I keep almost no information about visitors to the site, except to the extent that the various tools that I use to manage the site keep information. However, any information that you do provide probably gets kept.
For example, if you make a comment, the Word Press software will keep the name and email address that you provide, and the text of the comment. I might use that information. For example, I might display your name on comment, and might link it to a web address that you provide. Or, if you write a really interesting comment, I might send you email and call you by name. In any case, I pass that information along with things like your IP address, user agent, referrer, and Site URL to Akismet, which checks to see if your comment is spam. They probably keep some of that information for statistical purposes.
Lots of the tools I use keep information about visitors—I use a statistics package that tracks information about visits, and I serve ads which also track information.
In particular, I serve Google ads, and Google insists that my privacy policy provides the following information:
- Third party vendors, including Google, use cookies to serve ads based on a user’s prior visits to your website.
- Google’s use of the DoubleClick cookie enables it and its partners to serve ads to your users based on their visit to your sites and/or other sites on the Internet.
- Users may opt out of the use of the DoubleClick cookie for interest-based advertising by visiting Ads Settings. (Alternatively, you can direct users to opt out of a third-party vendor’s use of cookies for interest based advertising by visiting aboutads.info.)
They go on to say that, if you have not opted out of third-party ad serving, the cookies of other third-party vendors or ad networks may also be used to serve ads, a fact which should be disclosed as well in the following manner
- Notify your site visitors of the third-party vendors and ad networks serving ads on your site.
- Provide links to the appropriate vendor and ad network websites.
- Inform your users that they may visit those websites to opt out of the use of cookies for interest-based advertising (if the vendor or ad network offers this capability). Alternatively, you can direct users to opt out of some third-party vendor’s use of cookies for interest-based advertising by visiting aboutads.info.
All manner of tools may track information about you—some may save the information in a cookie on your machine, some may store it in a database on the server I use to host this website, some may store the information on their own servers. Since I don’t really know what information is gathered or stored, I can’t make an informed statement about it. Since the various services use the information for their own purposes, which I generally don’t have control over, I’m not in a position to promise that it won’t be misused.
Sorry.