Stop Junk Mail is anti-marketing and pro-privacy. I'll never use your personal details for marketing purposes or allow third parties to use this website to track you on the world wide web.
there are no cookie warnings on this website. I'm only using non-intrusive, functional cookies:
- When you log in to the website or put an item in your shopping basket the website start a so-called session cookie. This cookie contains a random strings of letters and numbers and is used to make sure you're not suddenly logged in as someone else or end up with someone else's shopping basket.
Paypal and Youtube
The shop uses Paypal for the checkout. After you've stuffed you basket with lots of goodies you're redirected to the Paypal website to process your payment. Unfortunately, Paypal does use tracking cookies. According to its website these are used
to recognise you as a PayPal customer, customise the PayPal services, content and advertising, measure promotional effectiveness, collect information about your computer or other access device to mitigate risk, help prevent fraud and promote trust and safety. In other words, some of these cookies are used for marketing purposes.
There are a small number of embedded Youtube videos on this website. To prevent Youtube from setting cookies on your computer / device the videos are embedded using Youtube's privacy-enhanced mode.
Web servers keep an access and error log. For every page element that's downloaded to your computer / device there's an entry in the access log that lists the name of the file that was visited; your IP address; the date and time of your visit; what type of request was made; the result status of the request (i.e. whether or not the page could be displayed); the number of bytes transferred; the referrer (the web page you came from); and the user agent (your operating system and browser).
To illustrate, the below shows the entry of me visiting Stop Junk Mail's home page:
stopjunkmail.org.uk 127.0.0.1 - - [31/Mar/2019:11:53:25 +0100] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 6867 "http://duckduckgo.com/post2.html" "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686; rv:11.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/66.0"
We can break this down into little chunks and display it in a table:
|Log file||What it means|
||The web page that was requested (in this case the home page)|
||The IP address (this is of course not my real address)|
||The date and time of the visit (the 'timestamp')|
||The type of request (a normal 'HTTP' request)|
||The result states. '200' means there were no errors.|
||The number of bytes there were transferred.|
||The referrer (that is, how I ended up on the web page).|
||The user agent (operating system and web browser).|
As I'm hosting this website myself I got access to the full access log. I don't use services such as Google Analytics, nor is the data in the access logs aren't collated by logfile analysers such as Awstats.
Privacy / data protection
In general, I try to treat your personal data as I'd like you to treat mine:
- I don't collect irrelevant personal details. The website's contact form, for instance, only contains four fields: name, e-mail, subject and message.
- I don't keep personal data longer than strictly necessary. For instance, future junk mail historians will be disappointed to learn I regularly delete e-mails that are over three months old (unless the e-mails are really significant).
- I don't use personal data for any purpose other than the one it was collected for. For instance, if you consult Dr Junk Buster your personal data is used to answer your question – no more, no less. Or, when you buy something from the shop your details are used to send you a confirmation e-mail and the item(s) you bought. Your details won't be used for anything else. You won't suddenly get a newsletter or promotional e-mails, nor will your details be shared with any third party.
- I keep data secure. It's important to be realistic about this: any website can be hacked. That said, a combination of sensible security measures and the above approach to data protection should give you a reasonable level of data security. (In particular deleting data as soon as it's no longer strictly necessary is something I'd encourage others to do – there's no better way of preventing personal data falls in the hand of the wrong people.)
Marketing and other nuisances
As already indicated, Stop Junk Mail will never use your personal details for marketing purposes. I don't do marketing, simple as that. There's no newsletter, and the campaign doesn't have a presence on nuisance platforms such as Facebook and Twitter.