Introduction
This post documents my privacy policy for this blog, albertnet.us. I will endeavor to always keep this policy up-to-date and accurate. It probably won’t change much over time but you never know … after all, I had to start from scratch on this after going down a pretty deep rabbit hole recently. My original, necessarily irksome, now obsolete privacy policy is here. My plunge down the rabbit hole, and details of how ChatGPT was involved, are described here. But if all you care about is how I actually manage your privacy on this blog, currently and from now on, just read what follows here.
(A note on the cover art: I’m not sure how to account for it. I generated the above via ChatGPT, giving it a lot of leeway and not specifying what the text, or even the art, should be. With my free version I only get three pictures per day, and the above is the best I was able to get. I like it because the woman looks like both an outlaw and a person who simply wishes to be incognito. Was this A.I.’s intention? Based on the incongruity of the text, I kinda doubt it. I think it just got lucky.)
Use of cookies
I don’t use cookies on this site. The fact of you visiting or not, or anything about your visit (how long you kept the page open, whether you scrolled, whether you clicked on a link, etc.) is not something I am able to track. Of course I’m curious about how much engagement this blog gets from readers, but I have given up trying to extract data about that, and do not want to creep anybody out via tracking cookies. So rest assured, whatever you do on this blog is your own business. Unless somebody is looking over your shoulder or snooping in your web history by commandeering your device, you are completely anonymous and invisible here.
Now, if you do feel like giving me positive or constructive feedback, you can post a comment below, either anonymously or via your Google login if you can figure out how to make that work (though most users, including me, cannot). Or, you can click here to send me a private email nobody else will ever see. Note that if your idea of “constructive feedback” is “Your trying too hard” or “Crickets…” or “Zzzzzzz,” you can keep that to yourself.
Use of cookie dough
For the purposes of this blog, “cookie dough” refers to the revenue, typically from advertising, that can be configured through the use of cookies. This is not a standard industry term, but it really ought to be. It could be slang for the passive income that people dream of getting through their blogs. If you ever hear the phrase “cookie dough” thrown around in this fashion, you read it here first!
That being said, let me be clear that I will never bother you with ads, nor will I use this blog to promote a product based on some kickback or other benefit accruing to me. I am not an influencer (at least not knowingly or on purpose). When I praise a product such as White Lightning chain lube, Halls cough drops, Oster toasters, or Volvo cars, it’s because I like it, that’s all. These companies didn’t pay me, they didn’t thank me, and above all they didn’t even notice.
The only use of traditional, culinary cookie dough on albertnet is as a beer flavoring, here.
Blogger platform stats
The Blogger platform that hosts albertnet gathers its own data to compile certain stats, such as page views, top referrers (i.e., sites that send readers here), top referring URLs, what browsers are used, what operating systems, and where viewers are located geographically. But don’t worry, Blogger doesn’t know or share anything about you—not your identity, not your specific location, not even whether or not you are a human being. Information about your visit is not only anonymized, but blended with so much other data that your individual identity is akin to a single speck of plankton, or even plankton larva. In fact, you’re not even like a larva in a sea of plankton; you’re like a larva in a sea of both real and fake plankton, since a lot of bots visit this blog.
In fact, so many of the visitors to this blog are bots, even the most general trends I might choose to observe are largely illusory. Thus, I don’t even bother to consider them, with or without a grain of salt. As an example, the Blogger stats tell me that in the past week, albertnet has had about 20,000 page views, about half of which were from Singapore. It also claims there were more visits from Estonia than from the UK during that time. So if you think either Google or I be learning anything about you through these stats, think again. (I used the deliberately incorrect verb “be” in that last sentence because I couldn’t figure out whether the verb should be “is” or “am” and chose to slip between the horns of the dilemma.)
To put this another way, fretting about your use of this blog is like worrying about being at a giant music festival and accidentally wetting your pants. There would so many people packed in around you, many of them doing far worse than just wetting themselves, that there is almost no chance your little accident would be noticed.
Booger platform stats
There are no boogers on this blog. If you see the word “booger” anywhere in this policy, that was a typo.
Google Analytics
I dabbled in Google Analytics last month but I have given it up. Not only do I no longer access the Google Analytics platform, this blog no longer transmits data to it. The tag has been deactivated.
Consent and your rights
By using this site, you consent to nothing. If you do not wish to view my content anymore, simply close the browser tab. You can gratify your reading preferences by navigating the albertnet blog archive tree down the right side of the page and clicking only the posts that interest you, duh! And, if you don’t want to encourage my more sophomoric impulses by clicking on, say, the link to “From Farting Liberally to Liberal Arts – the Flatulence Files,” you can click the link just above it, to that month’s posts:
That way you can scroll down through the four January posts without indicating which, if any, you read. Thus, the fact of you reading the post about farting won’t even be registered in the Blogger stats. But remember, I don’t look at those anyway. How could I know if you read that post, or some bot scraped it? Trust me, I’m intentionally oblivious.
