This policy explains what happens to information when you read The GL Pod. It is written for a United States audience and in plain language rather than in the usual defensive phrasing, because a privacy notice nobody can get through is not really a notice at all. It covers what is collected automatically, what you provide yourself, what third-party services may do, and the choices and rights available to you.
The short version: the site is a reference you can read without creating an account, and there is no reason to ask you for personal details. A small amount of technical information is recorded automatically whenever any site is visited, and anything you send by email stays in the inbox you sent it to. The sections below give the full picture.
What this policy covers
This policy applies to The GL Pod and to the pages published under it. It does not apply to the outside websites this site links to, including the conservation assessments, government agency resources and museum pages cited throughout the catalog. Those organizations operate independently, and each publishes its own privacy notice governing what it collects when you visit.
Following a citation takes you off this site. From that point the receiving organization's practices apply, and this policy has no bearing on what happens there. Reading the notice of any site you spend time on is a reasonable habit, and it is worth doing for the institutional resources as much as for anything else.
Information collected automatically
Like effectively every site on the internet, this one is delivered by a hosting provider that keeps server logs. Those logs typically record the address your request came from, the date and time, the page requested, the referring page if there was one, and basic details about the browser and operating system making the request. This happens as part of delivering pages and keeping the site available, not as a separate act of data collection.
Log information is used to keep the site running: diagnosing errors, understanding load, and identifying automated traffic or attempts to disrupt access. It is not used to build a profile of you, and no attempt is made to connect log entries to your name or identity. Logs are retained for a limited period and then discarded.
Information you provide
The only personal information this site receives directly is what you choose to send. If you write to [email protected], that message arrives with your email address and whatever you included in it. Correspondence is used to answer your message, and reports about factual errors may be kept as part of the record of how a page was corrected.
Your address is not added to a mailing list, sold, rented or shared for marketing. If a correction you report leads to a change on a page, no personal detail from your message appears there. There is no account to create, no newsletter to join and no profile to fill in, because the site has no use for any of it.
What is not collected
No account system exists here, and no registration is offered or required. The site does not ask for your name, your mailing address, your phone number or your date of birth. No payment information is ever collected, because nothing is sold and no subscription is offered. No precise location is requested, and the site does not ask for access to your camera, microphone, contacts or files.
Never collected on this site
- Account registrations, usernames or passwords
- Payment or financial information
- Precise geolocation data
- Health, biometric or government identification data
- Contacts, photographs or files from your device
Cookies and similar technologies
Cookies are small files a site or a service it uses can place on your device. Some are necessary to deliver pages and protect against abuse. Others remember a preference so a choice you made survives from one visit to the next. Measurement and advertising services may set their own, and where third-party services are present the cookies they set are governed by their operators rather than by this site.
Where a preference can be carried in the link itself, that is the approach taken. Comparison selections and catalog filters travel in the page address, which means the page you are looking at can be bookmarked or shared without anything about that choice needing to be stored on your device. The cookie policy describes each category in more detail and explains how to control them.
Measurement and analytics
Understanding which pages are read, how readers arrive and where they leave is how a reference site decides what to fix and what to expand next. Measurement of this kind may be carried out by a third-party analytics service, which typically records page views, approximate region derived from network address, referring source and general device category, and reports them as aggregate statistics.
Analytics here is about pages rather than people. The interest is in whether a profile is being read and whether readers are finding the comparison useful, not in who any individual reader is. Analytics data is not used to identify you and is not combined with correspondence sent to the editors.
Advertising
This site may carry advertising supplied by third-party services. When it does, those services operate under their own privacy policies and their own data practices, and they may use cookies or similar technologies to select which advertisements to show, to limit how often a given advertisement is repeated, and to measure whether it was seen or clicked.
Third-party advertising services may use information gathered across many different sites to personalize the advertising they deliver. That practice belongs to the advertising service and not to this site, which does not receive, hold or have access to the profiles such services build. No advertiser has any influence over the editorial content here, and no figure, profile or piece of prose is affected by a commercial arrangement of any kind.
Limiting personalized advertising
- Ad settings offered by the advertising service itself, where it provides them, usually allow personalization to be turned off
- The industry opt-out pages run by the Digital Advertising Alliance and the Network Advertising Initiative cover many participating services at once
- Browser settings can block or clear third-party cookies, which limits how advertising is targeted
- A Global Privacy Control signal sent by your browser or extension communicates an opt-out preference to services that honor it
- Mobile operating systems provide their own advertising identifier controls in system settings
Children's privacy
This site is a general-audience reference and is not directed at children under 13. No personal information is knowingly collected from children, and there is nothing here for a child to sign up for, buy or submit. The material is often useful for school work, and young readers are welcome to read it, but no account or personal detail is ever requested from anyone.
If a parent or guardian believes a child has sent personal information to [email protected], a message to that address will lead to the correspondence being located and deleted. No verification beyond what is needed to identify the message is required, and no explanation is asked for. Enough detail to find the message, such as the address it came from and roughly when it was sent, is all that the request needs to contain.
How long information is kept
Server logs are kept for a limited period sufficient for security review and troubleshooting, then discarded on a routine schedule. Correspondence is kept for as long as it is useful to the editorial record: messages that produced a correction may be retained so the reason for a change remains traceable, while routine mail is deleted once it has been answered.
Information held by third-party analytics and advertising services is retained according to those services' own policies and schedules, over which this site has no control and into which it has no visibility. Their published notices are the accurate source for those periods, and they are worth reading if retention matters to you. The cookie controls and opt-out routes described above are the practical way to limit what such services collect in the first place.
California resident rights
California residents have specific rights under state privacy law, including the right to know what categories of personal information have been collected and the purposes for which they were used, the right to request deletion of personal information, the right to request correction of inaccurate personal information, and the right to opt out of the sale or sharing of personal information. Exercising these rights will never result in discriminatory treatment.
This site does not sell personal information, and it does not share it for cross-context behavioral advertising in exchange for anything of value. Where third-party advertising or measurement services operate, their use of cookies may fall within the broad statutory meaning of sharing, and the opt-out methods listed above, including a Global Privacy Control signal, are the practical means of limiting it. Requests should be sent to [email protected] and marked as privacy requests.
Making a privacy request
Any request concerning personal information should go to [email protected] with a description of what you are asking for. A request to see or delete correspondence needs enough detail to locate it, such as the address the message was sent from and roughly when. Where identity verification is necessary before information is released or removed, only what is needed for that purpose will be requested, and it will not be kept afterward.
An authorized agent may make a request on your behalf with proof of authorization. Requests are acknowledged and answered within the period the applicable law allows, and a reply is sent even where a request cannot be fulfilled, along with the reason it could not be. Requests concerning information held by a third-party analytics or advertising service have to be made to that service directly, since its records are not accessible from here.
Changes to this policy
This policy will be updated when practices change, when new services are introduced, or when the law requires different disclosures. The revision date at the foot of the page always reflects the current version, and material changes will be described on the page itself rather than made silently. A notice that can be rewritten without anyone noticing offers very little protection to the people it is supposed to inform.
Continuing to read the site after a revision means the current version applies to you. Questions about any change, including what a particular passage means in practice or which of the choices described above would address a specific concern, can be sent to [email protected]. Those questions are answered in plain terms rather than by quoting the policy back, and asking one costs nothing.