My Privacy Policy — Such As It Is
Where you see BAD WORD, your imagination is invited to fill in the blank.
Privacy Policies are like Do Not Swim signs in front of alligator ponds. They exist because someone, somewhere, decided they needed to be told. If you are one of those people, welcome — this policy was written with you in mind. For everyone else, bear with me. Apparently this is required.
All websites hosted on my personal server or managed by myself or associates are owned by me, Darren Popham — not the other Darren Popham’s of the world, as in the UK or Hong Kong, but by myself currently enjoying Florida and frequent visits to Disney World.
I, along with any number of content contributors I have invited to work on my sites, offer a wide variety of content and services including gathering hacker information, personal thoughts, and tools such as my QR code background generator for video conferencing. All of it is subject to change or disappear without notice.
When you visit my site you voluntarily hand me an assortment of information — your IP address, your browser type, the pages you visit, and more. It is NOT my responsibility to itemize what you voluntarily give me. It is YOUR RESPONSIBILITY to control what you hand over. Think of it as the village idiot shouting about their personal hygiene in the street: once it’s out there, the genie isn’t going back in the bottle, and I certainly didn’t ask to hear it.
What I do not collect: payment information, real names, or anything that tracks you across third-party sites. I have no interest in that and no mechanism for it. I’m not Google. I’m just a guy with a server.
I may also place cookies on your system. The Internet needs them to function. If that offends you, turn them off yourself — you have the tools. This is your choice to dive in, and I won’t be telling you to BAD WORD off for not knowing how it works, but I’m not going to apologise for how the Internet operates either.
As for what I do with the data I collect — I track web accesses on my network for security purposes. I determine what traffic is legitimate and what is from some BAD WORD attempting to break in. The bad actor data goes into a database and I will use it in any way I see fit, including generating firewall rules, publishing details about the offender on my site, or printing it on toilet paper to wipe my BAD WORD — an entirely proportionate response. Legitimate traffic I simply don’t care about and ignore.
To be clear, “bad actor data” does not exclusively mean a hacker. It could be a bot ignoring my robots.txt, a comment spammer, or an ordinary user from a country I have banned outright. I do feel bad for the innocent user caught in that last scenario, but the sheer volume of BAD WORD from those countries left me no choice. Bad actors ruin things for everyone — take it up with them.
I do not sell any data to third parties. I may share it freely, but no money changes hands for it — unless someone makes me an offer, in which case I’ll update this policy accordingly.
By visiting my websites you agree to everything on this page. If you don’t like it, the tools to protect yourself are readily available. Use them.
If you are a child or not permitted to use the Internet unsupervised: I am not your parent. Go ask them. There is nothing here requiring adult supervision beyond the occasional bad word and the kind of free thinking that some people find alarming.
This policy may change at any time without notice to anyone. If that bothers you, bookmark it and check back occasionally. If I never have to touch it again I will die a happy man.
Now go swim with the alligators. You were warned. 🐊