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Privacy Policy

The privacy of all our visitors is extremely important to us. The following document outlines how information is received, processed, and stored in this site, and how that information is protected.

Who are we?

This site is written and managed by Gordon Russell, but it is owned by Edinburgh Napier University. It runs within Edinburgh Napier University, and therefore under the regulations of that University, as well as under the regulations of JANET, our network provider..

Disclaimer

The authors of this website aim to ensure that all the information published is accurate and error free, but in no way is this guarenteed. There are bound to be errors, but we do our best. We also do our best to remain free of malware or viruses. In any case we cannot accept any liability for your use of this site and its material.

Any personal data collected by this site is treated as confidential. The site operates in the United Kingdom, and operates in line with the principles of the appropriate laws of the UK.

External links leading away from this site may lead you to other sites outwith the control of of this site. You should review the privacy policy and the terms and conditions associated with such sites yourself, as the authors have no control over external sites. We do not warrenty in any way links which lead to external sites.

Cookies

When you visit this site we may set cookies for our use. These hold your interface preferences, cache information, session information, and other operation information. This site is not usable if you disable cookies.

When you log out of the site some cookies may remain, but these do not contain any tracking information or personal information. These are purely cookies involved in managing the user interface.

Logs

Our sites are mostly focused on teaching, but they also form part of our non-commercial teaching research activities. As such we maintain logs for non-commercial research, so that we can better understand how to teach effectively. Additionally we have to maintain logs for security and legal reasons. As such a great deal of information is logged on your use of the sites. This includes your IP number and username. We monitor and record packet information for legal reasons. As such you should never keep confidential or valuable data in these sites (e.g. dont use virtual machines on this site for your online banking). Data is retained as required by the laws of the UK.

Having said all that, great effort is made to protect your information, no matter what form it is in. When we use log information for our university research, it is anonymalized at every stage. We will never reveal any of your information unless this is required by legal or for subjudicial reasons (e.g. to meet a requirement of my University's Regulations).

Passwords

All passwords held in these sites are secured using current best practice. As of 2012 passwords are encrypted using a 512 bit sha encoding, which is dynamically seeded by 128 random bits, plus per user seeding using some of your account details (e.g. email address) plus a large static seed not stored in the database. If the best practice encoding ever changes your password is automatically re-entrypted next time you type it in again (e.g. log into the site). We have no realistic way of recovering your password.

Personal Information

We do not share your information with anyone. We do not sell or give your information away. We do not spam you or email you in general. We do however email you as part of our registration process (a one-off email), and we do email you if you request a password recovery email. We also reserve the right to email you on security matters (e.g. if you are abusing the system) and we may email you as part of our teaching research (e.g. a questionaire as to how you liked/hated our site). However in the decades of running these sites we have never actually sent any such teaching research messages. Rest assured your email and other details are safe with us. We never send marketing information.

There is one exception to our sharing of information. If you are actually a student studying at our University, and you are accessing this site as part of your University education here, then we will use your information as required to properly support our education processes. For instance, if you undertake an online accessment in this site we naturally need to take your identity and assessment scores and use that to give you a grade in your course. Additionally, we may use site information to validate your grade, e.g. plagiarism and collusion detection.

Changes to your information

If you have provided us with personal information, then you can always log back into the account and change this as required.

If you need your account deactivated then please email me using the details in your registration email. For security reasons we do not support deleting an account, so for instance if you use a virtual machine to do something bad you cannot just delete your account in an attempt to avoid any legal action. However account information, logs, etc, are handled using the appropriate laws in the UK, and this includes retention periods, after which all deactivated and inactive accounts are destroyed.

Linuxzoo created by Gordon Russell.
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