GDPR Statement

The General Data Protection Regulations apply to all organisations that conduct any form of business electronically with or in the EU. To reassure visitors to this site, here’s my position on the GDPR:

This site does not collect any personal information. In fact, comments are turned off so there’s no content returned by the server that did not originate here. The server maintains the usual connection logs, but these don’t contain any personal information and are used simply to determine what content is viewed most often. This site creates temporary session cookies only for logged-in users, which does not include the general public. There are third-party services (such as the Mastodon feed) that do their own thing, which will include some of their own content. These are high-profile third-party services so if there’s something unwelcome happening with them then pretty soon everyone will know about it. So for now these are present because they bring benefits without known/obvious problems. I don’t have advertising on my site, because I’m not trying to make any money from my visitors. (Turn off your ad blocker for this site and you will see no difference.) One benefit of the Mastodon feed is that it provides a way to notify me regarding something you’ve seen on this site, assuming you have a Mastodon account. Beyond that, I don’t want your personal information anywhere near this site because if I don’t have it then it’s not at risk. You should find that reassuring.

As a businessman I also run Rotan Consulting Ltd located at www.rotan.ie and even there I don’t accept any content from visitors. If people want to contact me to do business, the email address is on the site, and I reserve the right to retain emails sent to me indefinitely. (UCE goes direct to Trash, of course.)

In short: in my personal and business capacity I don’t deal with content or data from the public, except for some emails and Mastodon comments.

Of course, I have quite a number of clients who do handle content and data from the public and other businesses, and as a professional in the tech industry I make a point of adhering to the best practices and legal requirements to the best of my ability, and encourage my clients to do likewise. I will not engage in any activity that would seek to undermine the security and privacy of the general public. We make use of technology for our benefit and we know that this involves the passing of data to-and-fro but we should never allow this relationship to go any further than the minimum necessary to satisfy the contract between service provider and service user. If sites want to make money from online interaction then they should say so clearly when people visit. In my case, I’m not trying to exploit your visit, sell your clicks or anything else. On my site you can relax.

I am also a member of the IEEE for about four decades and I adhere to the IEEE’s code of conduct.

I hope all this is clear.

Rotan