When you visit my website, what kind of personal data about you is shared with my website hosts?
MylesZhang.org was created with a domain name purchased from Squarespace.com. This website is designed from the WordPress.org template Parabola on the Edublogs.org operating system. Performance improvements and additional security are provided through Cloudflare.com encryption.
If you click the “play” button to view a virtual reality model on this website, or if you watch a video through this website, then the organizations Sketchfab.com, YouTube.com or Vimeo.com will collect data from your device to the degree that is necessary to provide you this embed service. For purposes of tracking user engagement and for website analytics beyond what is strictly necessary to stream content online, YouTube and Vimeo also collect through my website the time you spent watching each of my videos, the duration of your page view, and the moments within the video that you paused streaming.
Squarespace, WordPress, Edublogs, Cloudflare, Sketchfab, YouTube, and Vimeo collect details from all visitors to this website to the degree that they provide hosting services that make this website possible. The privacy of visitors on my website is, in large part, defined by the privacy policies of these organizations that I use to manage my content. The data they collect from you is analyzed in aggregate and is rarely traceable back to you individually. These organizations also collect data from visitors above and beyond what is narrowly accessible to me.
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When you visit my website, what kind of personal data about you is shared with me personally?
However, when filling out the contact form on this website, your email, name, and IP address will of course become visible to me. The contact form on this website directs to my personal email, and content shared with me through that means is preserved indefinitely.
When leaving a comment on my website, your IP address and email addressed also become visible to me. Before I click to approve your comments, I may lightly edit it for spelling and punctuation, meaning the comment that you post may appear slightly different from the content you submitted.
If you are visiting my website without first having installed a VPN, then other details will be shared with ClustrMaps.com. This is the platform through which I track and map data on visitors to my website at this public-facing link: https://clustrmaps.com/site/1aarz. This data visible to me includes your IP address, browser (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, etc.), type of device used (computer, tablet, phone, etc.), name of your operating system (MacOSX, iOS, Windows 10, etc.), the pages you visited on this website, and the time opened each page. For purposes of building a public-facing “virtual encyclopedia” of the world, ClustrMaps uses this data to improve search results on its database of people. Clustrmaps sells this data to third parties for purposes of advertising and market research on other websites. You can opt out of ClustrMaps data collection at this link: https://clustrmaps.com/bl/opt-out. If you are visiting with VPN installed and better privacy protections, ClustrMaps will only identify the country where your server is based.
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Of course, no privacy policy is perfect. And this one is far from perfect for the very reason that I, too, must lean on the corporations and information oligarchs I despise in order to create the content I love:
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“Two men at Google who do not enjoy the legitimacy of the vote, democratic oversight, or the demands of shareholder governance exercise control over the organization and presentation of the world’s information. One man at Facebook who does not enjoy the legitimacy of the vote, democratic oversight, or the demands of shareholder governance exercises control over an increasingly universal means of social connection along with the information concealed in its networks.”
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The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, 2019.
