privacy policy

Our Privacy Policy

 

We take your privacy seriously and we do our best to protect it. We do not collect any personal information that could identify you off site, except what you yourself might choose to put on your account page.

 

We do collect the following types of information:

tracking data

To better understand how the site is used and how to improve it, we record some limited information about user actions on the site, including things like how many users view each page, which browsers they use and which plugins are enabled, how long they spend on the site, and what entry points they use. None of these data are transferred offsite or made available to any third party. When recording these data, the user's IP address is masked so that even the data we store on site cannot be used to identify individuals.

Some web browsers allow users to set a "Do Not Track" request when they browse the web. We respect the Do Not Track setting and record no tracking information at all for those users. If your browser does not offer the "Do Not Track" request, but you still want to turn off tracking while browsing sciphile.org, go to your sciphile.org account page and deselect the box that says "enable user tracking".

Note: there are important exceptions regarding tracking when you click on a third-party link. For example, if you watch an embedded YouTube video, YouTube may record information about what you watch and who you are, just as if you were watching from the YouTube site itself. Similarly, if you use the share button to send information to a social media site, you are then subject to tracking by that third party site about what you have decided to share and with whom.

cookies

A cookie, also known as a browser cookie, is a small piece of data sent from a website and stored in a user's web browser. When the user visits the same website in the future, the data stored in the cookie can be retrieved by the website to determine the user's previous activity. At sciphile.org we use a few limited cookies to make sure that our web pages are correctly displayed. For example, we use cookies to determine whether the user is logged in or not, which account is being used (so we know which user page to show), whether or not javascript is enabled in the browser, and whether or not a comment box has been closed. We do not use cookies to compile long-term records of individuals' browsing histories or any other personal information.

Note: We explicitly block any cookies from third parties when you use the share button. Generally this does not cause a problem, but it is possible some functionality is limited.

account data

If you log on to your personal account on sciphile.org, we record data about which materials have been rated and viewed through your account. These data may be used to try to make helpful recommendations about what other materials on our site might be of interest to you. They are not given to any other organization or individual, and the viewing history is discarded after one month.