Privacy Policy
Herecast Web Site
When you register as a contributor to the Herecast community, we ask for an email address. This will be used only to reply to requests initiated by you (for example, if you forget your password and require a new one) -- it will never be displayed on the site. If, in the future, we decide to create a newsletter, it will require explicit opt-in with email confirmation.
A few notes about spam. I'm sure you are very attractive person, and that all of your body parts are of an adequate size. If you need Viagra, it's none of my business, and I'm sure you can find it on your own. For great rates on mortgages, shop around. If you have wealthy relatives in Nigeria who are desperately searching for you, I'm sorry, but they won't find out about you from me. (By using this web site, you agree not to sue for lost potential Nigerian wealth you could have obtained had I sold your email address.) In other words, I won't share your address with anyone without your explicit permission.
Herecast Software
The Herecast software contacts the database only when necessary to retrieve information about an unknown access point. To improve efficiency, the software currently downloads all information for the entire city at once -- this means that server accesses should be relatively rare. Such accesses are not logged except as is normally done by Apache*, and are never linked to your account on the web site.
* Apache logs each URL that is requested as part of its normal operation. (This is true of every web site.) These logs are destroyed at least monthly.
Information contributed to the Herecast database is associated with your user account for the purposes of maintaining data integrity (for example, banning people who maliciously submit false information, and promoting community members who make positive contributions.) Information collected in this manner will not be used for purposes other than those stated above.
Herecast-Hosted Services
The HereSay and Area Map services do not log any access information except for the number of times the service was used. Since these services do not require registration, it is impossible to track movements with them. Any statistics will only be used in aggregate; for example: "100 people per day use the area map for UWO", or "the most popular location for chatting in HereSay is the Middlesex College building."
If you sign up for the HereSay alerts subscription service, the service needs to remember when you last checked for messages in each building. It does this by giving each subscription a random identifier. This ID is not associated with your user account (if you have one), and may not even be unique. The "last checked" records are permanently deleted when they are no longer needed, as specified when you subscribe. (For example, if you only want to be informed about messages that were left within the past 5 days, the "last checked" records are deleted after 5 days.)
For the Heresay: I was here subscription service, information is deleted after one day.
The regular map service redirects through the web site, but only for the purpose of reformatting the URL -- accesses are not logged further. This is (hopefully) only temporary, until I find a decent map service that will accept an address, city, province, and country in the URL, works worldwide, and has a good Pocket PC interface.
The Friend Finder service only stores the last reported location, and does not remember historical information. Like all Herecast Subscription services, it only is able to sense your location in the area you have configured.
Third-Party Services
Services other than those mentioned in the previous section are governed by the privacy policies of their respective owners.
