/ Privacy

EBC Privacy Policy

Notice: This page is not a legal document or a contract and is not legally binding. It is not a technical document. It is an attempt to document our privacy practices as they actually exist so that you may be informed about what information is gathered and stored about you by our website.

 

Tracking/Analytics

Overview

We use a local installation of Matomo to log visits to our site. Tracking is accomplished by javascript code that is present on each page. We DO NOT use image tracking. We DO honor Do Not Track requests.

What This Means

Because we use a self-hosted installation of Matomo, the information we gather about visitors to our site stays on our server. It is never sent out to a third party. Additionally, we do not track those who specifically ask not to be tracked via a Do Not Track header (if you don't know what that means, learn more at donottrack.us).

Data Collection & Usage

What We Collect

Please Note: Any website you visit is capable of gathering the same categories of information that we do (and sometimes more). This information is built into the way your browser works unless you have configured it otherwise.

When a user visits our site, we collect specific data about that user if they have chosen to allow us to do so. The data we collect is

  1. The user's partially anonymized IP address.
  2. What browser the visitor is using.
  3. What operating system the visitor is using.
  4. What screen resolution the visitor is using.
  5. The date and time the visitor was on our site.
  6. How long the user was on our site and how long the user was on each page of our site.
  7. How the user got to our site - if the user manually entered the address, clicked on a link on another site, or found us via a search engine. If the visitor found us via a search engine, we can sometimes see what search term the visitor used to find us. We can only do this if the search engine chooses to pass that information along with the visitor. Most search engines do not send the search term. (See here and here for more information regarding this.)
  8. What pages on our site the user visited.
  9. If the user downloaded any content from our site.
  10. If the user left our site by clicking on a link found on our site.

To opt out of the collection of this data, see the How to Opt Out section below.

What We Don't Do

We never sell, license, or give away the data we collect. We do not use the data to target you for ads or to tailor content to you specifically.

What We Do

Primarily, we simply use the analytics data to see how many people visit our site, what they spend the most time doing while on our site, and how they found our site. Additionally, we might use the data to tailor our site (for everyone, not individuals) to display content in a more user friendly way. Finally, we can see when visitors find dead links or other errors on our site and use that data to fix the errors.

Privacy

IP Address

While we do store information about visitors to our site via our web analytics, we also take steps to ensure that stored information respects the privacy of our visitors. Regarding IP addresses, our analytics nevers stores the full IP address of any visitor. Each IP address is partially anonymized by dropping the last section of digits. That means that if your IP address is "213.34.51.191", our analytics only sees and stores "213.34.51.0".

Third Parties

We do our best to not include third party content on our site. For instance, we do not use Google Analytics. When we do include third party content, we do our best to use the least privacy-invasive option available.

How to Opt Out

You have several ways to avoid being tracked by our web analytics.

  • Set your browser to send a Do Not Track request.
  • Install an adblocker, such as uBlock Origin, that blocks tracking scripts .
  • Disable javascript, either as global setting in your web-browser or just on our site. Note: Disabling javascript on a site specific basis will probably require you to install an add-on, such as NoScript, in your browser.
  • Install a cookie in your browser that will instruct our analytics not to track you -
Partially Opting Out

In addition to opting out entirely, you can configure your browser not to send HTTP Headers. Much of the data we collect, such as how you got here and what browser and OS you are using, is given to us by your HTTP Header. By disabling the sending of a header, you can opt out of some of our data collection. (Please note that some websites will not behave normally if you have disabled headers.)