Due to European Union GDPR rules that are technically impossible to implement, and sometimes at odds with fundamental web technology, as of March 25, 2018 this site can no longer accept new memberships from European countries
Existing accounts belonging to users in the European Union must either be closed or the users need to swear under oath that they no longer reside in the EU, are not EU citizens, and will never return. We are not pleased with this development, but the threat of 20 million euro fines for non-compliance with something that is impossible to comply with have a special way of focusing your attention.
Here's our new privacy policy. Have fun.
Privacy PolicyThis policy explains in detail how “XYMer's Home away from Home” along with its affiliated companies (hereinafter “we”, “us”, “our”, “XYMer's Home away from Home”, “https://x704.net/bbs”) and phpBB (hereinafter “they”, “them”, “their”, “phpBB software”, “www.phpbb.com”, “phpBB Group”, “phpBB Teams”) use any information collected during any session of usage by you (hereinafter “your information”).
Your information is collected via two ways. Firstly, by browsing “XYMer's Home away from Home” will cause the phpBB software to create a number of cookies, which are small text files that are downloaded on to your computer’s web browser temporary files. The first two cookies just contain a user identifier (hereinafter “user-id”) and an anonymous session identifier (hereinafter “session-id”), automatically assigned to you by the phpBB software. A third cookie will be created once you have browsed topics within “XYMer's Home away from Home” and is used to store which topics have been read, thereby improving your user experience. Two additional cookies are set to record that you've accepted our GDPR policy and that you've agreed to allow the site to set cookies (this pointless and irritating exercise is legally mandated by the European Union -- please complain to them that it's utterly pointless and has no purpose other than to spam users with obnoxious cookie notifications on every site everywhere).
The second way in which we collect your information is by what you submit to us. This can be, and is not limited to: posting as an anonymous user (hereinafter “anonymous posts”), registering on “XYMer's Home away from Home” (hereinafter “your account”) and posts submitted by you after registration and whilst logged in (hereinafter “your posts”).
Your account will at a bare minimum contain a uniquely identifiable name (hereinafter “your user name”), a personal password used for logging into your account (hereinafter “your password”) and a personal, valid e-mail address (hereinafter “your e-mail”). Your information for your account at “XYMer's Home away from Home” is protected by data-protection laws applicable in the United States. Any information beyond your user name, your password, and your e-mail address required by “XYMer's Home away from Home” during the registration process is either mandatory or optional, at the discretion of “XYMer's Home away from Home”. In all cases, you have the option of what information in your account is publicly displayed. Furthermore, within your account, you have the option to opt-in or opt-out of automatically generated e-mails from the phpBB software.
Your password is ciphered (a one-way hash) so that it is secure. However, it is recommended that you do not reuse the same password across a number of different websites. Your password is the means of accessing your account at “XYMer's Home away from Home”, so please guard it carefully and under no circumstance will anyone affiliated with “XYMer's Home away from Home”, phpBB or another 3rd party, legitimately ask you for your password. Should you forget your password for your account, you can use the “I forgot my password” feature provided by the phpBB software. This process will ask you to submit your user name and your e-mail, then the phpBB software will generate a new password to reclaim your account.
This privacy policy has been compiled to better serve those who are concerned with how their 'Personally Identifiable Information' (PII) and personal data are being used online. PII, as described in US privacy law and information security, is information that can be used on its own or with other information to identify, contact, or locate a single person, or to identify an individual in context. Please continue reading our privacy policy carefully to get an understanding of how we collect, use, protect or otherwise handle your Personally Identifiable Information in accordance with our website.
What personal information do we collect from the people that visit our blog, website or app?When ordering or registering on our site, as appropriate, you may be asked to enter your name, email address, mailing address, phone number, or other details to help you with your experience and to make the site work in any sane way whatsoever.
For purposes of the GDPR and EU citizens or residents, what personal data do we collect any why do we collect it?- Your IP address, since it is necessary for sending data to your browser, securing your session, tracking abuse, and preventing spam.
