Cookie and Data Policy
in plain language
About Cookies in the real world
Cookies are small pieces of data that are put in your browser's cookie collection that enable a website to remember information about your visit. This enables a website to work smarter on your behalf, such as presenting content in your preferred language.
However, the cookie situation is complicated by websites placing third-party cookies on your computer. If you've ever wondered why you're getting ads served to you on a website that seem to correspond with an enquiry you made on a completely different website, that's what third party cookies, do. They track what your doing and sell the information to others! Sadly the EU's GDPR regulations make this worse rather than better. When you click the cookie link at the top or bottom of any site you visit, you just want to get rid of the annoying message and don't realise you what you are accepting, which in many cases is cookies from anywhere!
Our cookies
tanalan.com does not use any third party cookies. Here is what we store:
General visitors
- A cookie that says you accept cookies. This is given when you acknowledge the cookie message, and therefore stops the message appearing in the future.
- Your language selection, so that as you move around the website, and next time you visit, your preferred language will be offered to you without your having to select it. That's it! Analytics is done within the site's database.
- A session cookie, which is controlled by the website to help it keep track of what's happening.
Forum participants
If you decide to participate in the forums on this website, you'll need to sign-up with an email address, and choose a user name and password. When you have logged in, your cookie collection consist of
- 'thisuser' a long encrypted string, that only the website can decypher. The allows the user to stay logged (on that computer/browser) between visits, so that you don't have to enter your user name and password each visit.
Data Storage. Your personal data.
A database is integrated into the website, which stores and presents the forum posts, as well as storing the user credentials. As far as the registered user of the forum is concerned, the following data is retained.
- Email address.
- User name, that you choose, (and previous names, if changed.)
- Password, that you choose. Fiendishly encrypted within the database of course.
- Local time, optional. Enables the forum times to be shown in your local time.
- Your location, optional. Contains whatever you type in this field, and is visible to all.
- Brief Bio (about me), optional. Contains whatever you type in this field, and is visible to all.
- Forum posts, optional. Contains whatever you type in this field. Forums are public. What you type here is visible by the whole world!