Kinhost.org Privacy Policy

Introduction

In this day & age, information about you is being inferred by 3rd parties depending on your browsing habits. It is very difficult to be truly "anonymous" on the web. The European Union is cracking down on this, as they should.

Before the GDPR went into effect, and given that Big Data is being used for sale, advertisements, and tracking people around the web, we (the Crisses / (Rev.) Criss Ittermann) decided that since our main audience is very sensitive about personal data, we would do our best to eliminate our involvement in Big Data (Google, for example — or Amazon retargeting pixels, etc.) collecting any of your browsing habits or information, as much as we could while still providing the services that we feel compelled to offer the world.

What constitutes "personal data"?

Information that allows a person to be identified whether directly or indirectly, especially by reference to any given identifier. Isn't that confusing? So, it can be your name, number, phone number, email address, your common online "username" or "handle" that may elsewhere be associated with you personally, your IP address could help identify you (or someone using your internet connection), your location information, and anything that could identify you in the future. So broadly defined, just about anything that could point back to you.

Our Stance

We don't want your personal identifying information, but sometimes it's impossible to avoid sharing one's legal name, system name, identities within your system, your phone number, email address, IP address, or more — especially if you want help or a reply back. If you choose to disclose information about yourself, your medical or mental health condition, or where you are located — please understand that we do not maintain HIPPA compliance and are not outfitted to protect the privacy of your personal health information. If you post this information in articles on the site, or in comments on pages, they will be publicly accessible. If you send us those details in email, you understand you are taking the risk of sending it to someone who is not set up to protect health information.

What do we do with your information and data

There are more details in specific below and some tips on how to protect yourself from data collection on 3rd parties. We do what we can to protect you, however some things are unavoidable.

1. We removed Google Analytics off of Kinhost.org and LiberatedLifeCoaching.com, and several other sites. We no longer directly track your browsing information or flow through our websites through 3rd party software.
2. Our dedicated web server tracks IP addresses for data hits and web page requests in the server logs. We only look at the logs if there's a website issue that needs to be addressed. Logs are archived (compressed), rotated, and eventually deleted on an automatic schedule.
3. Our server has 2 administrators — ourselves (The Crisses) and our partner, who is also a DID system. We always do everything we can to keep other persons or even our own customers out of our server data. If there are legitimate other users or customers with any direct access to the server, they are in a chrooted "jail" i.e. they can only access their own section of the server, and the rest of the sever is not available to them. So for example a customer can use our webmail services or FTP files to/from their own directories, but not access the rest of the server.
4. We have not had any known server/data breaches.
5. If you email me through the website forms, I will get whatever information you put into the forms. Hopefully this would be obvious. My emails are generally removed from the server in 1 week, but I keep my emails on my business computer for decades. If you have ever or will ever email me, that email may very well be "forever". My emails are stored on my business computer and in onsite & offsite backups/cloud backups of my computer. If you absolutely need me to erase an email sent by you, you may have to provide me with exactly what information you put into it and approximate dates so I can locate it in my enormous email warehouse. Your IP address should be tracked on my server, but is not sent to me in the emails sent by the webform which just becomes an email from my server to me with your information from the form in the body of the email. The email may tell me which webpage you were on which helps give me context if you have a question or concern — so I know what you were looking at when you contacted me.
6. Where you are tracked is if you log into the website (if you have your own sub-site or an editor/contributor account) or if you leave comments on the blogs or pages on the server. You can choose whatever name to sign your comments with, or the name you use to log in under. Your IP address — i.e. your computer routing information — is saved when you post comments or articles to the site. It is used to stop abuse of the site and is available if the authorities insist by way of a warrant to get information from my server. We would do everything in our legal power to keep them from having this information, but tracking that information is necessary for protecting ourselves from harassment or attack, or protecting the community from perpetrators. If someone is violative, exploitative, etc. we might volunteer their information to the authorities to help protect potential future victims.
7. When you log in to our website to work on a subsite or to create a comment, your Author information may be stored in a cookie on your computer. This is used to auto-fill your username when you log in or when you edit a page. You can remove cookies from your browser following the instructions from your browser's creator.

3rd Party Tracking

We do not send your data directly to any 3rd parties. The following are ways you may incidentally be identified on 3rd party platforms as having come from one of our websites.

