"You have zero privacy anyway, Get over it." - Scott McNealy, Chief Executive Officer, Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Like it or not about the only way HNN can pay its bills is with banner ads. No one likes them. But without them we would not be able to buy any beer and that would be worse. Face it this site is a lot of work and if it wasn't for the fifty bucks in beer money those banner ads earn us each month it is doubtful HNN would exist in the same format. We have to get drunk once in a while.

So to appease the people with the money (i.e. advertisers) we will post a privacy statement that details what we will and will not do with any information you choose to provide to HNN. This is just a statement. Of course we reserve the right to change this policy at any time and we may or not update this page. Since there is no law that says we have to, why bother.

If you do not want to provide any information to HNN and wish to remain completely anonymous (to us anyway) then don't visit the site, or check out the folks at Zero Knowledge (we sure hope they go gold soon). Just by visiting you are giving us information about you. Information we log, and store, and look at, and analyze and drool over while we drink the aforementioned beer. Yes, we lead exciting lives.

By connecting to HNN via http (the web) you provide us, and any other web site, your IP address, your browser type, your operating system, etc... all standard web log stuff. Nothing to personal. If your DNS actually resolves then we can find out approximately what part of the world you are in and who your ISP is. Do we have time to do all that? No. Do we want to? No. Do we care? No. Does it all get written down in logs for us to look at if we so choose? Yes.

If you choose to send us mail with our online web forms there is data gathered there too. Web forms are not anonymous. Not on our site or any other. Web forms will automatically grab your IP address, browser and OS types, and append that information to the email. Do we do anything with this information? No. We do use it internally sometimes to verify when one person is trying to send us bogus stories, though.

If you choose to send us mail with the likes of HotMail, Yahoo, or any one of the dozens of other free email services you should be aware that the IP address of the person who composed the email is usually stored within the header. Again, we don't do anything with this information other than to determine where certain stories are from.

Email is stored locally for approximately one month, sometimes less, sometimes more. Depends on how much we have had to drink and how full the hard drive is. Then it gets deleted never to be seen again. At the moment the machine that email is stored on is not backed up so don't worry about the feds taking all of our old tapes. We will absolutely NOT harvest email address from our received email and sell them to advertisers (Yes, we have been asked to sell such lists). SPAM is evil, and must be stopped. We will not contribute to its propagation under any circumstances!

Speaking of the authorities, if they ever show up with a search warrant they can gladly have all of our equipment. I just hope they bring a very large truck and several burly moving men. What this means to you is DO NOT send us email about illegal activities you are planning. This only implicates us and forces us to inform the authorities. Yes, we will do that. We have a moral obligation to report crimes and do not encourage such activities.

So what can you do about your general lack of privacy? First, stop giving it away, stop filling out questionaires or applying for things you don't need. Second, follow some of these links and learn some more.

NewOrder Box - Lots of Privacy and Anonymity Links

The Electronic Frontier Foundation - Fighters for Online Privacy