You have the right to visit albertnet from any device and any browser, even one whose cache you’ve just cleared, without seeing any annoying banner about cookies. There is no banner here because there are no cookies in use here. It’s the same reason you don’t see that yellow police crime scene tape encircling a home where nobody has been murdered. If you do see a cookie banner here, it means I screwed something up and I would really appreciate you clicking here and letting me know so I can remove the banner (again).
You do not have the right to visit this site if you are a bot. Of course, if you are a bot, it’s not really your fault you’re here, because somebody created you and set you loose on the Internet and you’re just doing your job, with no more consciousness, I suppose, than a sperm. Nor can I stop bots like you, obviously. But that doesn’t make it okay and you really have no right.
If you are a human, you do not have the right to deploy bots to this site for purposes of scraping, SEO boosting, link farming, link spamming, or any other purpose. Obviously I’m powerless to stop you, plus you’re not even reading this, but just in case you are, or you know somebody who deploys bots, consider this: if there is anything to the whole karma concept, you/they will be reincarnated as plankton. Maybe even fake plastic plankton.
You do not have the right to post bogus comments to this blog, either manually or through bots. Nobody is buying your awkwardly worded, patently phony praise, and the likelihood of anyone clicking your link to “car locksmith Dallas” is infinitesimal.
If you are manually stealing content from this blog and reposting it in any form beyond a brief quotation and/or a link to my post(s), you are in violation of copyright law. If you scroll to the end of this page you will see that my footer explicitly asserts my copyright to all the content on this blog. Immediately desist this activity. If you want to reprint any of my content with my permission and appropriate citation, please email me here.
How I protect your data
The number one rule in cybersecurity is: if you don’t have the data, nobody can compromise it. This is why (for example) Anthem should have deleted all unnecessary user records instead of leaving them around on a server so that a cybercriminal could steal almost 79 million of them.
To reiterate, I don’t get any of your data, so I have nothing to store. Occasionally I do receive other people’s data by mistake, in the form of US postal service mail that lands in my physical mailbox out on my porch. When this happens, I will walk it over to their place, if it’s not too far away, unless it’s addressed to my late father, in which case I will intend to phone up the charity that mailed it and say, “You know the guy’s dead, don’t you?” but I’ll probably never get around to that. (I am not suggesting any online analogy to that last bit, by the way. I’m not even sure why it’s part of this policy.)
How I protect your sensibilities
I am not generally very crude on this blog but it’s not rated G either. I used to put ratings at the top of any post that wandered into PG-13 or R territory, but I gave that up. I do promise never to blog about politics other than to blog about not discussing politics (and that was only once). Also, I am not interested in being a soldier in a culture war so I will never blog about, say, gender identity or cancel culture. Come here to laugh (I hope), to be informed (sometimes), and to see if what amuses me also amuses you. If it doesn’t, just go about your merry way and forget you ever stumbled across albertnet … no hard feelings, I promise.
I occasionally use ChatGPT or ImageFX to create art for this blog. I will never try to pass this art off as my own work (not that you’d ever believe it was mine anyway). As detailed here, I try to prevent ChatGPT from showing a woman’s bare shoulder and/or bra strap when it generates images, but sometimes the current A.I. refuses to comply. It is my policy to always make fun of A.I. when it does this.
I endeavor to never post distastefully risqué art or photos, or distasteful written content either for that matter. If your taste differs from mine, such that you find any of my content unbecoming, undignified, unseemly, or upsetting, I hereby apologize.
How I protect the privacy of people appearing in my blog
You may have noticed that when I mention in these pages a person who is not a celebrity, I tend to use a single initial rather than a first or last name (e.g., “E—’s handwriting is a bit hard to read”). If I write unflatteringly about a person, the initial I use may have nothing to do with the person’s actual name. If you see an actual name spelled out in these pages, it usually means that either the person gave me explicit permission to use his or her name, or the person has passed away. (In the early years of albertnet I was not quite so disciplined about this. My policy has become more stringent over time.)
I often post photos to this blog, and they often feature a person or persons. Usually these featured persons are either a) celebrities who are either out in public or participating in a broadcast sporting event, b) members of my family who have given blanket permission to be featured, or c) dead. Once in a while a person is shown who is just some rando, perhaps in a bar in Ely, such as the guy in the background of this photo:
In this latter scenario, the rando cannot generally be identified and isn’t likely, I think, to take offense, because he’s just minding his own business, after all. If you do ever find yourself depicted on this blog in some unflattering way, including but not limited to being drunk and/or disorderly and/or having a bad zit or a receding hairline like mine, please contact me and I will remove or alter the photo.
Have I missed anything?
If you feel this policy is incomplete, or fails to respect your privacy in any way, please email me and/or post a comment below. If the “email me” link in the previous sentence does not work for you, manually type or paste the address feedback@albertnet.us into the “To” field in your email app.
Thank you for taking your privacy seriously and making it through this entire post. Perhaps you can now consider whether other websites you visit are also appropriately respectful of your rights. If they aren’t, maybe you can forsake them forever and just come here instead?
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