Open Source Ecology:Privacy policy
Summary
This privacy policy applies to the websites operated by Open Source Ecology (hereafter referred to as OSE).
If you only read the OSE project websites, no more information is collected than is typically collected in server logs by web sites in general.
If you contribute to the OSE projects, you are publishing every word you post publicly. If you write something, assume that it will be retained 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.
Identification of an author
When you publish a page in the wiki, you may be logged in or not.
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, whatever user name you selected when you created your account.
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.
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.
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 OSE's server administrators and by users who have been granted "CheckUser" access. Your IP address, and its connection to any usernames that share it may be released under certain circumstances (see below).
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 OSE 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.
Cookies
The wiki will set a temporary session cookie 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.
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.)
Passwords
Many aspects of OSE projects' 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 one shall knowingly expose the password of another user to public release either directly or indirectly.
Private logging
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 OSE to use this information to keep track of legitimate users.
These logs are used to produce the statistics pages; the raw log data is not made public, and is normally discarded after about two weeks.
Here's a sample of what's logged for one page view (showing equivalent example from Wikimedia):
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"
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.
Policy on release of data derived from page logs
It is the policy of OSE that personally identifiable data collected in the server logs, or through records in the database via the CheckUser feature, may be released by the system administrators or users with CheckUser access, in the following situations:
- In response to a valid subpoena or other compulsory request from law enforcement
- With permission of the affected user
- To the chair of The OSE Foundation, his/her legal counsel, or his/her designee, when necessary for investigation of abuse complaints.
- Where the information pertains to page views generated by a spider or bot and its dissemination is necessary to illustrate or resolve technical issues.
- Where the user has been vandalising 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.
- Where it is reasonably necessary to protect the rights, property or safety of the OSE Foundation, its users or the public.
OSE policy does not permit public distribution of such information under any circumstances, except as described above.
Sharing information with third parties
Except where otherwise specified, all text added to OSE projects is available for reuse under the terms of the CC-BY-SA.
OSE 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.
For Legal Reasons
We will access, use, preserve, and/or disclose your Personal Information if we reasonably believe it necessary to satisfy a valid and legally enforceable warrant, subpoena, court order, law or regulation, or other judicial or administrative order. However, if we believe that a particular request for disclosure of a user's information is legally invalid or an abuse of the legal system and the affected user does not intend to oppose the disclosure themselves, we will try our best to fight it. We are committed to notifying you via email at least ten (10) calendar days, when possible, before we disclose your Personal Information in response to a legal demand. However, we may only provide notice if we are not legally restrained from contacting you, there is no credible threat to life or limb that is created or increased by disclosing the request, and you have provided us with an email address.
Nothing in this Privacy Policy is intended to limit any legal objections or defenses you may have to a third party's request (whether it be civil, criminal, or governmental) to disclose your information. We recommend seeking the advice of legal counsel immediately if such a request is made involving you.
Security of information
We strive to protect your information from unauthorized access, use, or disclosure. We use a variety of physical and technical measures, policies, and procedures (such as access control procedures, network firewalls, and physical security) designed to protect our systems and your Personal Information. Unfortunately, there's no such thing as completely secure data transmission or storage, so we can't guarantee that our security will not be breached (by technical measures or through violation of our policies and procedures).
We will never ask for your password by email (but may send you a temporary password via email if you have requested a password reset). If you ever receive an email that requests your password, please let us know by sending it to privacy@opensourceecology.org, so we can investigate the source of the email.
Newsletters
If you subscribe to one of our project's newsletters, we will store your email address in our phplist database.
If you provide us with additional information about yourself, we will store this information in our database for purposes of providing you with information that is more relevant to your interests. Such data may include:
- Name
- Address
- Phone Number
- Donor Status (True Fan, Gold, Angel, etc)
- Donation History
- Skills & Expertise
- Interests
You can unsubscribe from our newsletters or update your information by visiting our phplist website here:
User data
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.
Update or Rectify
You can update your User data in your Preferences. If you have any issues with this, please contact us.
Removal of user accounts
User accounts can be merged into a special user for deleted accounts. To request this, please contact us.
Deletion of content
Removing text from OSE projects 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 can see what was deleted. Information can be permanently deleted by those people with access to the servers, which is a complex and time-consuming process, and is not done unless first there is a valid and legal reason, and if the requester pays for the admin time at reasonable rates for a system admin hired by OSE.
However, the general rule is that all wiki information is public, and requests to "delete" content will not be granted, unless content is illegal. Administrators may delete content permanently only if it is spam or not relevant in any way to the work of Open Source Ecology. Users themselves are able to modify or delete content by editing this wiki as they like.
For the sake of open information, requests by collaborators to 'delete' either other contributors' or their own pages will not be granted unless there is a compelling and legal reason why the content is illegal or unwarranted. The remedy in this case that a user simply edits the page to delete the undesired content. Note that any page may be modified by other users, and it is not fair for any user to delete content in the case that others have contributed to the content. Any requests to delete other users' content will be denied unless required by applicable law.
The general intent is to preserve all work for transparency, for future study of all work done within this history-making project. contact us
Data Retrieval Requests
If you would like to retrieve the user data that the OSE projects have stored about you, please contact us.
Contact Us
If you have any questions or suggestions about this Privacy Policy or the information collected under this Privacy Policy, or to make a request as described in our Privacy Policy, please send an email inquiry to privacy@opensourceecology.org
