Privacy Policy
Adopted by the Board of Directors on June 4, 2008
Contents |
What is Covered
This privacy policy covers information that is revealed by you to us, Trees and Things, Inc., during your interaction with our website.
Our Commitment to Your Privacy
We value your privacy, and hope that you feel comfortable that using this web site will not compromise your privacy in any significant way. We collect limited information about you and how you use this website. We use that information to provide customized, dynamic web pages to you, and to protect the security of your account and of this website.
Trees and Things, Inc. does not consider your personally identifiable information an asset. We will not give or sell information about you to anyone, with limited exceptions noted below. We will not use information about you for demographic research or development purposes, unless you have specifically authorized us to do so. We will not divluge information about your activities on the website to anyone without your permission, with limited exceptions noted below.
We will never use your email to contact you for marketing puposes. We may use your email to contact you about your account, or about business related to the website if you have volunteered to help in a post. In these instances, your email address will only be viewed by a site administrator.
What information is collected
Discussion forum
The main site of treesandthings.com is an automated discussion forum running a customized version of the kuro5hin Scoop code.
Cookies
Treesandthings.com will request that your web browser set a cookie: tnt_session. This cookie is used to associate your local machine with your user account alias, so that you are not required to log in every time you visit the site. It has a one-month expiration time. When you log off of the website, this cookie should be automatically deleted from your computer.
Stories Read
If you have accepted the treesandthings.com cookie, the site will record which stories you have read, and keep track of the most recently posted comment that was sent to your system. This information is used to inform you when new messages are posted.
User email address
You have the option to provide us with an email address. This address will be used to send you basic notifications about the site, such as when a story that you have submitted will be posted. It will not be used for marketing, and will not be given or sold to other entities.
User profile and preferences data
Your user account on treesandthings.com may be customized at your discretion. We include fields you may fill with your public contact email, a link to your home page, a short autobiography, and your cryptographic public key. This information is saved on the treesandthings.com server.
We also provide a page for you to enter your comment and story display preferences, change your private verification email, and change your password. All of this information is also saved on the treesandthings.com server.
Public Posts
Obviously, all posts, stories, quicklinks and diary entries you submit on the forum are saved on our server once you select the "submit" button. We do not retain any information you may have entered and previewed, but not submitted. We also retain, but do not display, the IP address of the computer that uploaded that post. This information is retained only as long as the story remains an "active" scoop story. When the story is archived, IP information is discarded.
Personal Messages
While you are logged in to treesandthings.com, you may send personal messages to other users that are not viewable by the general community. This information is retained on our servers. Personal messages remain on our servers until both the sender and recipient of the message chooses to delete it. We also might delete old personal messages if necessary to save disk space.
The body of personal messages is encrypted when it is stored on our servers. The key necessary to decrypt the message is also stored on our servers, so this encryption provides only minimal privacy from hackers. This encryption does, however, prevent accidental disclosure of the contents of your messages to an administrator performing maintenance on the database. The subjects of personal messages are not encrypted.
IRC Server
Trees and Things, Inc. maintains an IRC server at irc.treesandthings.com, with a web interface at chat.treesandthings.com.
IP address
The IRC Server will log the IP address and host info of all connections used to communicate with it.
Chat log
All messages posted in IRC are logged by a process at the IRC host.
NickServ
A "NickServ" chatbot is available for you to register and password-protect your favorite nicknames in order to prevent third parties from impersonating you. This registration information is stored on the IRC server.
Organization Membership
If you wish to become a member of the Trees and Things, Inc, the nonprofit organization devoted to running this website, we are legally obliged to collect and retain your real name and mailing address.
How we use your information
Debugging
When one of our admins attempts to address a problem you are having with our website, that admin may need to access your personal data. For instance, to resolve a lost password coupled with a no-longer-valid verification email address will require that the admin accesses the existing data.
Abuse
If we suspect that you are illegally attempting to hack or otherwise damage treesandthings.com, we will reveal information about you and your usage of the site to law enforcement.
If you report that someone has hijacked your account, we may use IP address information associated with the account posting history to verify your claim.
Legal Obligations
We will comply with any subpoena, search warrant, court order, or other legal process which compels us to disclose any information, including your personal data. If, in addition to being a user of our site, you are a member of the nonprofit organization Trees and Things, Inc. organization, we are legally obligated to retain your name and mailing address, and to reveal this information to any member who demands a list of all members for any purpose related to their interest as a member. We will not associate your forum username with your real name.
IRC user tracking
Any IRC user may message the treesandthings chatbot to request the last action of your nickname with the "seen" command. i.e. The command "/msg tntbot seen nickname will result in the bot returning your message with nicknames last action in the general chat room.
Other Web Sites
Trees and Things is a disucssion forum. Any given thread will contain several links away from treesandthings.com to pages hosted by other websites. There are also groups set up for Trees and Things users at other social networking sites such as flikr.com, frappr.com, and last.fm. We also accept donations and dues via paypal.com. Be aware that our policies detailed in this document do not and cannot apply to the operation of these other web sites.
