When you tell your browser to visit our website, your browser tells the cloud the address - the URL - of a page on our website. The fact that you asked to visit the web address is visible to anyone able to eavesdrop on your network. The computers that your browser consults to find our website learn that a computer with a specific network address is asking to visit the web page. The company we use to host our web page is told which page you wanted. Our website is told which page you want.

The company hosting our web page keeps some anonymous statistics for us, such as the number of pages visited and the amount of data we send out. The company also keeps such data as it deems necessary to provide technical support.

We track of how many times each of our pages are visited. For example, we know how many times this page was read. We don't track who reads a page, how long people spend viewing a page, or the sequence of pages read. The current version of our website does not track the portion of the web address that would tell us what topics you are searching. We may add limited tracking of the added information once we have the spare time to do it right. (Tracking how much activity there is around the Gauge Calculator product might be fair game. Tracking in enough detail that we could guess at the sequence of pages you visit is definitely not fair game.)

We plan to use this tracking information to learn what interests our visitors. We don't want to drop content that you find interesting. We'd like improve the odds that the new content we add over time is useful and interesting to you.

We monitor the statistics provided by the web hosting service we are using in order to find out if we have links pointing to nowhere, that we need to either seek larger disk and network quota or rework our website to be less demanding, or that our website is in some other way acting in an unhealthy fashion. The statistics provided by our web hosting service list the IP address of your computer as well as which page you visited. The statistics are kept in logs that are erased on a regular basis.

A cookie is a piece of information that we give to your browser to remember. Every time you ask your browser to visit a page at our website, your browser will tell us the piece of information again. A website can ask that a cookie be kept for one visit to a website or that a cookie be kept for a specified time interval. Unless you use an https: web address, the cookie is visible to eavesdroppers as well as to our website.

We use cookies good for a very long time if you visit our Preferences page and tell us to remember what color scheme and what font size to use while you visit. These cookies are human readable so it would not be difficult for an eavesdropper to determine, say, that you prefer a larger font size and the color red.

We use short-lived cookies to discourage pranksters from camping out on a particular review and hammering one of the voting buttons. These cookies are deleted when you shut down your browser or if enough time has elapsed that we think it is reasonable to let you vote again on the same item.

At this point in time, we are operating on an honor system with regard to submitting product reviews, features, requests, and other forms of feedback. We do not have a login system and so cannot track who submitted what. We monitor your submissions for matters like civil tone and we have an overall throttle on the number of submissions based on how much manpower we can afford to spend monitoring. In the future, we might switch to a login based system so that we can let you create a login, establish a track record of civil, on-topic postings, and earn the right to be exempt from the overall throttle. Such a login based system would be implemented using cookies.

When you click on a link or submit information after filling out a form, your web browser reports the web address of the page containing the link or form. This web address (also know as the referrer) is visible to eavesdroppers (unless the link or form asks for an https: address).

We use this origin web address when a web page submits a trouble report, for example, if the scripting code in a web page crashes trying to run on your browser.

If we find that some other website is making what we regard as unfair use of our content by, say, embedding one of our online applications into their site in a way that make it look like their application, we will use the originating web address information to block the use.

We regard the originating web page (aka referer) as being moderately sensitive information. It can be used to track the sequence of pages you visit. Knowing the sequence of pages visited is the kind of behavior tracking that in other contexts has proven to be vulnerable to being correlated with other actions to reverse-engineer the identity of a person. This is a piece of information we will not start tracking without a very compelling reason.

Your web browser reports what kind of browser it is when it fetches a web page. It also reports what kind of browser it is to the web page fetched. For example, it might report itself as Internet Explorer 8. Because different kinds of web browsers behave somewhat differently, people that maintain websites like to track what kinds of browsers are being used to visit the website. The information lets them decide how much testing to do with the different kinds of browsers.

We want to put more effort into making sure that our website works properly on the browsers most commonly used by our visitors so we will collect counts of visits by the various types of browsers. We won't record which computer address used a particular browser. When one of our pages detects a misbehavior in itself, it will send a problem report that includes the type of browser. Our record of the problem won't include any other information about whose computer suffered the error.

