We’re shocked you’re actu­ally tak­ing the time to read­ing this. But since you’re here we might as well tell you how the sausage is made. Chefs knife at the ready? Good. The recipe is as follows;

What do we collect?

First, you’re on the inter­net and as such should have no expec­ta­tion of pri­vacy unless you are a multi­na­tional com­pany or gov­ern­ment. Cyn­i­cal? Maybe. But more often than not, true. (Wik­iLeaks any­one?) Hav­ing said this, what do we col­lect? We col­lect infor­ma­tion you might sup­ply us dur­ing nor­mal com­mu­ni­ca­tions. Data such as com­pany names, people’s names, posi­tions, phone num­bers, postal addresses, email address, URL’s and the like which are gen­er­ally pub­lic knowl­edge are col­lected when appro­pri­ate. We also track activ­ity such as how you got to our site, where you go on it, and how long you stick around. And you do stick around, right? Where else can you get com­pelling con­tent like this?

We also col­lect infor­ma­tion about the hard­ware and soft­ware you are using, such as oper­at­ing sys­tem, browser ver­sion, res­o­lu­tion and color depth, and con­nec­tion speed.

Why do we do this?

The main rea­son is to asses the gen­eral capa­bil­i­ties of our vis­i­tors sys­tems. After all, there is no sense in us ded­i­cat­ing time and resources to devel­op­ing con­tent which only a neg­li­gi­ble per­cent­age of our vis­i­tors have the abil­ity use.

Back in the day—fifteen years ago, lets say—when every­one ran Win­dows and Inter­net Explorer 4 on a desk­top with a fif­teen inch mon­i­tor set to thirty-two bit color depth at a res­o­lu­tion of 1024 x 768 this prac­tice was not such as big deal. The user base was essentially homogenized.

But with the advent of mobile com­put­ing and mul­ti­ple oper­at­ing sys­tems, browsers, and hard­ware con­fig­u­ra­tions fight­ing for dom­i­nance it’s vital hhh­h­h­hghgh (Sorry, cat walked across the key­board. It’s dead now.) for us to have as clear a def­i­n­i­tion as pos­si­ble of our vis­i­tors limitations.

Our promise to you

We will not share your infor­ma­tion with spam­mers, unre­lated ven­dors, or any­one out­side our direct employ unless you specif­i­cally direct us otherwise.

Any data col­lected can not pin­point indi­vid­ual activ­i­ties, but rather is col­lected en mass to pro­vide a snap shop of vis­i­tors. We have bet­ter things to do than peek under your IP address.