The Anglo-Norman On-Line Hub. Privacy and Security Information |
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Logging |
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None of this constitutes "personal data"
in the sense of relevant UK or EU legislation. Please note that neither
your email address nor any user id you may use to log into your local
system is ever made available to our server when you use our site. |
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The most reliable method is the use of session cookies. These are small pieces of data passed to and fro between your browser and the server, which allow the server to realise that a given request is from the same user as a previous one. (Note, however, that such cookies, as used on this site, reveal nothing else: the server knows via the cookie that two or more requests are from one and the same user, but it does not know who that user is. Of course if, as happens on some commercial sites, your are explicitly asked to provide information that identifies you by name or otherwise, then a server can tie that information to the cookie, which thus encodes your identity and allows your browsing behaviour to be linked to your personal details. It is this practice that has raised doubts about the security implications of cookie passing, but it is not employed by the ANOH system.) If your browser is configured in a standard way, these session cookies will be used and you need know or do nothing special. However, if your employer or institution has decided that session cookies constitute an unacceptable security risk then the "View entries visited" facility and the related "Bookmark this session" feature may not work properly. Where a browser blocks session cookies, the ANOH servers attempt to use an alternative method not requiring cookies ("token-passing"), but there are various circumstances in which this method cannot keep track of your session and thus cannot correctly maintain a list of entries visited for you. If you personally have decided to prevent your machine from accepting session cookies on security grounds, we advise you to reconfigure your browser so that it does allow session cookies to be exchanged with www.anglo-norman.net. All current browsers allow such settings to be made on a per-server basis. There is no need to allow what are called "persistent cookies" from our server, because we do not use them at the present time. The cookie you receive from our server will be deleted from your machine when you close down your browser. If you wish to resume a session keeping
the list of entries you visited in place, there is a means of doing
this, described in the user guide. This sends you a special address
containing a session token. If you use this address to start your
next session, the server will find the list of entries visited associated
with that session token and add them to the list it creates during
your new session. Note that the server has no way of associating
the data about entries visited with you personally. It identifies
them purely by a session code which contains only information about
the time the session began and on which of our multiple servers the
entries associated with that session code are stored. The server
cannot associate that information with you, unless you
choose to start a new session by sending it back the session code
concerned, and even then it "knows" nothing about you other
than that you wish to be regarded as the same user who had that same
session code on an earlier occasion. |
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