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| Your Rights to Privacy and Our Web Site |
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The web server for our site maintains a log of all accesses to any static or dynamically generated web page. This log includes:
Summaries of these statistics are available as part of our frequently asked site questions web page at www.awmach.com. The overall summary page is updated approximately weekly and the associated yearly statistics pages and combined statistics pages are updated at least once per day.
If you are accessing one of our sites from a fixed IP address you might show up for a small time at the very start of a year in some of the summaries. Since we only list the top domains accessing us or referring to us, individual computers are rapidly swamped out by Yahoo, Google and the like. Nonetheless, if you are particularly paranoid, you might want to avoid using our site the first few days of each year.
Obviously, when dialing in via an ISP dial up line, your identity is obscured to any site not tracking individuals via cookies. We use no cookies and do not intend to ever use cookies to track accesses or clickstreams or store local information about you in your own computer or in ours. When using a computer permanently connected to the Internet at a work site (or at home via a wireless or DSL connection with a fixed IP address), your accesses would be more visible to any corporate information technocrat looking for unauthorized browsing from work or to snooping by your ISP. Of course, if they have any decent tracking software, it is probably visible in their own logs anyway. Your individual identity remains largely invisible to us unless we have a reason to go looking for you due to abuse.
We purge certain information from the logs and do not use it for monitoring hits. All errors are removed. All of Microsoft's IE bookmarking operations are also removed from the error logs and the access logs. We are delighted when users bookmark our site and we provide our cross png as the icon IE grabs in most directories when bookmarked as a convenience for the user in finding our site (and to reduce the size of our weekly error log). But we don't need or desire to know who has bookmarked us. Microsoft should be ashamed of themselves.
Why do we keep the logs at all? We keep them for three reasons.
When the site was young, we tried to pray about any individual access that looked like a real person rather than a
spider or robot. As the traffic has grown, it has become impossible to do that for every access. But, we still try to pray
over anything that catches our eye as unusual in the log. I wish it could still be as thorough as when we could pray over
each user's session on our site, but we must ask God to fill in the gaps.
What do we pray about? We pray that individuals will find the information they are seeking without getting frustrated and
that God will illuminate the answers they seek. Sometimes we pray for support for them or that God will direct their paths
or the paths of those they care about. We don't specifically pray that they will come back or that they will tell all their
friends about us. (Although that's always nice!) We simply pray that God will direct those people who can be helped by our
site to us and to what they need.
We need to see what is of interest to the web surfers to help guide us in adding features and commentary. For example, if we see several people searching for what Bible versions or topics say about a particular subject, we might transcribe a sermon that has been preached about the subject and add it to the Christian's Corner. This is particularly true if it appears to be a subject that is hard to find in the Bible for most users. We haven't been as good about this as we would like and have so far concentrated mostly on getting the Word available in easy to use formats and adding hints to help people use the search engines more efficiently. But as time permits, we will try to do more to help the people using the site.
The last reason is just to fulfill a curiosity about whether or not the service is really important to people measured by pageviews and repeated pageviews, and to see how the site is accessed from around the world. And of course, to provide a record in case of abuse.
The FTP server maintains a log of all files retrieved from our anonymous FTP site. This includes
We keep this log to summarize bible and commentary uploads. We don't send notifications of every attempt at abuse of the FTP server, but we do send enough to hopefully get the word out that we aren't an easy target.
We appreciate any feedback you send us about our site. We used to have a direct e-mail address on several of the web pages, but have switched to a feedback form to try to prevent robots from picking up our addresses and sending us unwanted e-mail. We don't like junk mail any more than you do! This also allows people to send somewhat more anonymous messages to us if they desire as they don't have to reveal a name or e-mail address to send us a message. There is still some accountability from the access logs in case of abuse, however.
If you send us an e-mail via our feedback form and choose to include your name or an e-mail address, rest assured that the e-mail you send will not get you on an electronic or snail mail mailing list (from us or anyone else). If you do supply an e-mail address, it is assumed that you are expecting some sort of reply to the message you sent. If it seems appropriate to send a personal one-time reply thanking you for your specific interest or comment we will do so. We may send a prayer back in reponse to prayer requests via your e-mail address. If you make a specific request for a one-time acknowledgment of the e-mail we will also try to send that. If you specifically request to be kept informed of site changes or error corrections in a particular document, we will try to do that. Otherwise, you shouldn't expect to hear back from us based on a comment you leave.
The e-mail is sent directly to the specified parties by a custom program. The content remains in the access log which is archived weekly and compressed. You receive a notification from the feedback form when the messages have been transmitted. Clearly, any information you send via the feedback form would be retained in the user's e-mail software until deleted and could potentially be compromised in route by a determined hacker. We can make no guarantees of privacy for those e-mail systems - we only can say that the particular individual felt their privacy was sufficient for their own mail or they wouldn't be using it themselves.
Be aware that the end recipients of the e-mail could still be compromised by hackers at any time, and that copies of your messages may still exist for unknown lengths of time on backup media on e-mail systems used by your specified recipients even if they have deleted their own copies. Finally, submitting an e-mail address could potentially expose you to a virus threat since some of our pastors use Microsoft products which have been targeted by hackers recently. Unfortunately, virus scanning software isn't proactive - it only handles clean up after viruses spread the first time.
All links off the site are kept in a single Links page. These other sites are not affiliated with us in any way. We have absolutely no control over these sites, including availability, content, suitability of content, or privacy. While we felt that they had value when added, we do not regularly monitor them for changes of content or changes in privacy policy. As with all the web, proceed at your own risk. If their standards have dropped, please let us know.
This privacy policy may be altered at any time to reflect changing site conditions or address new privacy concerns. We will try to update the What's New page if this is done. It isn't our intention to loosen policy, and since there is no personal information recorded on the site itself, any such loosening shouldn't affect previous users anyway.
We operate under the laws established for the United States of America, State of Wyoming, County of Natrona, City of Casper. Any access log entry including queries, or retained e-mail, may be supplied to an appropriate judicial authority if required by a court order. I can't conceive of such a circumstance, but lawyers are full of surprises.
Although awmach.net would host church web pages from anywhere that meet the doctrinal conditions, such hosting is provided as a service to the Christian community and does not represent any intent to operate a commercial venture. This is essentially a non-profit personal web page for the Christian community run privately in a non-commercial setting. Our primary intention is to serve churches local to Wyoming. Any issues that should arise regarding the content or operation of the awmach.org, awmach.net, or awmach.com websites will be resolved in the court system of Casper, Natrona County, State of Wyoming.
Normal website activity, including, but not limited to, answering e-mails, end-user browsing or searching site documents, and end-user downloads of information from the site by users outside Casper, Wyoming will not be construed as initiating or maintaining a forum of operations in any other city, county, state, country, planet, planetary system, galaxy, or alternate universe.
If you don't accept these privacy terms, or agree with this legal disclaimer, please do not use the site's resources.
Best Wishes
/s/ William H. Haller Webservant for awmach.org, awmach.net, awmach.com