Privacy

[toomanycats]

With the recent witch hunts against our hobby, I wonder, What is being done to assure the privacy of members. Since e-mails addresses are required to become a member and e-mails easily lead back to individuals, is there a fail-safe to protect members I.D.'s. If a member leaves the forum is his/her personal information deleted?. Also, if every post must be reviewed maybe it is time to end membership, as the posts are being reviewed anyway and improper content could be stopped. I really like this forum, I belong to other forums which do not require membership to post and being anonymous insures protection. I would appreciate a real answer to this question, hopefully not "If you don't like it move on." I have asked this question before and never received an answer. It is obvious this forum is being monitored. Maybe it is time for a database crash.

[blutach]

I don't think there's a fail safe of way protecting your privacy anywhere. Big Brother is watching you with all sorts of ID numbers in your life, as you know.

However, I am sure the forum respects your privacy as much as it can. Admin can answer your other questions about what happens to your user info if you leave.

But it will be nice to have you stick around. I doubt there's much that can go amiss from now on, given our new policies in respect of DVD Ripping.

Finally, every post is already reviewed so nothing will change in that regard.

Regards

[toomanycats]

I don't plan to go anywhere. I have learned way to much here and have a long way to go. The computer section in this forum is incredible and though I don't post there often I get a lot of info from there. I know we are all being watched. It seems I got the last laugh on all those people who thought I was nuts for wearing a aluminum/aluminium foil hat all these years!

[admin]

Forums that don't require memberships are often targets for spam, and forums that cover topics such as the ones here are already prime targets of spammers. The only way for non membership would be to implement moderated posts, which means that every post and reply must be moderated before it can be viewed publicly, possibly with hours in delays from a post being posted and it being viewable. And this would also open the door for imposters, pretending to be someone. It would not really be workable, and I don't think members will appreciate this level of moderation.

I assume the monitoring you are referring to is just people reading and making notes of the posts you have made. This is a public forum, so all your posts are public, and hence, there is no protection from being monitored in this way. We certainly don't allow people to set up monitoring software on our servers to log your email and IP address and this kind of stuff (which would be illegal in anycase), if that's what you are wondering.

If you do leave the forum, you can request your personal information be removed (actually, you can do this yourself). This means blanking out the email and removing things like ICQ/AIM information. Deleting all posts is usually difficult, since it will leave blank spots in many threads, but this has been done before for users who do not have a lot of posts. As for your IP address, the forum software (vBulletin) requires IP addresses to be logged during registration (in order to ban spammers and the like), but the forum no longer logs IP addresses for each post you make (which is the default vBulletin behaviour).

The best way to protect your privacy is to install privacy protection tools on your computer and use a free email account as your sign in email (and the usual clearing of caches/cookies/history through your browser). Tor is a good example of a free privacy solution. This kind of solution scans *any* data you send out from your computer, including cookies and even hidden information sent by your browser, and then routes the data through other computers with no trail as to where the data originated from. Your information will still be logged, but this information can't be used to identify you. You will run into problems with login (occasionally logs out while posting, for example).

But as blutach mentioned, all of this is may be moot now, since this forum has already removed everything that could be considered "illegal", so I don't know if this forum is interesting enough for monitoring purposes. Perhaps this is a question best raised elsewhere, where there might still be "illegal' content and where monitoring might still be occuring.

[katzdvd]

Very thorough & good post, admin. I appreciate your in-depth explanation. Although I don't like the "big brother" approach of everything being watched these days, I gave up any sense of anonymity or security several years ago.

My theory is, if you don't want your head cut off, don't stick your neck out! Again, I feel you have been very fair here, & have taken on more responsibility that I would want to in running a forum like this, but I know I speak for many/all members when I say we deeply appreciate the "open forum, lightly moderated" approach that is exhibited here.

I plan on hanging around! Who knows, things may change (for the better) in the future!

[finditforu]

I just found this forum and plan on learning everything I can from it and you guys. I always seem to come to the party late lol..........chin up .....things arent always as bad as we think and sometimes us good guys win in the end.

[aussiealan]

Thanks

Thanks Admin for the many hours you must put in the manage this forum.

I have learned a lot from here, but have a long way to go yet, so won't be giving it up. I look in every day.

Thanks Alan.