Privacy

Pri­vacy is a big deal on the Inter­net. These days, any time a Web site asks for per­sonal infor­ma­tion about you, even your name, it’s cause for suspicion.

Because the Con­sor­tium for the Cre­ative Nudge’s Web site asks for a few piece of per­sonal infor­ma­tion from its users, we have decided to out­line just what we col­lect from you, why we need it, and what we do with it.

Your name – When you reg­is­ter for the site, you are required to pro­vide your first and last name. The rea­son we require these bits of infor­ma­tion are two-fold. The first rea­son is sim­ple: the Web site is set up to auto­mat­i­cally dis­play your first and last names on the “Con­trib­u­tors” page and on your per­sonal archive page, mark­ing you as an active mem­ber of the Con­sor­tium of the Cre­ative Nudge. Your name is also attached as a byline to each sub­mis­sion you post to the site.

If we let you get away with­out sup­ply­ing your name, it would mess up the Web tem­plate; there­fore you are required to enter your name.

The sec­ond rea­son is more com­plex and has to do with account­abil­ity. The writ­ings you post to this Web site are yours and always will be. You, the authors, own all rights to those works, period. So it makes sense that you should want to attach your name to your sub­mis­sions. Also, anony­mous writ­ing has a place, but it prob­a­bly shouldn’t be on this site. The Con­sor­tium is about friendly encour­age­ment and cre­at­ing a help­ful, inspir­ing online group. We hope you don’t feel like you have to with­hold your name from a com­mu­nity like that.

A descrip­tion of your­self – When you reg­is­ter, you are also asked to pro­vide a per­sonal descrip­tion. This, like your real name, is part of the Web tem­plate and is dis­played on the Con­trib­u­tors page and on your per­sonal archive page. If you do not pro­vide a descrip­tion, it screws with the Web tem­plate, so we require you to pro­vide one.

E-mail address – You are also required to pro­vide an e-mail address when you reg­is­ter for the site. This is so that 1) the soft­ware that runs the site, Word­press, can send you a ran­domly gen­er­ated pass­word via e-mail and so that 2) read­ers can con­tact you about your writing.

The first rea­son is out of our hands. Word­press is great soft­ware, but enter­ing an e-mail address at reg­is­tra­tion is a require­ment of the soft­ware and would be very com­pli­cated to change, so we won’t try. The sec­ond rea­son is cour­tesy. If you are writ­ing for oth­ers, it is awfully nice to make your­self avail­able to answer ques­tions about your writing.

Your e-mail address is dis­played on your per­sonal archive page — which is linked from the Con­trib­u­tors page if you have sub­mit­ted mate­r­ial to the site. We use e-mail obfus­ca­tion tech­nol­ogy to keep spam­bots from culling your address from the page, which should make it very hard for you to get spam as a result of your address being dis­played on the Con­sor­tium site.

Your e-mail address may also be used in occa­sional mail­ing from Con­sor­tium admin­is­tra­tors and edi­tors. These would be of the announce­ment sort of e-mails, and they would be infrequent.

Your e-mail address may also be used to notify you that a post you sub­mit­ted for approval has been pub­lished on the Cre­ative Nudge site.

Other infor­ma­tion – There are other fields you can fill out in your user pro­file screen — acces­si­ble after you log-in by click­ing on “pro­file” on the right-hand side of the admin­is­tra­tion screen. These are vol­un­tary, and right now, only your real name, e-mail address, and descrip­tion are dis­played any­where else on the site.

We may choose to dis­play other infor­ma­tion you pro­vide in the future, such as links to your Web page or your IM user­name. We’ll let you known before­hand if some­thing big changes about the way we use the infor­ma­tion you pro­vide to the site.

Shar­ing your infor­ma­tion – We don’t. Every­thing you pro­vide stays on the site. The Con­sor­tium doesn’t give your infor­ma­tion to any­one else for any reason.

If you have any ques­tions about these poli­cies, please write to consortium@creativenudge.org.

Last mod­i­fied: Feb­ru­ary 24, 2009