Privacy Information

Viruses and spam pretending to originate from Globalissues.org

Globalissues.org does not sell or pass on email addresses or use them for spam in any way.

Please be aware that there are numerous viruses and email harvesting robots spreading around the Internet that have the ability to mimic other people’s email addresses. I unfortunately understand that some of these viruses and spammers may have impersonated email addresses from globalissues.org when spreading a virus or sending emails, when it has not in fact originated from globalissues.org at all. They also have nothing to do with globalissues.org in any way.

I regret the situation, but am unable to do anything about it. For readers to contact me, I have had to put my email addresses on this web site, but I have tried to hide it in ways that automated software will hopefully not find my addresses and harvest them. Unfortunately these techniques are never guaranteed as spammers and viruses always grow in sophistication.

For more information, please see for example the following:

• An article from CNet’s News.com from 2002, a web site devoted to technology news.
• An article from the Boston Globe from 2006 that suggests spammers are going to get more sophisticated and harder to detect, unfortunately.

If you feel you have received email from me that appears to be spam or a virus, please do contact me for more information so we can try to resolve this if possible, or contact your anti-virus software vendor (or get some virus protection software soon!)

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Privacy of email addresses

This site provides the ability to send you a monthly email newsletter informing you of changes and updates to the site, and related matters. If you are interested, you can sign up to this site’s service, which is free.

If you use this email update service, your privacy is simple: your email is the only bit of information needed, and is kept in strict confidence. Please see the previous link for further details.

If you are still unsure but would still like to stay in touch with the site, I also offer an alternative, an RSS Feed. You can find out more about this option by following the previous link.

This site also provides the ability to share a page with others by providing theirs, and yours, email address. These are not stored, and only used for the purpose of sharing the page via email.

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Analysis of web usage uses anonymous data gathering

Almost all web servers provide the ability to record some information about the nature of a visit to a page. Typical information stored includes:

• Date and time of the request made;
• The page that was requested;
• The IP address used to access the resource;
• What referring web site did the visit come from;
• Technical stuff like was the request successful or were there any errors, how long the page took to respond, etc.

I use this data to attempt to get a better understanding of how the site is functioning, what areas are popular, what needs improving, etc.

The web hosting company I use to host my web site provides me a service whereby they go through these log files and present pretty charts and graphs, making it easier for me. I can therefore know things like how many page views I get per day, week, month, year, etc. I can find out which pages are popular, and so on.

At no time is any personally identifiable information used to track you through your visit. I don’t have any area on the site where I ask you to identify yourself, so I cannot know anything about any individual user.

Note that while the IP address is stored, it is a standard configuration from my web hosting company, but it is generally hard to personally identify a user through an IP address as most IP addresses are often internet service provider proxy servers. I do not make use of the IP address, in any case.

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Cookies

As mentioned above, Google Analytics needs to set some cookies which they can use to help create the richer analysis that helps me understand how the site is used.

In addition, I use Google Adsense to serve ads.

For more information on the Google services, and how to control the information sent to Google, please visit Google’s page, explaining how Google uses data from these services.

Finally, a cookie is used to store the fact you have consented to the use of cookies!

Other than that, I do not use a cookie for any purpose.

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