And this is all True !!! well, for the 5 people reading this blog, I
assure you, I’m not selling your data or tracking you in any way :)
At COMPANY _ we value your privacy a great deal. Almost as much
as we value the ability to take the data you give us and slice, dice,
julienne, mash, puree and serve it to our business partners, which may
include third-party advertising networks, data brokers, networks of
affiliate sites, parent companies, subsidiaries, and other entities,
none of which we’ll bother to list here because they can change from
week to week and, besides, we know you’re not really paying attention.
We’ll also share all of this information with the government.
We’re just suckers for guys with crew cuts carrying subpoenas.
Remember, when you visit our Web site, our Web site is also visiting
you. And we’ve brought a dozen or more friends with us, depending on
how many ad networks and third-party data services we use. We’re not
going to tell which ones, though you could probably figure this out by
carefully watching the different URLs that flash across the bottom of
your browser as each page loads or when you mouse over various bits.
It’s not like you’ve got better things to do.
Each of these sites may leave behind a little gift known as a cookie
— a text file filled with inscrutable gibberish that allows various
computers around the globe to identify you, including your
preferences, browser settings, which parts of the site you visited,
which ads you clicked on, and whether you actually purchased something.
Those same cookies may let our advertising and data broker partners
track you across every other site you visit, then dump all of your
information into a huge database attached to a unique ID number, which
they may sell ad infinitum without ever notifying you or asking for permission.
Also: We collect your IP address, which might change every time you
log on but probably doesn’t. At the very least, your IP address
tells us the name of your ISP and the city where you live; with a
legal court order, it can also give us your name and billing address
(see guys with crew cuts and subpoenas, above).
Besides your IP, we record some specifics about your operating system
and browser. Amazingly, this information (known as your user agent
string) can be enough to narrow you down to one of a few hundred
people on the Webbernets, all by its lonesome. Isn’t technology wonderful?
The data we collect is strictly anonymous, unless you’ve been kind
enough to give us your name, email address, or other identifying
information. And even if you have been that kind, we promise we
won’t sell that information to anyone else, unless of course our
impossibly obtuse privacy policy says otherwise and/or we change our
minds tomorrow.
We store this information an indefinite amount of time for reasons
even we don’t fully understand. And when we do eventually get around
to deleting it, you can bet it’s still kicking around on some
network backup drives in somebody’s closet. So once we have it,
there’s really no getting it back. Hell, we can’t even find our
keys half the time — how do you expect us to keep track of this stuff?
Not to worry, though, because we use the very bestest security
measures to protect your data against hackers and identity thieves,
though no one has actually ever bothered to verify this. You’ll
pretty much just have to take our word for it.
So just to recap: Your information is extremely valuable to us. Our
business model would totally collapse without it. No IPO, no stock
options; all those 80-hour weeks and bupkis to show for it. So we’ll
do our very best to use it in as many potentially profitable ways as
we can conjure, over and over, while attempting to convince you
there’s nothing to worry about.
(Hey, Did somebody hold a gun to your head and force you to visit this
site? No, they did not. Did you run into a pay wall on the home page
demanding your Visa number? No, you did not. You think we just give
all this stuff away because we’re nice guys? Bet you also think
every roomful of manure has a pony buried inside.)
This privacy policy may change at any time. In fact, it’s changed
three times since we first started typing this. Good luck figuring out
how, because we’re sure as hell not going to tell you. But then, you
probably stopped reading after paragraph three.
(Source : http://www.itworld.com/print/129778 )