When you ask for a web page, your web browser reads the page. It will ask the website for additional information, for example, for the images you see. Sometimes a web page will wait awhile before it asks for more information, for example, a news site might ask to see if there is any new breaking news. In those cases, you can see the new images or announcements of breaking news. In other cases, web pages communicate behind the scenes.

We will be open about what communication our website that isn't obvious based on what you see. We do hidden communication for two reasons:

• To count the number of visitors that have turned off scripts
• To report any misbehavior our pages spot in their self-checks

We have a privacy note at the bottom of each of our web pages informing you of this behavior.

Web pages can contain code - or scripts - designed to be run by web browsers. Such code can provide useful functionality. It can enable web sites to provide functionality in a more private fashion by letting the browser carry out tasks in the privacy of your own computer, as opposed to a more public fashion by telling the website to carry out the task on your behalf. Such code can also report on what it observes you do and what it observes of your computer. Many browsers provide a means for their users to command that the browser not execute such code (scripts).

Our website embeds scripts (code) in our web pages to provide functionality that we think you will find beneficial. We monitor how many visitors have scripting turned off so that we will know whether we should consider switching to other techniques. Other techniques may offer less privacy, require delivering more data to you and so run up your data plan costs, or require you to jump through more hurdles. At present, we use scripting to do the following tasks:

• If you click a Remember or Forget button on our Preferences page, we use a script to create or delete a cookie for you.
• Our web pages fine tune the instructions given to your browser about where to place things like menus based on what your browser tells our web pages about your screen size.
• Our Gauge Calculator Online Edition application runs a script to do its arithmetic locally. (Otherwise it would have to tell our website what your size and stitch count information is -- which we think would be bad from a privacy aspect).
• Our page letting you ask what we know about you runs a script to get some of the answers.
• Our scripts do some observations of their own behavior and will report if they spot evidence of a bug.
• Some of our pages, such as the write review page, run scripts to check that you've filled out the mandatory fields before you submit your input. If scripting is off, you are more likely to get back a message saying that your posting could not be accepted.

As we add additional products that run as web pages, we are likely to continue embedding code necessary to do what the product promises to do and to report product flaws to us. Our philosophy is to not observe or do things that are not essential to providing you with the content and product features we say we are offering.

When you ask for a web page, your web browser talks in a language called HTTP to the website. The browser always uses HTTP to tell us the address of the web page you want. The browser tells us about any cookies it stored about our website using HTTP. Applications other than web browsers can also use the language HTTP to ask our website for data or services. An application can use HTTP to send a website other kinds of information about the request. For example, applications on cell phones may send information about your current location.

We do not at this time have applications that send this kind of information to our website. We are planning such applications. If you download an application from this website or buy one of our applications from an app marketplace, we'll give you the details about what information our application sends. You will always be able to go to the Products area of our website to find out about what information is sent before you buy or download.

Any time your computer uses the network, it reveals its network address (or IP address). This enables the remote computer you are contacting to address its responses so that they reach your computer. A network address is rather like a telephone number. It doesn't directly reveal your name or where you live and the owner of the network address can change from time to time. Like a telephone number, a person with access to the right information can discover which computer owns or owned the address.

Canitag Apps N Crafts recognizes that your network address is personal information. We will treat your network address with care and not keep a record of it any longer than we must. What do we consider situations in which we must keep it for awhile? Here's a hypothetical example. Suppose our administrator finds that every day for a week, our daily quota of product reviews has been filled by spam. We might turn on tracking of web addresses for the next few days to see if the spam is coming from a single address that we could easily block.

On the other hand, we at Canitag Apps N Crafts feel that sales and marketing purposes do not justify us to keep a (long-term) record of your network address. It would not justify doing the analog to an area code lookup in order to figure out what countries and states our visitors (and potential customers) live in. We will not maintain record of which network addresses have downloaded which products so that we can display targeted advertisements.