Out In Minnesota Privacy Policy

Out In Minnesota gathers and uses some very limited information about our site users. We will not spam you. Nor will we share this information with anybody else. This page describes in some detail the information we have and our purpose in gathering it.

Registration

We request that you provide us your email address before permitting you to post messages or photographs to the Message Board and Galleries. This is so that we will have at least some possibility of contacting you if we need to. It's also in order to permit you to be notified of private messages from other site users and to allow you to choose to receive occasional announcements from OutInMN. Users may at any time choose to stop these email messages - after you are logged into the message board click on My Controls near the top of the page, and then look under Options to Email Settings.

The private messaging system is intended to permit others to contact you directly and by email - but without you revealing to them (and to the spam bots) your email address. It's very handy. The option to be contacted with general announcements from the site administrators is little-used. In any case, if we ever do use it then every message will carry an instruction of how to cancel further such mailings.

We have no intention of bothering anybody. Both of these options are available to be turned on or off from the time you register. They're optional.

Personals and Commercial Ads

We require verifiable contact information before we will accept Personals Ads or commercial advertising from anybody. That's not to say that we endorse the accuracy of these ads! We can think of all kinds of mischief that somebody might get up to here, absent verification, so we do our best to keep the mischief under control.

Cookies

The message board and galleries need to use cookies in order to function. They don't do anything bad. They make sure that your messages are posted as being from you and allow you to edit your own messages after they've been posted. If there were no cookies then there could be no registration, no profiles, nothing. Everybody could impersonate everybody else and the site would soon become useless.

IP Addresses

Whenever anybody uses a computer on the Internet they make use of a computer IP address. It looks something like this 12.345.67.89 Every Internet Service Provider (ISP) owns lots of these numbers and they, in turn, make them available to their customers. ISP's keep logs of who is using which of their IP addresses at any given time.

When you post messages or send emails or just visit a site, your IP address and the current time are logged. Nearly always, nobody ever looks at this. No one cares. But in certain circumstances this information can become interesting - not only to OutInMN but even to law enforcement.

In such an extremely rare circumstance, we could look up which ISP owns a particular IP address, and report that together with the time of the incident to the ISP, and they would be able to see who among their customers was using that IP at that time. If it's a minor issue of harrassment, they might deliver a warning to the customer and point out the Terms of Service. If it's something major then a court might issue a subpoena requiring the ISP to hand over all of their information about this customer, and leading to further investigation and prosecution.

So, yes. We do record IP information about you but it's nothing personal. We cannot use this to find out your real name and address. No ISP would ever share that information with us! But it also means that everybody should behave themselves here because another thing IP's are good for is we can block IP addresses, or a set of them, from accessing the site if we feel that it's necessary.

Visitor logs

We track how many people visit the site, and how many pages they look at. These records do include IP numbers but it's not our purpose to find out what anybody individually is doing. We just want to know which pages are the most and least popular so that we can improve the usefulness of the site over time.

Comments and questions

We welcome your suggestions and comments either at the message boards or by use of the mail form on our Contact Page.