- A username that you provide if you sign up as a member of the site.
- Your email address, necessary as a security measure to prevent spam and abuse against the site, and in order to send notifications about site changes and notifications that you request. Members may change or delete their email address at any time by contacting the site administrator through a private message to our Benevolent Dictator
BDAqua.
- Your site settings and preferences, if you become a member of the site.
- Anything you or anyone else voluntarily enters in to the site, including but not limited to: sensitive personal data such as racial or ethnic origin, political opinions, religious or philosophical beliefs, trade union membership, genetic data, biometric data, photos, videos, and personal communications. This is necessary because this is a forum site and we cannot, do not, and will not vet absolutely everything that anyone could ever possibly enter in to a new thread topic, comment, response, private message to another user, etc.. Really, as an online forum sharing stuff like this is
the entire point of the site's existence even if the GDPR make that sort of thing effectively illegal. Consider yourself warned!
How long will data be stored?- In general, forever, unless you ask us to delete it. We may not be able to fully expunge all personal data upon request because it's very likely it will be impossible to readily identify that some personal data belong to you. Much of the data on the site are unstructured comments, so if someone else posts your personal data, or quotes your personal data in a reply to something you post, or you are identifiable in a photography posted by another user, we will have no way to connect those data directly to you and will be unable to expunge it unless you tell us where it is. We may also not be able to delete all occurrences of your IP address, including the address you use to register for the site if you choose to do so, because in some cases we will need to retain that information to protect the site from spam or abuse. We also may not be able to delete ad-hoc personal data and IP addresses that are incidentally captured in log files, error files, (occasionally) documents uploaded by yourself or others, or if your personal are otherwise not connected to your member account due to database glitches, technical problems, or prior removal of partial personal data.
- Log files containing your IP address are periodically rotated but kept for varying periods of time, not more than a few months, in order to administer the site.
When do we collect information?We collect information from you when you register on our site, subscribe to a newsletter, respond to a survey, fill out a form, Use Live Chat, Open a Support Ticket, provide us with feedback on our products or services when users post, or otherwise enter any information on our site.
How do we use and process your information?We may use the information we collect from you when you register, make a purchase, sign up for our newsletter, respond to a survey or marketing communication, surf the website, or use certain other site features in the following ways:
- To personalize your experience and to allow us to deliver the type of content and product offerings in which you are most interested.
- To improve our website in order to better serve you.
- To allow us to better service you in responding to your customer service requests.
- To administer a contest, promotion, survey or other site feature.
- To ask for ratings and reviews of services or products
- To follow up with them after correspondence (live chat, email or phone inquiries)
- The site internally processes data necessary to make site features work, such as sending notification emails if you have chosen to receive them. It is not necessary to choose to receive notification emails to use the site.
- The site administrators may also periodically examine the data to ensure the site is working properly, to investigate problems, abuse, or bugs. In rare cases the data may be queried to analyze how the site is used in order to improve site performance, reliability, or utility to its users.
- The site is completely non-commercial, includes no advertising, and no personal data or any other data are used by the site to target users with advertisements (with the previously noted caveat that anyone anywhere in the world is free to read almost anything you post on this site because it is a public forum and that's the ENTIRE POINT of the site). Jeez.
Also, the likelihood of the site doing almost any of that other than using your data to make the site's basic feature sort of do what you'd hope, like notify you (if you've opted to be notified in various circumstances) is quite low because the volunteers who run the site generally don't have a lot of spare time to do any of that, can't imagine why they'd market anything, have no products or services, run no promotions, nor attempt to personalize the site other than to upload a new theme option every decade or so.
How do we protect your information?- We
do not use vulnerability scanning and/or scanning to PCI standards.
- We only provide articles and information.
We never ask for credit card numbers.- We
do not use Malware Scanning.
