Website Privacy Policy

Personal Statement

This is a privacy policy for my website www.minus40.info .

This website was created and is owned by myself, Bob Sutherland. I am a Canadian citizen living in the country of Canada, on the continent of North America, on planet Earth.

This is a personal hobby website that I created as a retirement project.

I am not trying to sell you anything. I am not trying to create a customer list. I am not making any attempt to collect any personal information about you.

As far as I am concerned you are just another anonymous lurker. Go ahead and hide there under cover in the shadows of the Internet sneaking peeks at the pages of my website. I will never know you are there.

Of course, if you send me an email message I will know whatever you tell me about yourself. I may be slow but I usually reply to friendly email messages if you ask a question. I tend to ignore sales pitches that are trying to sell me something.

Over the past decade and a half of creating hobby websites I have only created one tiny cookie file. It was simply an interactive programming technique that provided my website's visitors with an opportunity to select how large they would like the photographs to be on the webpage they were viewing. My cookie file did not transmit any information back to my computer. It was programmed to self destruct in a few days. Alternatively the cookie file would be deleted whenever my website's visitors cleared the history cache of their web browser software.

I deleted the cookie file and its programming code from my website many years ago as I began experimenting with other ways to control the size of photographs on my website.

General Statement

Once I upload my website's files to the Internet many companies then become involved in the distribution of my website's pages to your computer. It is at this point that I no longer have any direct control or involvement in the process. Like you I can only try to figure out what is going on.

I am aware that some companies add their own programming code to my website's files. Some companies create small files called cookies on your computer. Some companies may use cookies or other techniques to try to identify or track you as you surf around on the Internet. All of this will happen whether you visit my website or any other website on the Internet.

Let us make it perfectly clear that there is no such thing as privacy on the Internet. The Internet was created to allow people to share knowledge and information. It was never intended to be a place where people can hide or keep secrets.

Every computer attached to the Internet has some form of history = cache = log file that records all of its communications with other computers on the Internet.

When you visit a search engine's website the computers there will record whatever you type as your search query. The search engine's computers will then record the long list of recommended websites they show you in their search results. Finally a search engine computer will record whatever website(s) from their list that you decide to go visit.

When you try to visit my website the company that is hosting my website's files will record each page that you request to view. My web hosting company will then record every file from my website that it uploads to your computer so that you can view my website's pages.

Let us change our focus to your own computer. Did you know that your web browsing software is recording a history log file of the date, time and Internet address of every web page that you visit?

Taken together all of these history log files on various computers that you are interacting with form what is known as your electronic trail. The easiest place for someone to find and follow your electronic trail is right there on your own computer. It is unlikely that any computer technician will ever attempt to find and follow your electronic trail on some of the big company owned computers on the Internet unless your computer is involved in some major catastrophy such as a cyberattack.

Specific Companies

The minus40.info website is registered with the combined Bing / Yahoo search engine database and the Google search engine database. From these search engines I receive some feedback. Specifically when I login to their respective websites they tell me if their unmanned computer robots that are constantly wandering around searching for new and old websites on the Internet have found any technical problems associated with my website. I might be told what sorts of things people have been searching for that may be associated with the content of my website. I might be told how many times people did or did not visit one of my web pages after doing a search. I am not told any information that would allow me to identify who was using the search engine or who visited my website.

The files of the minus40.info website are located on the DreamHost.com web hosting computers. Based on their advertising I think they are now hosting about a million websites and some of those websites have over ten thousand visitors per day. None of the technicians at DreamHost are likely to pay any attention to my little hobby website unless I suffer a cyberattack or some other major problem. Only then might someone at DreamHost look at their computer's history log file and may find your computer listed if you happened to be visiting my website when the disaster struck.

The minus40.info website is registered with Cloudflare.com . I am aware that Cloudflare adds their own programming code to the files of my website. Cloudflare may temporarily create a mirror copy of part of my website and place it on one of their computers located around the world to speed up the delivery of my website files to visitors in that region.

Cloudflare provides security monitoring protecting my website from some threats and problems on the Internet. Specifically Cloudflare is attempting to find, track and stop computers that are wandering around the Internet spreading computer malware, stealing copyright material, causing cyberattacks and otherwise misbehaving. If you are well behaved and not causing any problems on the Internet then the Cloudflare computers should not bother you as they are very busy chasing the troublemakers.

Cloudflare provides me with some statistical cumulative totals telling me how many computers visited my website, how much data was downloaded, how many webpages were viewed, and how many computer threats were blocked. I do not receive any feedback from Cloudflare that identifies who visited my website.

The minus40.info website has advertising provided by the Google Adsense program. Google provides some programming code that I paste on my web pages. Google's computers then make all of the decisions about how many advertisements to include on a page, where to place the advertisements and which advertisements to display. Google has a large network of companies and advertising agencies providing them with advertisements. The advertisements you see may be related to the content of my website, they may be related to something Google or one of its advertising agencies knows about you based on the use of cookies and other tracking technology, or it may simply be a random advertisement.

Over the past quarter century I have tried a few web page counters and website analytic programs. The former simply counts the number of visitors to a web page while the latter counts and attempts to provide some statistical analysis of the website's visitors. So far I have not been thrilled with any of the website analytic programs I have tried. The estimates of how many humans and robots are visiting my website have varied so greatly when comparing one program to another that I no longer use or trust any of them.

The Google Adsense program requires me to inform you that Google and any of the companies or advertising agencies providing the advertising may create, read or modify small files called cookies on your computer device. They may use web beacons and other technologies. They may use identifiers for mobile devices (e.g., Android Advertising Identifier or Advertising Identifier for iOS) or similar technology to collect data.

Google has created a web page that discloses what you need to know about their collection and processing of data from websites such as mine that participate in their Google Adsense program. Here is the link:

How Google uses information from sites or apps that use our services

Additional Reading

What is a Computer Cookie? is a web page I created to teach you about computer cookies.

Measuring Your Screen is a web page I created as a demonstration of how your computer is broadcasting details about itself to other computers as it attempts to communicate with them on the Internet. Companies such as Google can gather a fair amount of data about your computer just by listening to the information your computer is willing to share.