OutHistory:Privacy Policy

SUMMARY

This is the Privacy Policy for the OutHistory website. The Policy explains how author and visitor information is stored, logged, and used by OutHistory. We do not exercise control over the sites displayed as links from within our pages. These other sites may place their own cookies or other files on your computer, collect data or solicit personal information from you. If you have any questions about OutHistory Privacy Policy, please contact outhistory@gc.cuny.edu.

If you only read the OutHistory website, no more information is collected than is typically collected in server logs by web sites in general.

If you contribute to the OutHistory project, you are publishing every word you post publicly. If you write something, assume that it will be retained by OutHistory forever. This includes articles, user pages and talk pages. Some limited exceptions are described below.

PUBLISHING ON THE WIKI AND PUBLIC DATA

Simply visiting the web site does not expose your identity publicly (but see Private Logging below).

When you edit any page in the wiki, you are publishing a document. This is a public act, and you are identified publicly with that edit as its author.

1. Identification of an author. When you publish in the wiki, you may be logged in or not.

a. If you are logged in, you will be identified by your user name. This may be your real name if you so choose, or you may choose to publish under a pseudonym, the user name you selected when you created your account.

b. If you have not logged in, you will be identified by your network IP address. This is a series of four numbers which identifies the Internet address from which you are contacting the wiki. Depending on your connection, this number may be traceable only to a large Internet service provider, or specifically to your school, place of business, or home. It may be possible that the origin of this IP address could be used in conjunction with any interests you express implicitly or explicitly by editing articles to identify you even by private individuals.

2. IP address and your identity. It may be either difficult or easy for a motivated individual to connect your network IP address with your real-life identity. Therefore if you are very concerned about privacy, you may wish to log in and publish under a pseudonym.

a. When using a pseudonym, your IP address will not be available to the public except in cases of abuse, including vandalism of a wiki page by you or by another user with the same IP address. In all cases, your IP address will be stored on the wiki servers and can be seen by the server and website administrators. Your IP address, and its connection to any usernames that share it may be released under certain circumstances.

b. If you use a company mail server from home or telecommute and use a DSL or cable Internet connection, it is likely to be very easy for your employer to identify your IP address and find all of your IP based Wiki project contributions. Using a user name is a better way of preserving your privacy in this situation. However, remember to log out or disconnect yourself after each session using a pseudonym on a shared computer, to avoid allowing others to use your identity.

3. Cookies

a. The wiki will set a temporary session cookie (PHPSESSID) whenever you visit the site. If you do not intend to ever log in, you may deny this cookie, but you cannot log in without it. It will be deleted when you close your browser session.

b. More cookies may be set when you log in, to avoid typing in your user name (or, optionally, password) on your next visit. These last up to 30 days. You may clear these cookies after use if you are using a public machine and don't wish to expose your username to future users of the machine. (If so, clear the browser cache as well.)

4. Passwords

Many aspects of OutHistory contributor community interactions depend on the reputation and respect that is built up through a history of valued contributions. User passwords are the only guarantee of the integrity of a user's edit history. All users are encouraged to select strong passwords and to never share them. No employee of Outhistory shall knowingly expose the password of another user to public release either directly or indirectly.

PRIVATE LOGGING

1. Log data. Every time you visit a web page, you send a lot of information to the web server. Most web servers routinely maintain access logs with a portion of this information, which can be used to get an overall picture of what pages are popular, what other sites link to this one, and what web browsers people are using. It is not the intention of OutHistory to use this information to keep track of legitimate users. These logs may be used to produce statistics. Here's a sample of what's logged for one page view:

[INSERT EXAMPLE OF OUTHISTORY-SPECIFIC LOG ENTRY]

64.164.82.142 - - [21/Oct/2003:02:03:19 +0000]

"GET /wiki/draft_privacy_policy HTTP/1.1" 200 18084

"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_projects:Village_pump"

"Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/85.7 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/85.5"

2. Uses. Log data may be examined by developers in the course of solving technical problems and in tracking down badly-behaved web spiders that overwhelm the site. IP addresses of users, derived either from those logs or from records in the database are frequently used to correlate usernames and network addresses of edits in investigating abuse of the wiki, including the suspected use of malicious "sockpuppets" (duplicate accounts), vandalism, harassment of other users, or disruption of the wiki.

3. Policy on release of data derived from page logs. It is the policy of OutHistory that personally identifiable data collected in the server logs, or through records in the database, may be released by the system administrators, in the following situations:

a. In response to a valid subpoena or other compulsory request from law enforcement, except when such notification is forbidden by state or federal law in the United States of America;

b. With permission of the affected user;

c. Where the information pertains to page views generated by a spider or bot and its dissemination is necessary to illustrate or resolve technical issues;

d. Where the user has been vandalizing articles or persistently behaving in a disruptive way, data may be released to assist in the targeting of IP blocks, or to assist in the formulation of a complaint to relevant Internet Service Providers;

e. To investigate, prevent, or take action regarding illegal activities, suspected fraud, situations involving potential threats to the physical safety of any person, violations of OutHistory’s Terms of Use, or as otherwise indicated by law.

OutHistory policy does not permit public distribution of such information under any circumstances, except as described above.

USER DATA

1. User accounts. Website readers may create user accounts at http://209.200.244.13/wiki/Special:Userlogin. The advantages of creating a user account vs. making uncredited contributions is explained on Wikiversity.

Once created, user accounts will not be removed. It may be possible for a username to be changed. OutHistory does not guarantee that a name will be changed on request.

2. User data publicly available. Data on users, such as the times at which they edited and the number of edits they have made are publicly available via "user contributions" lists, and in aggregated forms published by other users.

E-MAIL

1. You may provide your e-mail address in your Preferences and enable other logged-in users to send email to you through the wiki. Your address will not be revealed to them unless you respond, or possibly if the email bounces. The email address may be used by OutHistory to communicate with users on a wider scale.

2. If you do not provide an email address, you will not be able to reset your password if you forget it. However, you may contact one of the OutHistory server administrators to enter a new mail address in your preferences.

3. You can remove your email address from your preferences at any time to prevent it being used.

SHARING INFORMATION WITH THIRD PARTIES

OutHistory will not sell or share private information, such as email addresses, with third parties, unless you agree to release this information, or it is required by law to release the information, pursuant to a court order or governmental investigation

SECURITY OF INFORMATION

OutHistory makes no guarantee against unauthorized access to any information you provide. This information may be available to anyone with access to the servers.

DELETION OF CONTENT

Removing text from OutHistory does not permanently delete it. In normal articles, anyone can look at a previous version and see what was there. If an article is "deleted", any user with "administrator" access on the wiki, meaning almost anyone trusted not to abuse the deletion capability, can see what was deleted. Information can be permanently deleted by those people with access to the servers, but there is no guarantee this will happen except in response to legal action.

UPDATES

This Privacy Policy may change from time to time. We expect most such changes will be minor. Regardless, we will post any Policy changes on this page and, if the changes are significant, we will provide a more prominent notice. Each version of this Policy will be identified at the top of the page by its effective date.

Posted 8-3-08 8:29 pm