US from people who have been here before using Firefox and reading more than one page have there been in the last 3 minutes?
The statistics are also useful to keep my spirits up since I don’t have a bell on a door that rings to let me know someone has visited.
Images
You can’t upload images because they may include some embedded location data (EXIF GPS). Other people and robots could download these and extract the location data. I have not a clue how to double-check for an EXIF GPS. I think it is best to avoid the whole possibility of anyone finding out where anyone else took a photograph by not posting them.
Cookies
When you leave a comment, the program will ask of you want to save your name, email address, and website as a cookie on your computer so when you visit you do not have to fill them in again for one year. There are a bunch of other cookies saved in your browser and deleted when you close our browser, or in 2 hours, or 2 days, etc, depending on what they are. This is just a general disclaimer to improve this privacy policy. These are for various uninteresting technical uses that are of no interest to anyone who wants to sell you shoes.
Embedded content from other websites
Videos and other content on this site may include embedded content other websites and will behave in the exact same way as if you visited the other website. This means if you click on a video that is embedded from YouTube, YouTube will do all the things it does to you when you visit their site.
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.
When you register, your personal informational is saved so you can see, edit, or delete at any time (except you cannot change their username except by deleting your account). I can also see and edit that information but I don’t know why I would want to.
What rights you have over your data
If you have an account on this site, or have left comments, you can request an exported file of the personal data that appears about you and can also request that it be erased. Except that I can’t erase any data I am obliged to keep for administrative, legal, or security purposes.*
*I don’t know what that would be but if the site gets larger, someone will probably tell me.
Where we send your data
Comments may be checked through an automated spam detection service but not anytime soonn. There aren’t that many comments. And I have no idea where I would send data if I had any to send. So I don’t send any to anyone.
Security
All the standard security programs and services that are readily available for non-commericcal websites are used to prevent malicious activity. For some reason I’m not overly concerned about anyone wanting to steal information on collaborative governance and decision-making methods and the people who read about it.
Questions welcome if you need other information. I might have it and I might not.
