Privacy Policy

About Auranos

Auranos is the online presence of Gartbeth Digital Services Ltd, a company (SC710279) whose proprietor is Stephen Duffy who can be contacted with regard to any privacy related issues at the following email address: admin@auranos.org

Protecting your Privacy

It is the responsibility of Auranos.org to protect your privacy in regards to any information that may be acquired from you and this extends, not only to the information we collect as part of the general administration of the business such as your contact details but also to the extent that your equipment could contain data which is personal and private to yourself.

Auranos.org will not disclose any information about you which is available to us to any other party to the extent that a court order will be required before we provide any data even to statutory agencies. We take the privacy of your data very seriously.

General Business Administration Data

The data about you we hold and control for the purposes of general business administration is held as exempt from the Data Protection Act but we are willing to correct any mistakes which are reasonable to correct. Examples of this data include your contact details, services currently being requested and any money which is due between us. This data will not be disclosed to any third party and forms part of the private contract between us.

Private and Personal Data Accessible to Auranos.org

As part of the business, it is essential to have access to a customers private data. For example, all the data on the hard disk of a machine that is currently under repair. We are neither a data controller for this data nor are we a data processor for this data. We regard this data to be the private personal property of the customer and nothing within it will be disclosed to any third party without a court order. In addition, it is in most cases, not part of a job to be going through your data to see what is in it, as this information is personal and private to the customer. For the most part data will simply be moved from one device to another and never looked at but in some circumstances it may be neccessary to look at the metadata such as filenames and subdirectories in order to ensure the integritty of data transfers in some specific instances. We will treat such data in the strictest of confidence.

Personal Information on the Website

It is possible to set up an account on the website which allows website users to create, alter and delete information about themselves. Except where otherwise stated this data when entered will become public domain and in cases where there is a specific statement that the data will be held privately, auranos.org and its agents will have access to this data. This data will be treated in the strictest of confidence and will not be given to third parties or used for the purposes of marketing.

Protection of Personally-Identifying Information

Any data derived from customers and members that auranos.org holds, is held either on secure servers or on machines held within secure premises. The data controller may be cited as Stephen Duffy who can be contacted at admin@auranos.orgin the event of any privacy breach. In any case the only person we will disclose any data to will, in absence of a court order to the contrary, be the person from whom the data is derived.


About Our Cookies

Quick Cookie Primer

Skip the Primer

If you already have a basic understanding of cookies and just want information on the cookies this web application generates, you can skip the primer by clicking on these links to go to the appropriate subsection.

Cookies set by this web application

Cookies which may be set by third parties through the application

Other threats to your online privacy and how to prevent them

About Cookies

Cookies are data which are specific for a particular website which are stored on a users browser and sent by the browser to the particular website anytime the user attempts to access the website. They are usually created and altered by the website according the way the user interacts with the website and the user then seamlessly tells the website all the information it has stored in the form of cookies every time they access the website.

Cookies are the primary means by which internet sites "remember" each user between browsing sessions. (A session is the time from when a user browses to a site to the time the user closes all windows and tabs associatied with the site.) By the use of cookies, a website can remember who a user is despite that the previous session may have ended days ago.

Cookies are used for a variety of purposes. The most common purpose they are used for is to remember the User Identity (UID) of a user for a particular website which in turn can allow the website to look up the data it has stored internal to itself about the user who has the cookie that the server created on their browser for them. This internal data can include anything from the version of browser and the dimensions of the screen upon which the website renders content, to user options like the preferred colours of the user, text-size or options that are specific to certain types of site.

Malignant Cookies

They can also be used to track user activities not only on the site that the user is visiting but on third party websites which are able to read cookies set by a website for other websites to read. Tracking cookies do not only store your options for a website but can identify across a huge swathe of websites and such sites can target content at those they track which can include advertising for commercial purposes by people who know you clicked on an advert for a train trip or a political candidate and are capable of being used for targeted propaganda at dissidents, people of influence and even people who some organisations may wish to keep in a bubble of false and misleading information for purposes which may not involve financial gain or profits as would fit into categories imagined by ordinary people where money is a scarce and all important matter to those who cant imagine a world composed of those who have never lacked money.

On this website, we tick the legal boxes of ensuring your privacy but then so do all the organisations showing privacy popups telling you they care so much about your privacy they are only going to share with their partners as soon as you click the annoying button preventing the flow of your browsing session. We don't share your data with anyone except the "authorities" and only then once the said "authorities" have fulfilled the legal requirements they need to follow like getting a court order and such like, indemnifying us from being sued by you because we gave away your private information to those who were not legally entitled. We will co-operate with the "authorities" but we strike a balance that the "authorities" must themselves be in compliance with the law.

We reserve a right to reveal your data without your permission in situations or imminent threat of death or torture, terrorism, state corruption and war. Outside of that, only if the law says we are required to divulge it.

Cookies Types

We separate cookies into four simple categories in describing who can see the cookies which are on your browser.

Session Cookies

These cookies are deleted at the end of every session and it would be rare for them to contain anything that could seriously violate your privacy. Perhaps the server wants to know what your screen size is during the current session so it can generate pages appropriate to the device dimensions. This could be stored in a session cookie but the next you access the website, the server will create a brand new session cookie serving the same purpose. Prior to version 3.0 of this web application, the "chatrooms section visiblity" and the "theme" being light or dark were stored on a session cookie which reset back to default values if the user left and came back again.

