Privacy Policy

Introduction

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If you are curious about the privacy policy on this website, please read the long text below. The long text is not mean to be a “I covered everything so you cant sue”, but rather is a short talk about the fact I, as an individual, respect and always will respect users their privacy/rights on everything i host publicly. And respect privacy and consumer rights above everything else like profit. This website is a personal blog where I share my projects, ideas and creations. I myself am a huge fan off privacy and user rights and in my opinion, every human should get the right to stay and be private and not have their data sold to some advertiser or broker and to use a product without having to do sell your soul to a company to be able to use the product or without any paywalls or limitations put in place.. If you don’t want to read through it all, you can click here to get to the sections that are important and actually list what we collect and what not.

Privacy in the modern age and with big tech/big corporations.

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In today’s modern age, privacy and security are becoming less and less important for organizations and companies and that’s honestly just sad. User data and specifically sensitive user data, have become the new currency/trade value. A lot of companies trade with it. Sadly this sometimes puts the consumer/user at risk. If Data brokers or websites get hacked (and they are a big target for criminals. Compare it to a vault full of diamonds), the data off millions/billions of users will be exposed and criminals can use everything to stitch together some evil plan to rob people from all their hard earned money, just because some companies could not handle it with care. Recently a big telecom provider in my country got hacked by some hacker group that i believe, mostly consisted off teens to young adults. They got access to the records off millions of people, all due to some social engineering (manipulating people into giving a hacker access). Also kind of funny and scary that a normal employee at the company had such massive amount off access to such sensitive and massive amount of data, scary! The data is often used without good intent and is stored in often very insecure ways, also partially cause they be cheaping out on the security or lock down of such systems. Basically it will be stored in a vault where the lock is broken and where the only lock is a simple small padlock that can be busted open by anyone skilled enough. Once the data is stolen, oh unlucky you, but you cant sue the company/data broker as the legal system is just as broken and most of those companies get away with minor image damage, the criminals are never caught and the event is waiting to happen again.

Privacy on 309Electronics.net and its subdomains/sub-sites.

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I, Rikxian van Houten, founder off the (for now not-fully-registered 309electronics.net organization) that hosts this site and any other site under the 309electronics.net name, truly respect privacy and user/consumer rights and safety. I find user rights and privacy just as important as basic human needs/rights like water and food and a roof above our head. In the end we should be allowed to do anything in our lives without every activity or move being recorded/tracked and sent to big brother (Those who can pay for the data). I mean we have a door (or more) in our houses for the exact same reason. Not just to keep people out, but also so they cant see our every move. Often “i have nothing to hide” is an argument people have and while that’s true, it can also be used against you later and those people often don’t realize that nearly every micro-movement is traced and recorded and is used to make a model of them so advertiser and potentially other people can know everything about said person and target ads/content at them and possibly could use the data that person is willing to share against them.

I try to collect as little data about you as possible as in the end its your life and activity and not mine. And i am not interested in earning money unethically by selling user data to brokers/advertisers. I am not interested in your data/what you do and don’t want to be caught with it and come in the news as “This company got a data leak. This is already the millionth data leak in x years”. The “you” part in “your data” always counts. We only collect what really needs to be collected and if there is any more, we will always ask and let the user consent or deny without issues. I will care about privacy as if it was my own child. Even if i could be a millionaire by selling all data i collect to google/Microsoft/apple/data brokers, i will always choose consumer side. I want to try to follow the footsteps of VLC Mediaplayer. Videolan/VLC denied millions of dollars just so they could keep their software ad-free and telemetry free. If they can do it, i will also do it for this independent blog, which is also a self hosted project i host with passion. VLC also is for the community by the community and i want to keep this blog just like that.

What data might be collected?

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The website will only collect the absolute minimum amount off data that’s needed for it to function correctly and for the user experience to be top notch. Other data could also be collected, but only ever with the user’s consent and will rely on the user willing to provide those, but its not a must. The data is do have to collect is also part of how the modern internet works so i cant easily avoid that. Below the table describes the data we collect, but also look at the notice under it to see how long we retain and in what way we retain it.

That’s it, that’s all we collect/ask from you :) And no, there is no hidden gotcha!

notice: IP-Address, IP based geolocation and user-agent collection are unavoidable and its the footsteps that all users will leave and that’s just part of how the modern internet and the world-wide-web works. You are free to use a VPN or some service to mask your IP if you want and if you are really paranoid, you can ask the webmaster to remove every trace of you from the systems after visit. But IP addresses/IP geolocation or browser user-agent strings are less valuable than your email and every website you visit will almost certainly have already logged those. But feel free to submit a removal request as i live in Europe so will comply and have to comply with the GDPR and i don’t really want to keep that info. Also most of it will be automatically cleared out every maintenance cycle as part of my maintenance process. Below is everything written down under their own category. If you do request data removal, we will also send you a confirmation about it and keep you up to date if any of your data somehow shows up in our systems in the future and wipe that too. No hidden fees or gotchas and you don’t have to sign a “why do you want us to wipe your data” contract or anything.

The 3rd party (Opensource) services we use and what they might collect from you.

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SO we do use some 3rd party services to provide the comment system or the newsletter service. These are purposely chosen to be Open source community ran, privacy focused instances. You can find them below and what info they collect from you. We also describe what data will be collected and what will be stored for how long. We will try to always be transparent about what we collect and our collection periods and terms.