Your personal information is probably contained behind secured networks, although we can't entirely guarantee this because we use a hosting service and this is their responsibility. If they're doing a good job, and we have no reason to suspect otherwise, you data are presumably only accessible by a limited number of persons who have special access rights to such systems, and are required to keep the information confidential. In addition, all sensitive/credit information you supply is encrypted via Secure Socket Layer (SSL) technology.
If you inexplicably enter credit card information in to this site it will be stored in perpetuity, or until you delete it or ask us to delete it, because this site is completely non-commercial and there is no mechanism anywhere on it to order anything. You can, however, enter your credit card information in any new forum topic you create, forum reply, private message, or profile field as you see fit. That would be stupid and pointless since,
again, this site doesn't process credit cards, recognize them as anything other than some random text, nor serve any commercial interest whatsoever, but "stupid and pointless" is kind of a running theme in online privacy policies so we felt compelled to mention it here.
Do we use 'cookies'?Oh please. Really? Yes, we use cookies, like every other site on the entire world wide web since, oh, 1996 or so. The intro paragraphs already addressed cookies pretty well, but here we go again. Cookies are like these little files that a site or its service provider transfers to your computer's hard drive through your Web browser (if you allow) that enables the site's or service provider's systems to recognize your browser and capture and remember certain information. For instance, we could use cookies to help us remember and process the items in your shopping cart if we had such a thing. They could also used to help us understand your preferences based on previous or current site activity, which enables us to provide you with improved services, but we've never done that either. We also don't use cookies to help us compile aggregate data about site traffic and site interaction so that we can offer better site experiences and tools in the future, but it seems like it's theoretically possible.
Instead, we use cookies to:
- Understand and save user's preferences for future visits.
- Maintain a user's login session while navigating the site.
- Remember that you've agreed to allow the site to set cookies.
- That you've agreed to the EU's GDPR notice.
- And to set a temporary unique ID while you're browsing the site for security purposes.
You can choose to have your computer warn you each time a cookie is being sent, which gets very annoying very quickly, or you can choose to turn off all cookies, or even block them for just this site if your browser supports it. You do this through your browser settings. Since each browser is a little different, look at your browser's Help Menu to learn the correct way to modify your cookies. Certain features of the site will break if you do so, but there's simply no practical way to prevent that.
If users disable cookies in their browser:If you turn cookies off you won't be able to log in and all kinds of stuff will be unusable. We don't care if you log in, but if you've been a member for a while other users might miss hearing from you.
Third-party disclosureDo we disclose the information we collect to Third-Parties?We sell, trade, or otherwise transfer to outside parties your name, address, city, town, any form or online contact identifier email, name of chat account etc., screen name or user names, phone number, SSN, cookie number, ip address device serial #, unique device identifier, photo, video or audio file of child, and anything you enter in to the site anywhere. This forum is generally accessible to the public, so this sharing occurs anytime you post anything in a forum topic on the site, add it to your public user profile, or another user posts it about you. We already kind of talked about this. Seriously. It's a forum. You share stuff you want other people to see. That's the whole point.
How and with whom we share your personal information and sensitive personal information:- Email address: 1) with no one but site administrators and forum moderators, unless you post it publicly.
- Your IP address: 1) with site administrators and forum moderators, 2) with any site to which another user creates a hyperlink that you click on, 3) any site hosting an image linked by this site itself or a user of the site who posts an inline image.
- Everything else: 1) with any administrator in the process of running the site, 2) with any user to whom you send such information in a private message or email using the site (I mean, if you write personal information in a private message and send it to someone, it should be abundantly obvious that person to whom that private message was addressed will in fact see the personal information you sent him/her -- we sincerely hope this revelation isn't alarming and hope you'll report a bug if your personal information are not successfully transferred), 3) with anyone anywhere on the Internet if the data are posted in a public comment, 4) to serve lawful requests by government authorities (we have never had such a request, and since we'd be legally compelled to do so anyway it seems kind of pointless that we have to say that here, but everyone else always puts that clause in their privacy policies so there you go).
