Privacy policy

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Muirium
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08 Feb 2015, 16:44

Deskthority values your privacy, so we don't use any 3rd party trackers or other external scripts. We'll never sell your data. We don't have to or want to. We're a small hobby club which finances itself by club member contributions.

Deskthority uses a modified version of phpBB forum software, which uses cookies to store settings and keep you logged in. phpBB also stores your IP address when you register and when you post, mostly to be able to identify spammers. For the complete phpBB privacy policy, see this document: phpBB privacy policy

We track visits so we get some nice statistics such as daily/weekly/monthly/yearly visitor statistics. There are two ways in which we aggregate such data:

1. Our web server, Apache, stores raw access logs of all server requests (pages, images, etc.). This includes your IP address. We keep it around for debugging and security (in case of a denial of service or other attack). Data is aggregated by statistics software (which we don't really use, we use Piwik, see below), and the original raw log files are kept for one month, after which they are deleted.

2. We use Piwik, which is open source traffic analytics software. It is installed locally on our own server. It acquires data by inserting javascript (or a pixel if you have javascript disabled) in pages.

Piwik doesn't store the complete IP address of visitors - we configured it to anonymise visitors' IP addresses by masking the last two bytes (e.g. 192.168.xxx.xxx), and moreover to delete this data after 180 days. This makes our stats of where people come from more inaccurate, but it doesn't really matter because we're not trying to sell anything.

Piwik is configured to support Do Not Track preference. When users have set their web browser to "I do not want to be tracked" (DoNotTrack is enabled) then Piwik will not track these visits.

You also have a choice of opting-out of Piwik Web Analytics regardless of your Do Not Track settings or if your browser does not support this: Piwik opt-out

Please be aware that all your data (posts, private messages, etc.) is stored unencrypted in our database by phpBB (only your password is encrypted), and while we obviously try to keep our server secure, we are a small, amateur club with little resources. You are therefore advised to regularly remove private messages with sensitive information and similar data.

We keep backups of files (excluding raw Apache access logs) and the database going back three months. That means if you delete something like a sensitive private message, it might still be stored in a backup for a while.

If you have questions or remarks, please state them in this topic.

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