Privacy

SheepOverboard does not use any information about you. Nor does it run advertisements of any type, or reproduce “live” content from sources other than our own website server.

It does, however, run a bevy of website scripts to enhance our pages, and security tools to protect them. These scripts may contain hidden code that tracks you and we have little chance of ever knowing if they do. The security tools seek to protect us against attack, but there is no such thing as perfect security. Therefore, your device (PC, tablet, phone) should run security software to protect it from infected web pages. And that includes, potentially, our web pages.

SheepOverboard’s Internet (web) server does – like every website on the Internet – collect basic (mostly non-identifying) information (e.g.: computer network address aka IP address) about visitors and store it in files. These log files usually fill and expire after weeks or months.

As webmaster, I only access these log files to see which Internet address is attacking our site. But even such an IP address is either falsified by the attacker or is a real person’s computer infected by hidden software and doing the attacker’ work. 

With the move to Google's Blogger (BlogSpot) platform in late 2021, tracking and log files are less, if at all, under our purview. You should also therefore read Google's privacy information pertaining to Blogger. 

Despite SheepOverboard not actively tracking visitors, your Internet browser software and apps do keep such information stored on your very own computer/tablet/phone for years. That has nothing to do with us. But you need to know this.

In fact, your privacy is at far greater risk from the devices and their software that YOU use. Sure, malicious websites can attack/infect your device, but those innocent 'normal' everyday sites you visit over and over again do, cumulatively, build a profile of your life, right down to the very personal details that you probably never supplied it. By simple cross-referencing and extrapolation.

Your PC, tablet, phablet, or smart phone uses software to visit websites and access services. That software is variously known as web browser, Internet browser, or simply “app” (which is short for application, aka computer program). Smart phones and phablets are but small and powerful computers that happen to make phone calls and fit in your pocket.

All Internet browsers and apps are nosy, intrusive, and cannot be trusted. Their job is to be furtively used by advertising and marketing companies and governments to, literally. snoop on you.

These organizations exist with one purpose: to know where you go on the Internet, to understand why you go there and what you do, and to thereby profile you. Deducing your name and address after that is, to them, trivial.

How do they do this? Learn about “cookies” – click here

 
If this is news to you, do two things:

  1. Take stock of what you are doing on the Internet. With today’s technology, that also includes simply using a smart phone or watching Wi-Fi-connected TV.. or driving a new car. Or not even glancing at a street ‘security’ camera [paranoia links here and here].
  2. Take some time out and learn about the system that is – literally – farming you, like livestock.

If you wish to read a real privacy policy and discover what a complex minefield Internet privacy really is, read the grand-daddy of policies by a company whose raison d’être is to know all there is to know about you, and then sell you to its corporate and government clients:  Google Privacy Policy – click here.

Be warned, and be under no illusion about it, wherever you go and whatever you do on the Internet, you are being followed and recorded. In too many cases, you are being profiled by thousands of cross-referenced sources you interacted with on the web, to such extent that you personally are easily identified by name and address, even if none of those sources carried those details.
And then there are the information leaks.

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