Met Dynamics:Privacy policy

Summary

If you only read the Met Dynamics websites, no more information is collected than is typically collected in server logs by web sites in general.

If you contribute to Met Dynamics you are publishing every word you post publicly. If you write something, assume that it will be retained forever.

Publishing on Met Dynamics

Simply visiting the web site does not expose your identity publicly (but see private logging below).

When you edit any page in Met Dynamics, you are publishing a document. This is a public act, and you are identified publicly with that edit as its author.

Identification of an author

When you publish a page in Met Dynamics, you must be logged in.

If you are logged in, you will be identified by your user name. This will be your real name or company name.

Cookies

Met Dynamics will set a temporary session cookie (PHPSESSID) whenever you visit the site. If you do not intend to ever log in, you may deny this cookie, but you cannot log in without it. It will be deleted when you close your browser session.

More cookies may be set when you log in, to avoid typing in your user name (or optionally password) on your next visit. These last up to 30 days. You may clear these cookies after use if you are using a public machine and don't wish to expose your username to future users of the machine. (If so, clear the browser cache as well.)

Passwords

Many aspects of Met Dynamics depend on the reputation and respect that is built up through a history of valued contributions. User passwords are the only guarantee of the integrity of a user's edit history. All users are encouraged not to reveal their passwords to anyone.

Private logging

Every time you visit a web page, you send a lot of information to the web server. Most web servers routinely maintain access logs with a portion of this information, which can be used to get an overall picture of what pages are popular, what other sites link to this one, and what web browsers people are using. It is not the intention of the Met Dynamics to use this information to keep track of legitimate users.

These logs are used to produce the site statistics pages; the raw log data is not made public, and is normally discarded after about two weeks.

Log data may be examined by developers in the course of solving technical problems and in tracking down badly-behaved web spiders that overwhelm the site. IP addresses of users, derived either from those logs or from records in the database are frequently used to correlate usernames and network addresses of edits in investigating abuse of the Met Dynamics, including the suspected use of malicious "sockpuppets" (duplicate accounts), vandalism, harassment of other users, or disruption of Met Dynamics.

Security of information

Met Dynamics makes no guarantee against unauthorised access to any information you provide. This information may be available to anyone with access to the servers.

Data on users, such as the times at which they edited and the number of edits they have made are publicly available via "user contributions" lists, and in aggregated forms published by other users.

Deletion of content

Removing text from Met Dynamics does not permanently delete it. In normal articles, anyone can look at a previous version and see what was there. If an article is "deleted", any user with "administrator" access on the Met Dynamics can see what was deleted.