Philip Brewer

I don’t collect or save any information about visitors to my website, except to the extent that various of the tools or services that I use do so.

The ones that I’m aware of are:

• Wordpress — The blogging tool that I use as a content management system allows users to create accounts for the purpose of making comments.  When users do so, it sends me email with the information that they’ve entered.  I usually save that email.  There’s probably also data kept in the database that holds the data for the site, which I can probably get at.
• Google Adsense — Some of my pages have Google ads on them.  Google no doubt keeps huge amounts of information about visitors to my pages.  I don’t have access to most of it, but I do get aggregate reports about how many times ads were served on my pages, and how many times someone clicked on an ad.  I don’t save any of that information, but Google does, and I go and look at from time to time.
• Dreamhost — This site is currently hosted on Dreamhost servers.  They keep server statistics that let me see things like how many visitors my pages have had, and save certain information reported by their browsers (such as what browser it was, and what the referring page was).  I don’t save any of that information, and I don’t know how long Dreamhost keeps the relevant log files.

The various services use the information for their own purposes, which I generally don’t have control over.  The information gathered by the Wordpress blogging tool is used in obvious ways–for example, a comment that you enter is displayed on the system, together with the name and homepage link that you supply.  I might also use the fraction of the information that falls into my hands–for example, I might use the email address that you supply to contact you, if I think your comment is especially interesting.