| Everybody
with a website accessible through the Internet needs to have a formal Privacy
Policy.
Mine is pretty straightforward,
I like to think:
Much as I would love
to know who visits my site, your personal information is your own property
and I have no right to it - no matter what other self- interested parties
may proclaim.
So when you visit this
site, I will not record a single piece of information about you.
If you choose to phone me or write to me and provide me with your details,
that's fine - but I won't take anything from you in any other way or without
your explicit permission.
However, TRIPOD almost
certainly record information about you and I have no control or say in
the matter - for which I apologize, because by the time you've got to this
page, your private information has probably already been recorded by them.
To find out about Tripod's
Privacy Policy, you'll need to visit their corporate site (www.tripod.com)
and again probably have your private information recorded.
PROFESSIONAL ETHICS
It's a classical Catch-22:
in order to find out whether you've had your privacy invaded in the first
place, you have to open yourself to further invasion of privacy.
It's wrong, but maybe one day all that will change.
Some years ago when I
ran an international User Group, I was registered in the UK under that
country's Data Protection Act (1984), and I made sure I not only followed
the legal rules but also some moral codes of my own.
I never sold - or gave
away - any item of my membership lists, and never divulged any aspect of
my members' information to anyone else (not even other members).
The only pieces of information I ever gave out were the total number of
members in my group and the names of the countries from which they hailed.
When I stopped running
the group I destroyed everything - all membership lists, in all forms (electronic,
paper) as a simple matter of principle.
For me it was (and still
is) just a matter of professional ethics. |