Wednesday, May 30, 2018

Privacy Policy

With the new GDPR rules in the EU, we're taking this opportunity to make our privacy policy explicit, no matter where you're reading from.

Your privacy is pretty safe with us. We collect no information ourselves; we set no cookies; we do not interact with your computer in any way other than to provide these page files on this web service for your browser to call up and read. We simply don't have any information about any of our readers that we could do anything with, even if we were so inclined—which we aren't.

Blogspot, the publishing service we use to construct and host this site, does provide cookies in your browser. This is not under our control and we have no access to them or to the information they contain. You should have received a privacy notice automatically when you opened the page if you are in the EU—which we are unable to even review because we're not in the EU. We can, however, share with you this page on Google's privacy policies and data management in general. If all else fails, here are instructions on how to disable cookies in Chrome or Firefox.

We're not aware of any further information Blogspot/Google collects simply from your use of these pages, and they have not revealed any other data collection practices to site owners.

The Survivor's Guide to Surgical Menopause discussion list is hosted by Google Groups. They have an updated privacy message on a sticky post at the head of our discussion topics. So far as we've been able to research, use of Groups falls under Google's general privacy policies/data managementcontrols.

We use Google Analytics to collect and display some information about site use. This is set to retain only impersonal data and that for the shortest permitted time. Here is the overall general statement about Google Analytics and data privacy. We have added code to our analytic feature "to anonymize the information sent by the tracker objects by removing the last octet of the IP address prior to its storage" (quote from Google Analytics). This purportedly makes it impossible to locate a user specifically. Google also offers an opt-out extension for the Chrome browser; there is a similar, privately-developed extension for Firefox. They claim to block all recording of your use of the site.

You may additionally have other sites' trackers enabled that can follow you and record your use of this site. These are entirely outside of our control. You can limit the reach of these trackers, however, through the use of browser extensions such as Trace (we are not affiliated with them).

And that's as simple as we can make this. We apologize that all of the Google stuff is so complicated, but that's on them. We've spent hours trying to unravel it all...and gave up and deleted our ad account just because that was an even more horrific mess. If anyone is aware of other tracking originating through this site or has other privacy concerns, please do contact Framboise and she'll do everything in her power to help.