I am very concerned about online privacy and I strive to not infringe upon the privacy of any visitors to my site. AnthonyKozar.net uses Apache as its web server software and WordPress to manage the site content. This site does not use any tracking technologies other than those that are enabled by default by Apache. This includes and is limited to recording a server log. I generally cannot personally identify you from the information in this log (see below).
If you leave a comment on my site, your name and website (if provided) will be published on the site along with your comments. Your email address (if provided) will never be published or shared, but I will save any information that you provide for the sole purpose of replying to your comment. I have altered the default cookie-setting behavior of my WordPress installation and I believe that I have disabled ALL cookies now for site visitors.
This site does NOT include content from or communicate with any other web sites during your visit. Therefore, to the best of my knowledge, no other online entities are tracking your usage of this site either (although see below about page referrers).
Your future privacy on most web sites is not guaranteed: most so-called “privacy policies” reserve the right to change the rules at any time. AnthonyKozar.net is my own personal web site and except for possibly selling CDs of my own music here some day, I have no intentions of ever “commercializing” or selling this site. Therefore, I can promise you that I will continue to abide by the terms you are reading here today, to the best of my ability, for as long as this site exists. The only changes that I will make to this policy will be to clarify it or to make the restrictions on my use of your information even stricter.
You can read the sections below to learn more about specific issues. Thanks for visiting!
About server logs
Typically, whenever your computer communicates over the internet with a remote machine providing a service (such as a web site or email), the server maintains a record of all of the requests that your computer makes. The original purpose for keeping these logs was to ensure that the server is functioning properly and to have a trail in case of a security breach. Later, web site owners realized that they could also use the information in these logs to analyze the traffic on their sites and learn more about their visitors.
In general, the information in a web server log does not directly reveal your identity. For each page you visit, the server records the IP address of your computer, the date and time of the request, the page requested, the response the server gave, the address of the page that referred you to the new one (see “About referrals” below), and the user agent identifier of your web browser.
Here is an actual example of a line from the log for this site:
99.118.45.118 – – [08/Mar/2013:23:03:07 -0800] “GET /music/ HTTP/1.1” 200 1315 “http://www.anthonykozar.net/” “Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; rv:16.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/16.0”
The IP address (99.118.45.118) is the piece of information here that most likely has the potential to reveal your identity. At a minimum, the IP address often indicates what part of the world you live in. Most home internet users though have a dynamic IP address – an address that changes periodically – and only the internet service provider is able to identify which of their customers had a particular address at a particular time. This makes it difficult for web sites to use IP addresses as unique identifiers which is good for your privacy. However, over the course of a single typical visit to a web site, your IP address will not change, so the site can track which pages you view during that visit. Other technologies (such as cookies) are needed for longer-term tracking.
The referrer address could also reveal something about you if you navigate from a site whose address includes information about you. An example would be a poorly-designed web mail service that includes your email address in the web page addresses of the service. The user agent identifier of your web browser (“Mozilla/5.0” etc. in the example above) reveals which browser and usually what kind of computer or device you are using. It does not identify the user of the web browser.
The recording of web server logs has always been “standard practice” on the world wide web. I don’t know how to disable the logging of this information and I do sometimes refer to it to try to gauge how many real people are visiting my site and what they are interested in. Unless you submit a comment to my site and voluntarily provide your name or email address, I cannot determine your identity from the information in the site logs except in the rare case that the referring page reveals something about you.
Learn more about web server logs …
About comments and emails
If you choose to post a comment on this site, please note that the Name, Email, and Website fields on the comment submission form are all completely optional. You can submit anonymous comments if you wish and I encourage you to only provide the information that you are comfortable sharing. Your email address will not be published on the site and I will NEVER share it with anyone or use it in any way except to possibly reply privately to your comment. Neither will you be added to any mailing list by submitting your email address.
All comments on this site are moderated (to prevent spam), so you will not see your comment after it is posted until I approve it. Feel free to check back in a few days and I will probably have posted a reply within that time.
If you choose to send me an email using the email address on my contact page, I will apply the same policy: I will NEVER share your email address with anyone or use it in any way except to reply privately to your email. In addition, I will not share or post the contents of your email without your consent. (OK, as an exception, I might share messages that I receive with my wife!) 
About cookies
A cookie is a small piece of information saved on your computer by a web site when you visit it. The cookie is then sent back to the web server whenever you visit again. This web site has never set any cookies in the browsers of visitors. (WordPress usually sets cookies when you leave a comment or log in, but this “feature” has been disabled). This site also does not use “super cookies” such as Flash Local Shared Objects or DOM storage.
Learn more about cookies …
About referrals
I like to add lots of relevant links to my pages and I do sometimes link to web sites run by commercial entities. If you follow a link from my site to any other site, the default behavior of most web browers is to share with the destination’s web server the address of the page on my site that “referred” you to the other site. I cannot disable the sharing of this information: it is a feature of your web browser. (If you use Firefox, you can install a plugin to selectively disable referrals). Note that I do not receive any compensation for these referrals and, indeed, I do not have any means of knowing when you click on a link to another site. I will never attempt to track whether my visitors click on “outbound” links.
This “technology” works between all sites that link to each other. So, be aware that if you follow a link from another site to AnthonyKozar.net, the page that referred you here will show up in my server logs. My logs will also show the sequence of pages on this site that each visitor views. This information helps me to understand where the traffic on my site is coming from and is anonymous unless you choose to submit a comment including your name or email address during your visit. If you are uncomfortable with this, consider using a web browser (such as Firefox or iCab) that allows you to disable referrers.
Learn more about HTTP referrers …
About third-party “snooping”
Whenever you see content on a web site that is being “served” by a web server other than the site you are looking at (most commonly advertisements), the third-party website receives information about the page you are viewing via the HTTP referrer method. Such third-party sites can also set cookies in your web browser, thus allowing them to track you over a wide range of sites that include their content. Several other site features are commonly implemented through third-party servers which also allows cross-site “snooping” to take place. Examples of such services include site statistics, social bookmarking, gravatars, spam filtering, captcha, etc. NO part of the AnthonyKozar.net site is implemented by including content from or by communicating with any third-party servers.