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Gulf of ClevelandNEWSLake Erie at Cleveland, by the numbers

Privacy

What we keep. It is very little.

There are no accounts, no analytics services and no tracking cookies on this site, and its fonts come from this site itself. The only outside service any page loads is the banner ad from adengine.us on the public pages, described under Advertising; it also counts one page view per page as a daily total. Pages set no cookies, except one security cookie on the Shore Watch pages, which have forms: it only proves that a form was sent from this site, tracks nothing and expires after a day.

Shore Watch

A watch keeps the name you type, your conditions, when it was made, when it was last opened, and its GO / NOT YET history. Our database does not keep the link code itself, only a one-way scrambled copy (SHA-256). The link is also the page address, so the web server’s access logs (below) record it each time the watch or its feed is opened. Anyone who has the link can open the watch, so share it only with people you choose. A watch nobody opens for 180 days is deleted, and you can delete it yourself at any time from its page.

Limits and logs

To stop abuse, the number of watches made from an internet address is counted for the day. The address is stored only as a salted one-way hash and the counters are deleted after two days. Like every web server, ours writes standard access logs (address, time, page requested, including watch links and feed addresses), which the hosting server keeps for a limited time for security and traffic statistics.

Backups

The database is copied every night and each copy is kept for 14 days. A watch you delete, and the hashed counters, can therefore remain in those backup copies for up to 14 days before they are gone for good.

Payments

When payments go live they will go through PayPal. This site will store only a pass record (plan, status, paid-until date) and PayPal’s reference for it, never card details.

Advertising

The public pages of Gulf of Cleveland News (the home page, the Morning Dispatches, Data, Pricing, and Sources and method) show one banner ad from AdEngine (adengine.us), the small ad network run by WeldonPC, the company behind this site. For now the ads are for WeldonPC’s own services. Shore Watch pages (the form and every watch), locked Lake Pass pages, this page, the terms and error pages show no ad.

To show an ad, your browser loads a script from adengine.us, asks it for one banner, loads the banner image, and reports once that the page was viewed and once that the banner was shown. Like any website, adengine.us receives your internet address, your browser type and the address of this site with those requests.

  • No cookies, no profile. AdEngine sets no cookies, gives you no ID and does not track you from site to site.
  • How your internet address is used. adengine.us looks up the approximate city for your address in a location database kept on its own server (nothing is sent to anyone else), so that ads meant for one area are shown only there. It also uses the address to count each ad view or click only once and to leave out robots and WeldonPC’s own office traffic. The address is not stored with the counts; the temporary entries made from it expire within six hours and are cleared from the server within two days.
  • What is kept. Daily totals only: page views for this site, and views and clicks for each ad. The adengine.us web server also keeps a standard access log (internet address, time, address requested, referring site, browser) for security; it is deleted on a rolling schedule.
  • Clicking an ad passes through adengine.us, which counts the click, and then opens the advertiser’s site, which has its own privacy policy.
  • Nothing about you is sold or shared.

Contact

This site is run by WeldonPC. Reach us through weldonpc.com.