Early North Carolina Phillips Group Wiki ENC Phillips Group Wiki

General Scope

This policy covers personally identifiable information collected or stored by the ENC Phillips Group Wiki on its servers in relation to the Projects and their communities. Consistent with its Data Retention Policy, the ENC Phillips Group Wiki collects and retains the least amount of personally identifiable information needed to fulfill this website's operational needs.

The public and collaborative nature of this website

All pages of the ENC Phillips Group Wiki are collaboratively developed by its users using the MediaWiki software. Anyone with Internet access (and not otherwise restricted from doing so) may view the publicly viewable pages of this site with or without logging in as a registered user. Registered user become editors with the ability to create a published page on this website, and a public record of every word added, subtracted, or changed. This is a public act, and editors are identified publicly as the author of such changes. All contributions made this website, and all publicly available information about those contributions, are irrevocably licensed and may be freely copied, quoted, reused and adapted by third parties with few restrictions under the license of this website.

Activities on the ENC Phillips Group Wiki

In general, this Policy only applies to private information stored or held by the ENC Phillips Group Wiki servers which is not publicly available.

Interactions with the ENC Phillips Group Wiki not covered by this Policy include, but are not limited to, aspects of browsing and viewing pages, use of the wiki "email user" function for registered user interaction with one another and subscribing and posting to this group's hosted email lists. Registered users may also interact with one another outside of ENC Phillips Group Wiki, via email, IRC or other chat, or other independent websites, and should assess the risks involved, and their personal need for privacy, before using these methods of communication.

User accounts and authorship

This wiki require editors to registered and approved. Users that do register are identified by their chosen username. Users select a password, which is confidential and used to verify the integrity of their account. Except insofar as it may be required by law, no person should disclose, or knowingly expose, either user passwords and/or cookies generated to identify a user. Once created, user accounts will not be removed. It may be possible for a username to be changed, depending on the policies of individual projects. This wiki does not guarantee that a username will be changed on request, but will be taken into consideration if asked.

Purpose of the collection of private information

The ENC Phillips Group Wiki limits the collection of personally identifiable user data to purposes which serve the well-being of this website, including but not limited to the following:

The ENC Phillips Group Wiki recognizes that any system that is open enough to allow the greatest possible participation of the general public will also be vulnerable to certain kinds of abuse and counterproductive behavior. The ENC Phillips Group Wiki and this website's community have established a number of mechanisms to prevent or remedy abusive activities.

To solve technical problems. Log data may be examined by this website's administrator in the course of solving technical problems and in tracking down badly-behaved web spiders that overwhelm the site.

Details of data retention

General expectations

IP and other technical information

When a visitor requests or reads a page, no more information is collected than is typically collected by web sites in general. The ENC Phillips Group Wiki may keep raw logs of such visits, but these will not be published or used to track legitimate users. They are only for statistical reference on vistors and length of visits to the ENC Phillips Group Wiki.

When a page is edited by a logged-in and registered editor, the server confidentially stores related IP information for a limited period of time. Logging in with a registered username allows for better preservation of privacy and is mandatory for any editing of this wiki.

Cookies and Web Beacons

Cookies and Web Beacons

Where necessary, this site uses cookies to store information about a visitor's preferences and history in order to better serve the visitor and/or present the visitor with customized content.

Advertising partners and other third parties may also use cookies, scripts and/or web beacons to track visitors to our site in order to display advertisements and other useful information. Such tracking is done directly by the third parties through their own servers and is subject to their own privacy policies.

Controlling Your Privacy

You can change your browser settings to disable cookies if you have privacy concerns. Disabling cookies for all sites is not recommended as it may interfere with your use of some sites. The best option is to disable or enable cookies on a per-site basis. Consult your browser documentation for instructions on how to block cookies and other tracking mechanisms.

Special Note About Google Advertising

Any advertisements served by Google, Inc., and affiliated companies may be controlled using cookies. These cookies allow Google to display ads based on your visits to this site and other sites that use Google advertising services. Learn how to opt out of Google's cookie usage. As mentioned above, any tracking done by Google through cookies and other mechanisms is subject to Google's own privacy policies.