- The site includes no "trackers," third-party analytics, advertisements, or behavioral targeting, but since the site is largely public if you post something that is publicly visible the site cannot guarantee that someone, somewhere in the world will not be able to use those data to track you, behaviorally target you, or customize ads on your behalf. To reiterate, THIS IS A PUBLIC FORUM SO ALMOST ANYTHING YOU POST HERE WILL BE VISIBLE TO THE PUBLIC. Really, do we need to keep saying this?? Anyway, the EU's GDPR probably outlaws this, but for the love of beans it's not our fault that the people who wrote the GDPR apparently haven't used the web since 1993 and seem to be unaware of this necessary, and often desirable, aspect of the world wide web.
We engage in this practice because:We just can't guarantee your data won't be shared in these way during the routine process of running the site, never mind such thing as (without exclusion) unforeseen critical extenuating circumstances, demands from law enforcement, etc. Some of these data are also shared because they're part of your public profile and anyone visiting the site can see them, or because you posted them, or you clicked a checkbox requesting you be notified of events on the site. You are 100% welcome to lie about anything you enter on the site, except for your age if you're under 13 in the US or legally a "child" in your locality, and whether your reside in the European Union.
Personally Identifiable Information.Third-party linksOccasionally, at our discretion or whimsy of any user posting such a link, we may include or offer third-party products or services on our website. These third-party sites have separate and independent privacy policies. We therefore have no responsibility or liability for the content and activities of these linked sites. Nonetheless, we seek to protect the integrity of our site and welcome any feedback about these sites.
Users are welcome to share images by linking them from third-party sources. If you view a page containing such an image your browser will make a request to that third-party site which will result in that site receiving your personal data in, at a minimum, the form of your IP address.
Transmission of data:Most of our site is protected by SSL, but even with this protection at a minimum your IP address and the IP address of the server hosting the site will be visible to intervening routers and networks that transmit IP data to/from you as you browse our site. We have no responsibility for protecting your IP address as it is transmitted across the Internet to serve information your browser requests on this site, nor any other requests from your browser initiated due to content on this site, such as images hosted on third party servers. To minimize this leakage of personal data consider using a virtual private network or anonymization network
GoogleGoogle's advertising requirements can be summed up by Google's Advertising Principles. They are put in place to provide a positive experience for users.
https://support.google.com/adwordspolic ... 6548?hl=enThis site does not use Google advertising, nor any other Google resource, but the boilerplate from which this privacy policy was generated automatically included this section about Google. We have left it in place for your edification in case you're interested in that sort of thing. Really, anyone who's read this far probably is interested, so go check it out. No need to thank us. To reiterate, anything Google says about advertising is completely irrelevant to this site.
California Online Privacy Protection Act
CalOPPA is the first state law in the nation to require commercial websites and online services to post a privacy policy. Reminder: this is not a commercial web site. The law's reach stretches well beyond California to require any person or company in the United States (and conceivably the world) that operates websites collecting Personally Identifiable Information from California consumers to post a conspicuous privacy policy on its website stating exactly the information being collected and those individuals or companies with whom it is being shared. - See more at:
http://consumercal.org/california-onlin ... RbT51.dpufAccording to CalOPPA, we agree to the following:- Users can visit our site anonymously.
- Once this privacy policy is created, we will add a link to it on our home page or as a minimum, on the first significant page after entering our website.
- Our Privacy Policy link includes the word 'Privacy' and can easily be found on the page specified above.
You will be notified of any Privacy Policy changes:- On our Privacy Policy Page
Can change your personal information:- By emailing us
- By calling us
- By logging in to your account
- By chatting with us or by sending us a support ticket
- Pretty much by any other means you can communicate with a site admin.