1. New: September 2, 2022. We are adding a Frase answerbot to the site that has been fed a curated list of content from this site. It should be able to answer questions, but also it will be tracking some inputs, problems, ratings, etc. and once I know more about how much it tracks I'll update this. It will aggregate data and report back to us what topics of questions are being asked, how many questions, and how confident it was in the answers, etc. To get an idea of what these dashboards look like please see this help topic on Frase's website. We have opted not to have our Frase installation collect emails from folk who have unanswerable questions, etc. But that might be something we add later, at which point we would only get that information if you agreed to give it.
   • We do see the questions that people ask in the analytics tools.
2. New: August 14, 2020. We just realized that Anchor.fm, owned by Spotify, can track you if you load our podcast pages with their html-included audio player included in the page. We are trying to figure out if there's a better way to deal with this, or we will have to take the players out of our website and provide a link to the episode page at Anchor.fm or another service. In the meantime, if you are logged into Spotify, and don't want Spotify to know that you are listening to our podcast, please log out of Spotify, use a proxy server, a VPN server, or another method of accessing the podcast. Please see their privacy policy as we don't control what information they have or can track if you are a member of their Spotify service. They would know which episodes you are listening to, and may add that data to other data they have about your browsing habits, music habits, or other account use history.
3. New: February 10, 2019. Since the redirects may be captured, even though they said they wouldn't be — and because it may be klunky and confusing for website visitors, we have removed dereferer.org from our workflow. We are now trusting that you are using a modern browser that will respect the "no-referrer" directives. If you are using Opera Mini or Internet Explorer Mobile it is NOT respecting it. Most are using Firefox, Chrome, Safari, etc. which do respect this setting. If you're on IE Mobile, or Opera Mini, get a new browser for your device so that you are safer everywhere on the Internet. To test whether your browser is sending referrer information without our permission, see: https://www.whatismyreferer.com/ We don't control the information; your browser does. We are telling your browser to not send it — it's up to your browser whether or not to listen to us. [Editor: Old info kept for archival purposes: New: As of September 9th, 2018, we are sending all external links through "dereferer.org" to hide where you came from. Thus Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, etc. will not know you clicked on a link at Kinhost.org. (Previously: Any offsite links you click to follow may show what webpage address you clicked on to follow the link. To use a link without the "Referring page" information, right-click, grab the website address, open a new tab, and paste the address into a new browser window. You'll go straight to the link without the tracking information of what webpage referred the link. We don't control this — web browsers send this information silently when you click on links. We just thought you might want to know this.)]
4. Email lists — if you sign up on an email list, it's likely to be hosted at MailChimp, since I can't bulk email from my personal or business accounts. We also have several more "public" email groups at YahooGroups — NewKin, Otherkin, Otherkind-Hosts, and Kinfrontiers. We don't own or operate the software running those lists, or store the public/onilne archives ourselves. Those policies would be covered by MailChimp & Yahoogroups respectively.
5. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. Our Amazon affiliate links (for book purchases) only track you if you click on them. We get a tiny commission on the sale of the book, but it does not change your price. Amazon will be able to see which site referred you on their end of the click (as stated above), and will also know I referred you to that book because you clicked my affiliate link. You can go to Amazon directly by opening a new browser tab and search for the book's title or our name as an author to avoid this. Prior to September 9, 2018, see above: Even if I give a non-affiliate link they would still know you clicked the link from my site unless you copy it and paste it into a new browser window — that information is sent to their server by your browsing software and has nothing to do with our site or web/computer programming on our site.
6. New: We removed dereferer.org from the workflow and instead marked all links no-referrer — your browser should respect this directive and not send the information on to the 3rd party site. Please use a modern browser that respects your privacy. This is outlined above in this document. YouTube links should send you to YouTube in a new tab with no referrer page(s) listed for Google or YouTube to log. Previously: As of September 9, 2018, we have removed all embedded videos from the site. You will need to click and all external links will go through "Dereferer.org" so that YouTube (and thus Google) and anyone we link to outside of this website does not know you visited from Kinhost.org. Your privacy about your diagnosis and mental health issues you are researching is very important to us. It's not convenient, it doesn't look as pretty — but it's better for everyone. Previously: YouTube may track you if you open a page with the embedded player. The data is streaming from Google's YouTube. So Google may know the URL of the page requesting the video feed or embedded player, and your IP address, or login credentials from Google/Gmail/YouTube. We don't control this.
7. Podcasts are hosted at Podbean.com, the embedded podcast player for our podcast is theirs, and they probably are able to track your IP address and the requesting page URL when you load podcast pages that house the embedded player. We don't control this. Here is their Privacy Policy: https://www.podbean.com/privacy.
8. The Multiple Mapping Project is hosted at Ushahidi.io and will get your IP and referrer site information if you load the mapping project page on Kinhost.org because of the embedded map. If you add yourself to the map, you will be giving Ushahidi and myself the information you put in the entry form. If you wish to remain anonymous, you can use "Anonymous" or anything else you'd like. You do not have to give an email address or any other contact information. The pin you place on the map does not need to be accurate. We suggest you "spoof" yourself on the map unless you are a merchant, professional, or community leader — in any case, you are sharing whatever information you decide with the community on a public website. Everyone can see everything that is posted in the form — only Ushahidi.io gets your IP address and referrer website information if you load the embedded map or submit information on their site. Their privacy policy: https://www.ushahidi.com/privacy-policy.

Our to-do list for our Privacy Policy

We have several websites to work on, so here's what we have not discussed or maybe not discussed in enough detail yet:

• Add Patreon, PayPal (tip jar for example), did we do enough about email?
• Inform about personal health info, sexual orientation & gender info, using system names as usernames & whether that constitutes identifying information, etc.
• Device security, email storage, site backups, etc.
• Why we back up email why we back up the website
• Personal contributions to the site — removing articles/pages vs. edits & rewrites of existing content (copyrighted author vs editor).

Contact Information

If you need information removed from our website, or have any other privacy/data concerns, please let us know by phone or email. If you need end-to-end secure/encrypted communications with us, we are available through our phone number on Signal, and as "crisses" on Keybase.io (with credential proofs to kinhost.org & our other sites), and you can set the conversation to wipe after a set time.

We can be reached at:
Criss Ittermann
Eclectic Tech, LLC
PO Box 225
New Hampton, NY 10958
845-820-0262

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