About Google advertising: What is the DoubleClick DART cookie? The DoubleClick DART cookie is used by Google in the ads served on publisher websites displaying AdSense for content ads. When users visit an AdSense publisher’s website and either view or click on an ad, a cookie may be dropped on that end user’s browser. The data gathered from these cookies will be used to help AdSense publishers better serve and manage the ads on their site(s) and across the web. Users may opt out of the use of the DART cookie by visiting the Google ad and content network privacy policy.

Cookies on This Website

Page history

Edits or other contributions to this wiki on its articles, user pages and talk pages are generally retained forever. Removing text from a project does not permanently delete it. Normally, in projects, anyone can look at a previous version of an article and see what was there. Even if an article is "deleted", a user entrusted with higher level of access may still see what was removed from public view. Information can be permanently deleted by individuals with access to this wiki's servers, but aside from the rare circumstance when the ENC Phillips Group Wiki is required to delete editing-history material in response to a court order or equivalent legal process, there is no guarantee any permanent deletion will happen.

User contribution

User contributions are also aggregated and publicly available. User contributions are aggregated according to their registration and login status. Data on user contributions, such as the times at which users edited and the number of edits they have made, are publicly available via user contributions lists, and in aggregated forms published by other users.

Reading pages

No more information on users and other visitors reading pages is collected than is typically collected in server logs by web sites. Aside from the above raw log data collected for general purposes, page visits do not expose a visitor's identity publicly. Sampled raw log data may include the IP address of any user, but it is not reproduced publicly.

Editing pages

Edits to Project pages are identified with the username or network IP address of the editor, and editing history is aggregated by author in a contribution list. Such information will be available permanently on the projects.

Logged in registered users:

Logged in users do not expose their IP address to the public except in cases of abuse, including vandalism of a wiki page by the user or by another user with the same IP address. A user's IP address is stored on the wiki servers for a period of time, during which it can be seen by server administrators and by users who have been granted CheckUser access.

Editors using a company mail server from home or telecommuting over a DSL or cable Internet connection, are likely to be easy to identify by their IP address; in which case it may be easy to cross-identify all contributions to this wiki made by that IP. Using a username is a better way of preserving privacy in this situation and hence, the reason all editors are required to register as a user.

Unlogged-in registered users and unregistered users:

Only have read access of this wiki and do not editing authority. To become a registered user requires authorization after a short biography which will become part of a user's page.

Discussions

On wiki discussion pages:

Any editable page can theoretically be the location of a discussion. In general, discussions on the ENC Phillips Group Wiki will occur on user talk pages (associated with particular users), on article talk pages (associated with particular articles) or in pages specially designated to function as forums. Privacy expectations apply to discussion pages in the same way as they do elsewhere.

Via email:

Users are not required to list an email address when registering. Users who provide a valid email address can enable other logged-in users to send email to them through the wiki. When receiving an email from other users through this system, one's email address is not revealed to them. When choosing to send an email to other users, one's email is displayed as the sender.

The email address put into one's user preferences may be used by the ENC Phillips Group Wiki for communication. Users whose accounts do not have a valid email address will not be able to reset their password if it is lost. In such a situation, however, users may be able to contact one of the server administrators to enter a new e-mail address. A user can remove the account's email address from his preferences at any time to prevent it from being used. Private correspondence between users may be saved at those users' discretion and is not subject to ENC Phillips Group Wiki policy.

On mailing lists(group discussion forum):

The email addresses used to subscribe and post to ENC Phillips Group's mailing list are exposed to other subscribers. The list archives of most such mailing lists are public, and searches of public archives may be performed on the Web. Subscribers' addresses may also be quoted in other users' messages. These email addresses and any messages sent to a mailing list may be archived and may remain available to the public permanently, but hidden from spam bots.

Disclaimer

The ENC Phillips Group Wiki believes that maintaining and preserving the privacy of user data is an important value. This Privacy Policy, together with other policies, resolutions, and actions by the ENC Phillips Group, represents a committed effort to safeguard the security of the limited user information that is collected and retained on our server. Nevertheless, the ENC Phillips Group cannot guarantee that user information will remain private. We acknowledge that, in spite of our committed effort to protect private user information, determined individuals may still develop data-mining and other methods to uncover such information and disclose it. For this reason, the ENC Phillips Group can make no guarantee against unauthorized access to information provided in the course of participating in ENC Phillips Group Wiki or related group discussion mail list.