Third Party Cookies

Third party cookies are traditionally cookies which created for websites other than the website you are currently visiting. For example, you visit the example.com website and it puts a cookie on your browser that can be read by any website and is intended that freindsofexample.com can read that cookie and make the connection that you exist elsewhere anytime you visit a whole range of websites.

Third party cookies were heavily exploited by organisations during the late HTTP 1.1 era and many browsers continue to allow users to block third party cookies with the caveat that on the modern internet, some sites may not work at all.

Samesite Cookies

A samesite cookie is a cookie which is created by a website specifically forbidding the cookie to be read by any website other than itself. These types of cookies are used by almost all websites which employ the use of cookies. The ability to be remembered by a site you signed up to logged into before is most often provided by samesite cookies.

Samesite Cookies by Third Parties

Social media and external authentication has encouraged techniques which were previously considered dangerous since they allowed third party websites to run programs on a website which was not their own. This was traditionally described as a cross site scripting XSS attack and far from a website just deliberately running a script from another site, alot of effort was made by maligned hackers to cause an external script to run on a website that was not their own such that alot of underlying technology had to be rewritten to prevent people from getting their scripts to run on someone elses website.

Samesite Cookies by Third Parties are a type of Samesite cookie which are appear to be created by the site that you are visiting and will not flag up as a third party cookie in a users browser but the cookies are ultimately being created by a script which is hosted on a third party website but is being run by the site you are visiting. This web application at the current time can run a script which is hosted by Facebook that creates cookies appearing to be created by the instance of the web application that a user is visiting. That is to say that a user visits this site, logs in using the facebook button and ends up with a samesite cookie for this site which were actually created by the script which was being hosted by facebook during the login procedure.




Cookies by Auranos

theme

The theme cookie is a samesite cookie which remebers the theme preferred by both members and anonymous users. At the current time (January 2021) there are two themes installed representing a dark mode like night time and a light mode like during the day.

user

The Login cookie is a samesite cookie which contains a members username between sessions when the user is not online.

This cookie is only created when a someone with a Basic Membership or greater opts to be remembered and logged in automatically every time they visit the site.

login

The login cookie is a samesite cookie which the server uses to ensure the user cookie is a genuine cookie created by the genuine user on the website so avoiding potential security hazards such as someone using a forged cookie.

This cookie is only created when a someone with a Basic Membership or greater opts to be remembered and logged in automatically every time they visit the site.




Third Party Cookies

Our Third Party Cookie Policy

With the possible exception of benign session cookies which are deleted at the end of each session and do not contain personally identifying information, this web application does not create any cookies which can be read by sites other than the site on which the instance of the web application is running.

In saying this, in order to provide features that some websites employing an instance of the this web application may desire to use, the use of Samesite Cookies by Third Parties is unavoidable if the certain features of the instance are enabled such as facebook logins.

The website owner should consult the list of site settings section of the setup or install page to switch these features on and off.

Facebook

Our website may be enabled to support logging in and signing up using Facebook as an Outside Authentication (OAuth) service provider. If you have logged in or signed up using the Facebook login then you will receive cookies which appear to be samesite cookies from our website but which were actually created by a script which is run through our site but hosted on Facebook.

At the current time (January 2021), Facebook will create two cookies which appear to be same-site/any-subdomain cookies from our website for anyone who logs in or signs up using the facebook login or continue as button. Their names are as described here:

fbm_############### (where # is digit from 0 to 9)

fbsr_############### (where # is digit from 0 to 9)

These cookies are only sent for "social members" who login to our site using the facebook login button and are not needed for members who have signed up for or upgraded from "social membership" to "Basic Membership".

Other Facebook Cookies

If Facebook analytics has been enabled for the website, a cookie for a Facebook Pixel will be set on your browser like so:   _fbp

Google

Our website may be enabled to support logging in and signing up using Google as an Outside Authentication (OAuth) service provider or the use of analytics cookies for the purposes of advertising and improving the search engine rankings of this website. If Google has been permitted to place cookies on your browser through this site then you may see the following cookies described here:

_gat_gtag_UA_#########_#

_ga

_gid

These cookies are only sent for "social members" who login to our site using the facebook login button and are not needed for members who have signed up for or upgraded from "social membership" to "Basic Membership".




Third Party Requests

Our Third Party Cookie Policy

Our website may be enabled to support various third parties who wish to make requests of third party sites for use on your experience of this website. It is hard to provide a comprehensive list of third party sites which this website may call due to the use of external scripts by third parties who may change which sites they make requests to without this site having much of any direct control over it rather than just switching off the features which cause the third party requests to be made.

We highly recommend the use of Searxes Third Party Request Blocker browswer extension as a means to prevent all Third Party Requests on any website to be blocked unless you specifically enable the ones that Searxes indicates websites are wanting to make.

This software was developed by Stephen Duffy for udhr.auranos.org which has a very special privacy policy which takes into account the Universal Declaration of Human Rights amongst other former high standing documents with the intent to provide users with maximum privacy and anonymity while at the same time providing features which will allow website owners who employ this software to reduce privacy to standard levels such as might be seen on most internet sites in operation today.