We are not lawyers, but we have updated our Privacy Policy through the use of an online legal site. I thought I’d also write a short note about why we collect some of your information.
We only require an email address and a nickname to sign up. We ask for the email address mainly as a way to fight spammers. The spam bots who try to sign up for the site generally don’t answer the verification emails sent out – it’s stopped hundreds of bogus accounts. If you are concerned about privacy, there are many services you could use to create a “throw-away” email account that you only use to sign up for this site.
The new privacy policy also states we may collect Name, Address, and Telephone Number. We only require this if we need to ship you something from the Free Stuff page or if you win a giveaway (coming soon?). There is just no good way to ship a physical package without it. If you are concerned about your privacy, private mailboxes are fairly inexpensive. Or, don’t ask us to ship anything to you. Our feelings won’t be hurt! 😉
Finally, there are digital footprints – IP addresses, browser types, etc. Again, to serve you a web page, we must know where to send it. (Although if you’re feeling extra paranoid, use TOR.) We reserve the right to turn on analytics to track what parts of the site are getting the most use, but we keep them off most of the time. If that bothers you, you can turn off those cookies by clicking the blue cookie in the lower left-hand corner and turning off analytics. Viola!
The cookie banner is currently broken. I’ll try to get a fix in sometime soon. 🙂