How does our site handle Do Not Track signals?We don't honor Do Not Track signals. We may track, plant cookies, and use advertising when a Do Not Track (DNT) browser mechanism is in place, at least we might if we had any advertising, but we don't and can't imagine ever having any. We don't honor Do Not Track requests because the site's administrators don't program in PHP and haven't a bloody clue how to honor DNT, think it's pointless anyway, and have no interest in tracking you other than making your login session work. Also, not using session cookies would hopelessly break the site. Caveat emptor.
Does our site allow third-party behavioral tracking?It's also important to note that we allow third-party behavioral tracking: this is a public message board and almost anyone who hasn't been banned from the site can load it and scrape any content you post to gain behavioral insights. If you do not want to be behaviorally tracked by anyone on the entire Internet anywhere, then don't post stuff. We have no idea if any behavioral tracking occurs because that's entirely in the realm of unknown third parties.
COPPA (Children Online Privacy Protection Act)If you're under 13 or legally a "child" in your local jurisdiction, you're not allowed to use this site.
When it comes to the collection of personal information from children under the age of 13 years old, the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) puts parents in control. The Federal Trade Commission, United States' consumer protection agency, enforces the COPPA Rule, which spells out what operators of websites and online services must do to protect children's privacy and safety online.
We do not specifically market to children. Actually, we don't market to anyone, but this site is definitely not built to attract children.
We also think COPPA is a pain in the butt, and the difficulty of conforming with it for a hobby site that has absolutely zero interest whatsoever in how old you are leaves us no choice but to block kids from participating in what would otherwise seem like a healthy and informative technology community. If you're a US senator, please change the law so it kind of makes sense for us.
Fair Information PracticesThe Fair Information Practices Principles form the backbone of privacy law in the United States and the concepts they include have played a significant role in the development of data protection laws around the globe. Understanding the Fair Information Practice Principles and how they should be implemented is critical to comply with the various privacy laws that protect personal information.
In order to be in line with Fair Information Practices we will take the following responsive action, should a data breach occur:
We will notify the users via in-site notification as soon as we figure out the breach occurred and aren't so preoccupied with technical measures to fix it that we don't have time to post something about it.
We also agree to the Individual Redress Principle which requires that individuals have the right to legally pursue enforceable rights against data collectors and processors who fail to adhere to the law. This principle requires not only that individuals have enforceable rights against data users, but also that individuals have recourse to courts or government agencies to investigate and/or prosecute non-compliance by data processors.
More GDPR notice stuff for EU citizens and residentsThis site shall not be accessed by residents or citizens of the European Union due to GDPR requirements that this site, and probably any non-trivial site especially one that allows user-posted content, are technically impossible to meet. If you are in the EU, do not continue browsing this site.
What are your rights involving your personal data as an resident or citizen of the EU?- Probably none, except for any that may exist under US law, which is pretty thin in this area. More specifically, the European Union describes a great deal of rights it
believes you have if you are a resident or citizen of the EU, without regard to the site you're visiting. This web site is not, however, aimed at a European audience, is run as a hobby by people outside the European Union, engages in no business activity, and it's unproven that the site, it's administrators, management, or anyone in any way involved with running the site in any way, is within the personal jurisdiction of the European Union as might be recognized by US courts. So while the EU is quite confident that you have every right laid out in the GDPR, the site's owners are cautiously optimistic you don't.
- The site's management will, however, make a reasonable effort to do what the GDPR asks because we like to be helpful, even though we suspect we're outside any reasonable notion of European jurisdiction.
National borders:Due to the way data are routed across the Internet, it is very likely that your personal data will cross international boundaries when you use the site.
This site is run in the United States and is usually hosted and stored on computers within the territorial boundaries of the United States. If you are outside the United States your data will necessarily be transferred across international boundaries when you access the site. Depending on where you are this is probably illegal (we remain completely befuddled by this section of the GDPR), but there's nothing we can do about it and still run the site.
Parting thoughts:- The GDPR is well intentioned, but is technically impossible for any non-trivial site to actually fully conform to in the real world.