PierceThorne.com Privacy Policy

Unlike most sites which claim to "respect your privacy" and then tell you (in long twisted paragraphs of fine print) all the ways they'll peddle your private information, when you visit PierceThorne.com your privacy is preserved. Here's what we mean:

PierceThorne.com Privacy Statement

• We hate spam. We won't generate it. We won't foster it by helping other companies build lists of visitors' email addresses.
• We're not snoops. We don't track your comings and goings in order to sell profile information about you to third parties. (As a result, "do not track" requests are moot: we don't track you, so we have nothing to stop.)
• If you provide any personally identifiable information on this site, it will be used only for the obvious purpose for which you are providing it. It remains between you and us. It won't be given or sold to any third party. Period.

Okay, so here's some fine print: if you do something illegal on this site such that the authorities come knocking at our door, of course we'll cooperate with them. But that's it.

• Here's the big one: this site is advertisement free. That means no third party dropping tracking cookies or "web beacons" onto your computer, or any other means for them to track where you come and go. Have you ever wondered how, after visiting site X, you suddenly start seeing advertisements for that product you looked at on site X? That's why. But you'll find none of that here. Yes, that means we're missing out on some revenue, but we value—and respect—you more and aren't selling you out to that big ad company.
• In the same vein, we are completely self-contained. We don't rely on third-party-hosted tools or facilities (think fonts, JavaScript frameworks, or the like.) Just like web beacons or advertisement, that sort of thing gives third parties the potential to track your movements. Yes, "they promise that the don't do that"... for now. But that can change. We'd rather not be dependent on their possibly fleeting generosity, so nope: if we can't host it ourselves, no thank you. (We'd rather write lean HTML that loads quickly in your browser than have some flabby bit of external code, anyway... I mean, have you seen how much non-content is sent your way on other websites? It's rediculous! Just do "view source" sometime, and be amazed...)

Site Examples

Some pages on this site have a means to "email a friend." There, you'll give us your name and email address, plus the name and address of your friend. When you hit send, an email gets sent, and that's it. We don't keep track of either you or your friend. But we do stash the sender's IP address (a sort of Caller-ID) into the email header. That's meant to discourage spammers, because they can't forge an IP address. If you get spam, you (or more likely, the authorities) can use the IP address to trace a path back to the originator.

Another popular feature is the Electronic Postcard. There you'll give the same sort of information (your name and email address, and your friend's) as well as a short message to put on the back of the postcard. Hit send, and an entry gets written into our postcard database. We also send your friend an email inviting him or her to see the postcard. After a set period of time, the record is erased from the database, and voila, you're both private netizens again. The IP-address thing holds true here, too.

At the risk of repeating ourselves, if you contact us, you'll provide us with your name and email address. That gets used to send an email to us, (and it would be nice if we could reply to you.) Here again, we don't collect your information for distribution elsewhere. At most, you'll get added to our personal address books (if it seems likely that we'll be emailing each other in the future.)

We don't use cookies at present, but might add it to parts of this site. Cookies are a way for us to store tiny bits of information on your computer. Often, a cookie just remembers how you set things up on this site, so that when you come back, it will be the same way. You can always have your browser refuse cookies; check your browser's help, because it varies. Cookies are site-specific, so no other site but ours can view cookies that might have been left by this site.

Yes, this site has a log file. Almost all sites do. We're not in direct control of what gets logged (our hosting service is,) and in all fairness, there's a chance that some amount of personally identifiable information might get put there as a natural part of using a web site. We use the log file to monitor site usage and improve the site itself. We absolutely do not harvest any information from the log for any third party.

You see, to us privacy actually means privacy. And we plan to keep it that way. Our site will change, and this policy page may be updated to reflect those changes, but we intend to maintain the spirit of the Privacy Statement above: the information you provide us is to remain between us.

Naturally, you're invited to come back to this page. That's just prudent surfing. But just remember: at PierceThorne.com, privacy really means privacy.