Our Privacy Policy
Summary: Privacy is important to you and to us. We do not collect data on users of our web pages, except for
the standard server log entries listed below. We do not track your visit and we do not use cookies. We have never shared
data on visitors with anybody since our site came up in 1995. As a result, we meet the European General Data Protection
Regulation (GDPR) without asking your permission for anything.
Web Server Log Info
When you access one of our pages we do not ask your browser for your name, your organization,
your email address, the brand of computer you are using or the name of your dog. We don't use cookies, either. We don't
need that information to provide our pages for your use. We don't sell anything here, so we don't need secure e-commerce
pages or any info on you, unless you donate through PayPal. The server of course needs your machine's Internet (IP)
address to send the page you want back to you, and all servers record that in their logs. Your address looks like
123.321.11.03 or some other combination of four numbers with periods in between. There is a machine name and location
associated with many addresses, but we do not capture that or look it up. Since most people access the Internet through a
temporary (dynamic) address, the number your Internet Service Provider assigns to you for an address may change whenever
your connection is broken for any reason, and you are assigned a new one when you connect up again.
Our web server keeps a standard server log of the pages requested in the universal website log format. That standard
format includes the numeric IP address of the machine requesting the page, the page that referred you to us, the filename
of the page requested, the browser doing the request, your operating system, the result of the request and the time.
Every web server on the Internet records that same info in its log, and some record more.
What We Do With Log Info
We keep our log files until we can analyze them to see how many hits we have had and
what pages are the most popular. You can see those numbers on our
server stats page. The log
also includes any error messages we have had to send back, letting us locate and fix a bad link on our site or other
problem with our pages.
We do not publish our logs. We do not attempt to capture your email address to send you anything. We do check our log to
see how many people are using what browsers. That lets us continue to configure our pages so that you never get a nasty
message that says you can't see this page because your browser is out of date, or a graphic is badly rendered.
Web Standard: P3P
The WWW Consortium has launched a privacy project it calls P3P for Platform for Privacy
Preferences Project. It has standards for exchanging information between browser and server indicating information about
the browser that the server wants and how much info the browser is willing to supply. We approve of the initiative, but
we don't do any of that info exchanging, because we don't need that info from you. So if you get a funny message from
your browser saying we are not responding to your "proposal" or something similar, it's because we are not sending a
request to your browser with our info demands. We don't have any. For more info on the W3C privacy project, check out
the P3P page. In their terms, we use our minimal log data for Research and
Development, defined as "The use of information to enhance, evaluate, or otherwise review the site, service, product, or
market."
Children's Online Privacy Protection Act
From the above it should be clear that we comply with the Children's
Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA.) Under this rule, commercial websites must obtain written parental consent before
collecting, using or distributing personal information about children aged 13 and under. Since we don't do that for
any of our site users, children are treated the same as everyone else, and we don't actually know your age or need
to.
European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)
When the GDPR came into effect in 2018 we did not have to
change our privacy policy, since we never sell or transfer anybody's data.
Info Requested by Email
If you ask us a question or send us a comment we of course have your email address to
reply. You can send us by email your postal mailing address if you want us to mail you our information on paper. But you
can also send us a letter requesting it and not use your email address at all. We do ask for your email address if you
want us to send you back the answers to
our helmet quiz for schools, or to add you to our free
email newsletter list. We don't share that list with anybody for any reason. All of our stuff
is free, so there is no question of credit cards or any other financial transactions, and we do not share your address
with anybody. We don't even send appeals for funds to people who have received our mailings. We have never had to do that
since our inception in 1989 and we manage our budget very carefully because we don't want to start now. We rely on
unsolicited contributions by people who find our service useful.
If you choose to donate, you
can send a check or do it with a credit card or PayPal account through PayPal.
If you have comments or questions about this page or our privacy policy, please email
us.