Remark42

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So to power the comment system at the bottom of each article, we use Remark42. This is an open source privacy focused community ran comments system as an alternative to google’s Firebase. This system only collects the absolute minimum amount of data. This service allows choosing between anonymous sign up without email and sign up with email. We chose the last option. The reason we chose that is that we don’t want bots/trolls misusing the system and disturbing the peace. If you don’t let them authenticate/sign up, they can go haywire and we don’t want that. 2nd reason is because if you sign up with email, its more personal and we can also write back to you or other people can write back to you. Your email address will never be sold/leaked publicly and we will do everything in our power to prevent that from ever happening. You are allowed to use an email alias or a disposable email if you like and we wont stop you for choosing to do so!

If you login with your email you will have to go through some steps to be able to comment on the blog. Its mostly verifying its you. When you login with your email, you will get a mail from our “noreply@309electronics[.]net” alias and you will get a code. Then you can enter this code into the dialog box that comes up on the blog inside the comments system and when you enter that code, you can comment and you are verified/logged in. This state will be stored as a cookie inside your browser. You are allowed to log out at any time and or remove your comment. If you want to do so, please first contact the webmaster so we can remove any trace of you or your comment from our system as we are ready to help remove any trace of you from our back end as sometimes there could be temporary data left.

Notice: Please note that all emails come from the above mentioned alias and not any others. We also will never ask you to fill in a form or pay us or click a sketchy link. If you see that, that’s not us but rather someone impersonating and trying to be US. If that’s the case, please also contact the webmaster so we can take immediate action against those criminals.

Listmonk

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So to power the newsletter system on the homepage, we use Listmonk. Its an open source privacy focused newsletter system. The system again collects the absolute minimum of data from you. If you want to sign up for the newsletter, which is used to make you up to date whenever we post a new article or have to mention any changes or maintenance cycles. There will be no advertising/spam and its purely notifying you. Every time we post a new article, we will via the mail let you know that we uploaded a new article. No hidden gotchas or fees involved! Again, you are allowed to use a email alias or a disposable email.

If you sign up using the form on the home page, you will get a mail from “newsletter@309electronics[.]net” and this mail is a confirmation (opt-in) email where you can chose to opt-in or sign out. If you opt-in, your email will be added to the subscribers list in our list monk instance so we can let you know when we post something new. If you decide to opt-out, you can easily do so by going to any of our sent mails and finding the “opt-out”/unsubscribe button. Also please let us know when you opt-out so we can remove any trace of you from our systems. Alternatively the unsubscribe page also allows you to remove and erase any of your user data yourself, but we really want to be sure so please if you want to opt-out, contact us so we can be fully sure. We really want to be transparent about it!

Notice: Please note that all emails come from the above mentioned alias and not any others. We also will never ask you to fill in a form or pay us or click a sketchy link. If you see that, that’s not us but rather someone impersonating and trying to be US. If that’s the case, please also contact the webmaster so we can take immediate action against those criminals.

Umami-analytics

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So i previously claimed that this website does little to no tracking and has no telemetry. Well, let me revise those words! I recently decided to add a telemetry system that allows me to out of personal interest see how many visitors the website gets and also how many visits. This system is brought to you by Umami-analytics this is an open source privacy focussed project that aims to be a sort of google analytics replacement without a big company like google behind it and also without your data and activity being the main monetization model.

The umami software allows me to see how much visitors the website gets, but also has extra features like collecting information about the visitor’s operating system and also the country and city they are visiting from. So its not just pure visitor count. I do want to be as clear as possible and would like to say that the geolocation is based on IP address and thus even without umami involved, someone could already put the IP address of the visitor into a geolocation IP database and get a result. This result mostly goes as far as the city and wont be able to track down the apartment/house the visitor is living in. Also the range and accuracy of geolocation by IP is not that accurate, but it can still track down (fairly) accurately the city. Also the Operating system of the visitor is visible but this is often based on the user agent string. Both the user agent OS identification and IP address geolocation are simply how the modern internet is built and while i could definitely tweak umami’s code to remove that functionality, i wont. But you are free to use a VPN to mask your IP address and country and use other matters to stay as private.

I am just trying to be as clear about it as possible as other websites have the exact same behavior but often use google analytics and thus immideatly process that data, package it and send it to the highest bidder or a data broker often without explicitly telling the user about it. At 309Electronics.net, we try to be as clear as possible regarding privacy and user data collection and will handle user data as careful as possible and will never sell it to any advertisers or data brokers. We will store and keep some of the data in our own database that will be isolated from the outside world and will never see the light of day when it comes to publicity. 309Electronics.net for now is purely a non-profit organization and will only make profit in the future through ethical means like providing web/repair services to other people, but never selling user data.

Below is a picture of the dashboard that i can see.

Cookies

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So we do store some cookies, but purely functional ones. One cookie is used by our Anubis filter proxy and is basically your ticket to be able to visit the blog without Anubis stopping you. Purely so that if you visit the site in intervals, you don’t have to wait every time for Anubis to verify you, which saves time and friction. The first time you visit, you will be stopped by Anubis but if it lets you through and has verified you are not a robot/scraper, it will create a cookie for you, basically your website ticket to visit it at any time, if its in a period of 6 hours as after 6 hours the cookie expires.

Another service that uses cookies is remark42, but its again purely functional. It makes sure that you don’t always have to login and verify if you want to comment (unless you switch to another device without importing your data and cookies).

EOF (End of File)

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The above information is everything regarding privacy and user data handling. Other than that, there are no other/further advertising cookies or tracking pixels/telemetry mechanisms embedded into our site. If you have any further questions or concerns, feel free to send us a mail or to comment on any of my social media. Always email me via the webmaster’s email: “Webmaster@309electronics.net” or find any of the other contact options by clicking the convenient button labeled ‘Contact’ at the bottom of the page or clicking This Button