Privacy Policy for Forging Soul (forgingsoul.com)
We at Forging Soul believe that privacy is important enough to explain in terms so clear that even someone who is not a lawyer can understand.
Typical Visits
For a typical visit to our site, we do not collect any information for the purpose of personally identifying you.
The information we collect on Forging Soul is anonymous and aggregated into statistics that tell us how people are using this site. What we collect does not go from us to any third parties and none of it ever will. We do not set any “cookies” or in any other way attempt to identify you.
In fact, we have a minimalist approach to information collection and take steps to limit the collection of information. For example, half of the script that logs visitors to this site for traffic analysis is dedicated to making exceptions so that we do not store even the ip address for visitors that have the “Do Not Track” header in their browser turned on. We removed the built in WordPress “Jetpack” visitor statistics package from the site since we don’t need it.
One more example? Adsense and Amazon both have tracking mechanisms built into their advertisements. For now, we have removed all such advertising from Forging Soul to limit our impact on your privacy.
Contributors
If you submit a comment on the site, your ip address is logged along with the e-mail address you type in, and the link you type in to submit to us. This is information you voluntarily share in order to comment, and could falsify if you chose to–nothing we do checks to see if the e-mail address is a real one. Our advice is to not include personally identifiable information in your comments, but you are solely responsible for what you post in the comments area.
Subscribers
If you subscribe to receive updates and information by e-mail, Feedburner (a Google service) will verify your e-mail address and confirm that you have opted into this. To find out more about what Google does with your information, please see the the unified Google privacy policy. We have access only to those subscriber e-mail addresses, and may send you information we think would be of interest to you. You can opt out at any time through the standard Feedburner cancellation link at the bottom of every e-mail.
Links to Other Websites
Forging Soul contains links to other sites that are not controlled in any way by us. Please be aware of this when you click on any such links; we are not responsible for the privacy practices and policies of any website other than our own. So we strongly suggest that you review the privacy policy of every website you visit, whether or not they are linked to by Forging Soul.
Third Party Impact on Privacy
There are third parties that have access to some information that may be generated as a result of your visit to Forging Soul. We have thoroughly reviewed their privacy policies and found them to be in line with our commitment to user privacy. Here is an explanation of these:
GoDaddy
We use a hosting service, GoDaddy.com, that has standard Apache web server logging enabled. This tells us if we have a link that is sending people off into no-such-page land, for example. You can find GoDaddy’s privacy policy on their home page.
Google Analytics
Just like 57% of the top 10,000 websites on the internet, we use the industry standard Google Analytics, a software package that incorporates a small javascript element on each page to record visit information. The main use for the reports from Google Analytics is determining the popularity of different content, and of Forging Soul in general.
We considered writing a custom logging and stats package to replace Google Analytics, but on doing the research, we opted out of any sharing on the part of Google with other parties, and thoroughly reviewed their privacy policy, and ended up deciding to put the time and energy into writing great content instead of reinventing infrastructure for Forging Soul.
AddToAny Social Sharing by Lockerz
Forging Soul uses the Lockerz AddToAny plugin for social sharing. Here is Lockerz privacy policy. They do not share personally identifiable information.
PayPal
Forging Soul may use PayPal for accepting payments; PayPal does not make any of the information they collect available to Forging Soul, though the information you specified to identify your transactions will appear as normal on financial statements. For more information, see the privacy policy for PayPal.
Children
Forging Soul is not intended for, or directed toward, individuals under the age of thirteen (13), and we request that such individuals not provide personally identifying information.
Security
Forging Soul has taken every reasonable and industry-standard precaution available to us to safeguard the very limited amount of information that we do collect.
What you can do to increase your privacy
For those interested increasing overall browsing privacy, there are software plugins and extensions that can block or delete internet “cookies,” as well as using other measures to increase your privacy in browsing. One example of this is the option to include a Do Not Track tag in the information the browser sends to each website as you visit–this is in major browsers now, and is gaining traction. One plugin that block an amazing number of tracking mechanisms, available for all of the major browsers, is called Ghostery.
The Ultimate Opt-Out
If the terms on this page are not acceptable to you, we’d appreciate an e-mail to explain any ideas you have to improve it. In the meantime, use of Forging Soul will be considered proof of your acceptance of these terms.
Legal Disclaimer
We reserve the right to disclose any information we may have as required by law, and when we believe that disclosure is necessary to protect our rights, or to comply with a judicial proceeding, court order or legal process served on our website or operators.
Contact Information
If you have any questions about our privacy policy, or really anything else pertaining to Forging Soul, please contact Mark Kenski at mark@forgingsoul.com.
This privacy policy was originally published 3/28/2012.