Surveillance Statement
Email spam filter (captcha)
When you fill out the contact form on this website, I use a self-hosted alternative to captcha called altcha to filter bots out. Everything runs on my server, and no data about you is shared with a third party or stored by this system.
Website analytics
I’m using a self-hosted version of Plausible analytics to count visits to this website. It doesn’t use cookies. It uses your IP address and browser's User-Agent to derive high-level information about you, and then deletes the IP and User-Agent. Plausible calls this "anonymized", but you can decide for yourself. Here is the list of what I store in my database.
Table of data I store about you:
Table adapted from Plausible's website.| Data | Example | Comment |
|---|---|---|
| Browser | Chrome 86.0 | I use the User-Agent to derive which browser and browser-version number you used when visiting this website. |
| Operating system | macOS 10.15 | I use this to know what operating systems you used when visiting this website. |
| Device type | Desktop | I use this to know what kind of device you used when visiting my website. Devices are categorized into desktop, mobile, or tablet. |
| Country, region, city | United Kingdom, England, London | I look up your location using your IP address. I do not track anything more granular than the city level. Your IP address is discarded. I never store IP addresses in my database or logs. |
| HTTP Referrer | https://bocoup.com | I use the referrer string to know what, if any, links on other websites you used to get to this one. |
| Page URL | https://boazsender.com/surveillance-statement | The Page URL tells me which pages have been viewed and how many times. I collect the hostname and path. Query parameters are discarded, except for these
query parameters: ref=, source=, utm_source=, utm_medium=, utm_campaign=, utm_content= and utm_term=. |
But why collect your data at all?
Great question. I think due to a combination of habit and a curiosity about how many people are reading about me. Things like who is linking to me, to which pages, and which city you came from helps me get a sense of my footprint on the web. Things like Browser/OS/Device type give me a sense of which technologies I can use on this website.
All that being said, I'm still looking for the right balance here, and may seek a more anonymized analytics tool in the future. I wonder what you think. You can email me if you'd like.
Why is is this a Surveillance Statement and not a Privacy Policy?
Digital privacy doctrine is double-speak for digital surveillance. Privacy statements are actually statements about how much a company or person is surveilling you. It's privacy theatre, which works to manufacture compliance with a regime of data extraction, mining, and retention. This concept is also referred to as surveillance capitalism. I called this a Surveillance Statement because it is not about how I am protecting your privacy, but rather about the details of how I am surveilling you.
If you'd like to read a counter narrative to privacy, Stop LAPD Spying writes about anti-surveillance on their about page.