Summary
If you only read the Protect CT Public Lands website, no more information is collected than is typically collected in server logs by web sites in general.
If you contribute to Protect CT Public Lands, you are publishing every word you post publicly. If you write something, assume that it will be retained forever. This includes articles, user pages and talk pages. Some limited exceptions are described below.
Publishing on Protect CT Public Lands and public data
Simply visiting the web site does not expose your identity publicly (but see private logging below).
When you edit any page on Protect CT Public Lands, you are publishing a document. This is a public act, and you are identified publicly with that edit as its author.
Identification of an author
When you publish or edit a page on Protect CT Public Lands, you may be logged in or not.
If you are logged in, you will be identified by your user name. This may be your real name if you so choose, or you may choose to publish under a pseudonym, whatever user name you selected when you created your account.
If you have not logged in, you will be identified by your network IP address. This is a series of four numbers which identifies the Internet address from which you are contacting Protect CT Public Lands. Depending on your connection, this number may be traceable only to a large Internet service provider, or specifically to your school, place of business, or home. It may be possible that the origin of this IP address could be used in conjunction with any interests you express implicitly or explicitly by editing articles to identify you even by private individuals.
It may be either difficult or easy for a motivated individual to connect your network IP address with your real-life identity. Therefore if you are very concerned about privacy, you may wish to log in and publish under a pseudonym.
Your IP address is also associated and published with any “anonymous” comments that you post on Protect CT Public Lands.
When using a pseudonym, your IP address will not be available to the public except in cases of abuse, including vandalism of a Protect CT Public Lands page by you or by another user with the same IP address. In all cases, your IP address will be stored on the Protect CT Public Lands servers and can be seen by Protect CT Public Lands’s server administrators and by users who have been granted “CheckUser” access. Your IP address, and its connection to any usernames that share it may be released under certain circumstances (see below).
If you use a company mail server from home or telecommute and use a DSL or cable Internet connection, it is likely to be very easy for your employer to identify your IP address and find all of your IP based Protect CT Public Lands contributions. Using a user name is a better way of preserving your privacy in this situation. However, remember to log out or disconnect yourself after each session using a pseudonym on a shared computer, to avoid allowing others to use your identity.
Cookies and Web Beacons
Protect CT Public Lands will set a temporary session cookie (PHPSESSID) whenever you visit the site. If you do not intend to ever log in, you may deny this cookie, but you cannot log in without it.
More cookies may be set when you log in, to avoid typing in your user name (or optionally password) on your next visit. You may clear these cookies after use if you are using a public machine and don’t wish to expose your username to future users of the machine. (If so, clear the browser cache as well.)
Protect CT Public Lands uses third-party advertising companies to serve ads when you visit our website. These companies and their affiliates and business partners may set their own cookies and/or may use information (not including your name, address, email address, or telephone number) about your visits to this and other websites in order to provide advertisements about goods and services of interest to you. This information, usually used to serve interest-based advertising, includes users’ browser, operating system, IP address, ISP etc.
Other third parties whose resources are requested by web pages on Protect CT Public Lands include Twitter and Facebook. We may add other third-party widgets at any time. All these services set their own cookies, which they can use to track you and build a profile. Each of these companies may also sell the information they compile to third parties in accordance with the GDPR or applicable local regulations.
Passwords
Many aspects of the Protect CT Public Lands’s community interactions depend on the reputation and respect that is built up through a history of valued contributions. User passwords are the only guarantee of the integrity of a user’s edit history. All users are encouraged to select strong passwords and to never share them. We do not store passwords in plaintext and are unable to tell you what your password is. You may request a new password via email. You may also log in to Protect CT Public Lands using your Facebook account.
Private logging
Every time you visit a web page, you send a lot of information to the web server. Most web servers routinely maintain access logs with a portion of this information, which can be used to get an overall picture of what pages are popular, what other sites link to this one, and what web browsers people are using.
The raw log data is not made public.
Log data may be examined by developers in the course of solving technical problems and in tracking down badly-behaved web spiders that overwhelm the site. IP addresses of users, derived either from those logs or from records in the database are frequently used to correlate usernames and network addresses of edits in investigating abuse of Protect CT Public Lands, including the suspected use of malicious “sockpuppets” (duplicate accounts), vandalism, harassment of other users, or disruption of Protect CT Public Lands.
Policy on release of data derived from page logs
It is the policy of Protect CT Public Lands that personally identifiable data collected in the server logs, or through records in the database via the CheckUser feature, may be released by the system administrators or users with CheckUser access, in the following situations:
- In response to a valid subpoena or other compulsory request from law enforcement
- With permission of the affected user
- When necessary for investigation of abuse complaints.
- Where the information pertains to page views generated by a spider or bot and its dissemination is necessary to illustrate or resolve technical issues.
- Where the user has been vandalising articles or persistently behaving in a disruptive way, data may be released to assist in the targeting of IP blocks, or to assist in the formulation of a complaint to relevant Internet Service Providers
- Where it is reasonably necessary to protect the rights, property or safety of protectctpubliclands.org, its users or the public.
Protect CT Public Lands’s policy does not permit public distribution of such information under any circumstances, except as described above. Please also see the section on Cookies and Web Beacons on this page.
User data
Data on users, such as real names or the times at which they edited and the number of edits they have made are publicly available via “user contributions” lists, and in aggregated forms published by other users.
Protect CT Public Lands will not sell or share private information, such as email addresses, with third parties, unless you agree to release this information, or it is required by law to release the information.
Removal of user accounts
Once created, user accounts will not be removed. It may be possible for a username to be changed. But Protect CT Public Lands does not guarantee that a name will be changed on request.
Deletion of content
Removing content from Protect CT Public Lands does not permanently delete it. In normal articles, anyone can look at a previous version and see what was there. If an article is “deleted”, any user with “administrator” access on Protect CT Public Lands, meaning almost anyone trusted not to abuse the deletion capability, can see what was deleted. Information can be permanently deleted by those people with access to the servers, but there is no guarantee this will happen except in response to legal action.