Privacy Policy
Guides For This Website
For Everyone
Updated:
In this document, the word "we" refers to anyone working for Burtmat.net in a relevant capacity, including volunteers and contractors, as we work together to develop and maintain this website and all associated content and projects.
General Statement
Everything is this policy appears voluntarily because your trust is important. For that reason, everything you need to know is here in plain English, without legalese jargon or any other trickery. If you have any questions, please ask them here.
Volunteered information
Any information you send to, or via, this website, its connected social media accounts (if any), or any other related, publicly viewable accounts, including comments and mentions, are considered publicly available information. Such information may be shared, forwarded, quoted and used in other ways, but will never be used in ways that violate the initial intention of the information. For example, a positive posting about another website will never be mis-represented as a positive review for this one. We're just not those kinds of people.
Information sent in any way with a reasonable expectation of privacy is considered private for the purposes of this policy. All private information is bound tightly by our code of secrecy, which prevents it from being shared or referenced in any way, with anyone who doesn't need to know it. And we mean need. Anything that can be considered private will be. For example, an email sent to any Burtman address, a private message, or something you post by mistake and then quickly delete - is obviously not intended for anyone else, and we don't care for loopholes and trickery. We respect your privacy and the integrity of your communications. Period.
Cookies?
This site sets exactly one cookie, when you first load a page, which allows you to sign into your account and keeps track of things for your convenience and the correct functioning of the site. Although it is required in order to maintain logged-in sessions and remember your settings, this cookie can be deleted at any time without causing any loss of your data. If you delete the cookie, you will be logged out. Logging back in will restore the remembered data.
If you don't have an account, or you don't wish to sign into it on a particular visit, you can happily continue with cookies entirely disabled, and it will not affect the functionality of the site at all.
Your cookie is encrypted in order to secure your information, and it is never shared with any other site or service. The reason we do not have a GDPR menu is that we do not have any other cookies from other domains and the only information we store is that which you explicitly and voluntarily provide. There are no adverts, marketing tools, external analytics, trackers or anything else you might not be excited about, and we do not use the blanket term 'legitimate interest' to allow spyware through our website.
Tracking?
The following tracking methods are commonly deployed by websites, in order to find out as much information as possible about their visitors, including geographical location, language, device and operating system, browser version, IP address, and even your private search history. None of these systems are used at Burtman.net.
HTML5 Canvas
Geolocation
Sneaky javascript beacon things
Image-embedded tracking urls and call-homes
Some other creepy tracking method that's conveniently not mentioned?
Hell-to-the-no. Read line one of this policy to see why Burtman's not tempted by these sinful things.
Notice On Post View Tracking
As of build 75, released April 16, 2024, there is a small, internal post read log, which is updated when you read a post (IF you are logged in). This is not a tracking method designed to learn about you. The only information it records is your user id (already present on the system) and the id of the post you opened. This log allows the operation of the new prior_read function, which is used exclusively on content that most visitors will never see (currently, you need the White Key to access it). It simply checks if your user id has been used to view the requested post id before allowing you to read a given post. For example, episode 2 of a series will not be available until you have read episode 1. This is called series priority and this is the limit of its functionality. The data recorded is only used by the post display engine and is not visible to any user or third party.
Connected Sites?
At no point will this website ever employ under-handed methods to obtain information about any visitor, nor will any advertiser, sponsor, donor, supporter, social media platform or long-lost-uncle be permitted to use this site as a vector for the same.
As the site develops, some external websites may be linked to this one, but rest assured, none of the government's data-mining tools like facebook, linkedin, twitter, google, etc., will be among them. Burtman favors independent, socially-responsible and non-profit organizations, because we have rights, no matter how badly big brother wants us to forget it.
JavaScript
Burtman uses the smallest possible amount of javascript - only where it's necessary for functionality. The pages that use javascript are:
- Playlist : The music on this page is embedded from SoundCloud.com. The relevant domains are soundcloud.com and sndcdn.com. If you don't want to allow javascript from SoundCloud, the audio tracks will not play.
- Maps : In the beta version of this site, maps are provided by Google, although alternative arrangements are in the pipeline. The relevant domains are google.com, maps.googleapis.com and gstatic.com. If you don't want to allow javascript from Google, the map will not be displayed but the location names will still be shown. Replacing Google here is a priority development milestone.
