Privacy FIRST

Privacy FIRST

We have selected DOT EASY AUSTRALIA (doteasy.com.au) to host our site. View their Privacy statement here. This Privacy Statement refers to the collection of data from ME, not YOU. Dot Easy DO NOT STORE ANY INFORMATION on our Visitors.

We feel so strongly about privacy rights that EVERYTHING about the design and technology of our Web Site, from the time its first pixel was displayed, has been designed around respecting the rights of our visitors — your rights.

But, frankly, just speaking those words doesn't mean very much, since that's pretty much what every sleaze-bag company on the Internet will tell you — even those that are currently under (USA) Federal indictment for deliberate and repeated privacy violation and abuse.

So, we have broken it down, detailing our specific conduct, so you can see EXACTLY what WE mean when WE say that we care more about your privacy and security than anything else:

Personal Information

Your email Address — We do not even retain your email address! The exception is in communications with us, otherwise we would not be able to return your mail.

Our Own email System — We do not subcontract or "farm out" our list management, (we just don't need to keep a list!) so there is NO CHANCE that your personal and private email address will be disclosed to any third party. Moreover, we feel quite strongly about the privacy of email addresses and NOTHING could induce us to divulge our customer's email address to any third party.

Some things are NOT for sale — your trust in us is one of them.

Never Used Them, Never Will — As we all know, the original intention behind cookies has been raped, exploited, and abused by some sneaky ba****ds of the Internet so now no one can use them anymore without raising suspicion. We have no need to use cookies in any case!!

Advertisements

petercullen Web Groups are "100% Ad Free" Zones — Perhaps you can imagine how many solicitations we receive from companies wishing to pay us for the placement of their advertisement on this and every other site. We're not even tempted. We do not understand why ANY family web site would choose to horribly clutter its pages with garish and annoying advertisements jumping around all over the place, trying to distract its visitors and get their attention. It's not as if being on the web is particularly expensive. It isn't. So we just can't understand why advertising has "happened" anywhere on the web except on those "fully sponsored" free web sites for individuals. It appears that many corporations have no taste or sense of style whatsoever.

But, independent of that, no force on Earth could make our place a reference to an off-site server on this site. The exceptions will be reference to other sites for Genealogy Research or other INTERESTING sites where you may just find something useful. The fact is, advertisements are a HUGE security and privacy risk. You will never find one here. No way.

Web Bugs

Do you even need to ask? — Of course we don't do anything like that. We can't imagine that we would ever want to know anything about you that we didn't have the courage to ask. So there's NO SORT OF TRACKING OF ANY KIND ever happening on this site. Period.

Server Logs

Nope, we don't do that either. — Other web sites' privacy statements say that they log all server accesses in order to spot abuse and identify and solve problems. Without relying upon any unknowable bits and pieces from anyone else, and since we don't have any problems with abuse and don't have any operational mysteries to solve, we have no need to log our web server's accesses — so we don't. Whether or not your own or our Hosting Company records logs is a matter for them.

Our Site's Favicon — Concern has been raised over some site's use of "favicon" images to add a custom icon to Internet Explorer "favourites" bookmarks. The concern is that since the request for a site's "favicon" is only made when a bookmark is created, web sites could use this to monitor how many users bookmark their sites. Since we are not recording any logs of any sort, this is a non-issue when visiting and bookmarking petercullen.com.

Your IP Address

Never Recorded — Your machine's current IP address is NEVER stored or recorded in any fashion.

In order to keep the count of this site's visitors as fair and accurate as possible, a visitor's IP address is placed into a "most recently used" (MRU) list so that if the same IP requests another page soon after the last one (such as pressing the browser's refresh button) the counter will not be redundantly incremented. Once an IP "ages", it falls off the end of the MRU list and is never considered again.

Privacy FIRST

If you have any questions or concerns about anything you have seen here, or about anything relating to your privacy conduct, PLEASE DON'T HESITATE to let us know. You may address any email to us for our immediate attention to: webmaster@petercullen.com

Thank you for your interest in these tricky but important issues. Perhaps we can work together to raise the standard of privacy on the Internet. It is certainly worth a try!