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Sunday, January 27, 2002
Ftrain Privacy Statement
By Paul Ford
I watch your every move, but you remain a number disconnected from flesh and life.
Ftrain Reader Services tracks everything a user reads on the site, with the idea that using the data collected from doing so could make it easier to read more of the site. It allows you to take brief notes on a per-page basis. The goal of Ftrain Reader Services it to allow you, the reader, to have more control over a large, oddly-structured hierarchical document. I'm not there yet, but it might work nicely some day.
For the curious: this kind of site has no commercial possibilities whatsoever, and the author of Ftrain, which is me, Paul Ford, isn't worried about who you are, how you look, the stuff you buy, the color of your skin, your brand of shampoo, the gender you prefer. He'd like to know if you were nice and treated others with respect. So your privacy is protected.
Reader Services uses cookies to keep track of who you are. I may occasionally go through all the user records and print out reports of the most popular pages, the least popular pages. It allows you to make up a name for yourself, but that doesn't really do or mean anything (although I might end up using the name you set in the narrative portions of the site at some point, just to spook you).
I will never make the notes (added via the Take Note function) public, so notate away without fear of exposure. I personally might read the notes every now and then, out of sheer curiousity, and you'll just have to forgive me that. I might add a “public note” checkbox, so you can share a note with the wider world if you choose.
So, essentially, you won't really be compromising anything, and the goal is to help readers, not get their data and sell it soda pop companies. I hope to use some of the data to figure out how people read a beast like Ftrain, but that won't effect you directly.
I hope you don't have a problem with all of this. Unless they break down horribly, Reader Services are probably here to say; they're part of my 10 year plan for the site.
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