- Tool Profiles : For the time being, the instructional videos in tool profiles are coming from Youtube.com, but we use the no-cookie version to protect your privacy as much as possible. The relevant domain is youtube-nocookie.com. Although there are several other youtube domains that want to use javascript, none of them are necessary for viewing the videos. Replacing youtube videos with videos from a better source is on the development list.
- Donate : Finally, there are a couple of small javascript functions on this domain (burtman.net); one which scales the main menu for smaller screens and one which loads the QR codes for the Burtman crypto wallets. If you don't want to allow javascript for this website, the QR codes will not display for the crypto wallets but the addresses will still be shown, and the main menu will not function on small screens.
Everything else will work properly without javascript, and you can still make a donation with the plain text wallet address (thank you ).
Limitation Of Use
All information gathered about you by any means is treated in the strictest confidentiality at all times, and is only stored for as long as is necessary in order to serve its purpose. This is both a legal requirement and an optional policy.
Publicly viewable information you post remains publicly viewable until you delete it.
All personally identifiable information is permanently deleted from our systems as soon as it is no longer required for the provision of services. For example, even if you don't have a supporter account, we need your email address in order to send you updates as a mailing list subscriber. But if you unsubscribe from the mailing list, we no longer need that email address and we remove it from our systems promptly.
In the case that removal of comments or other postings may damage the integrity of other information, especially information that is helpful to others, such comments and postings may instead be censored according to your request, and then transferred to the anonymous user, instead of being deleted. This might happen, for example, if your account is deleted, either at your request, or due to serious or repeated violation of our simple rules.
Transmission And Storage
All information transmitted to this website is encrypted by default, using the industry standard SSL protocol. All personal information in our database is stored in an encrypted state (Secure At Rest), which prevents its use in the unlikely event that the database is compromised.
Anything Else?
Although we do not currently process any user statistics, the following information is available to all websites you visit, and may be used for anonymous, aggregated statistics gathering in the future:
- The address of the site that sent you here, if you followed a link.
- Your country and language preference can give us an idea where our visitors come from, which can help with content production.
- Your browser and operating system versions can help us with technical work that improves the site for everyone, by showing us which systems are most used to display this website - that information will be used only to ensure more of our UX testing effort is dedicated to the most popular systems.
- If you followed a personal referral link, we register that link in your account, so we can reward the referrer according to how many people they have referred. This information is required in order to keep things running smoothly in the referrals department, but we don't use it to infer relationships and social networks, nor do we allow anyone else to see that information. Only you and Burtman can see who referred you and who you referred.
A Word On Crypto Wallet Software
We like cryptocurrency for its fast and cheap transactions. But we also like privacy. Actually, it's because of privacy that we prefer crypto to traditional bank transactions; The increasing authoritarian control that banks are trying to exert over all of us would lead us into slavery, if we fell for it. You can read more about that by researching CBDCs (Central Bank Digital Currencies) - Central banking's authoritarian answer to decentralized, freedom-promoting private currency.
Cryptocurrency allows us to send and receive payments without third party interlopers like banks, governments and other agencies being able to block or redirect those transactions. While some currencies like Bitcoin make use of publicly visible transaction lists, the sending and receiving addresses are arbitrary and cannot be easily connected to any single person. That makes our lives a little easier, although there are other currencies like Pirate Chain, which utilize private transaction lists to make that even harder. The details are far beyond the scope of this privacy policy, but well worth looking into, if you're interested in how cryptocurrencies actually work.
If you know anything about cryptocurrency, computer software, security, the internet, or any related field, you probably know that the software that stores your cryptocurrency is the most important target of criminals who may try to steal your wealth. If you knew nothing about any of the aforementioned areas, you now know this.
So that's why it's important to make sure that your crypto wallet software is secure and trustworthy. And that's why we recommend well-known and trusted wallet software for the various currencies we accept on this website. To help you stay safe in the crypto world, we include a recommendation for what we consider to be the best wallet for a given currency on the relevant donation page. That recommendation shows the official icon and a link to the official download page. This way, you can be sure you are really downloading the official build from the correct place.
Of course, there are often many different wallets available for a given currency, and especially for the most popular ones like Bitcoin and Ethereum. So please consider the recommendation just that. We have nothing to gain by recommending any given wallet over another because we do not accept or use promo codes for money-related software and services. We want to remain neutral to ensure we provide an honest and unbiased recommendation.
Long story short: If you don't know which wallet software to install for a given currency, you can trust the one we recommend. If you have another preference, then go with that, instead.
And that's that. Thanks for reading and enjoy the site!