What information is collected by Findcan

This privacy policy covers the website findcan.ca hereafter known as Findcan. Findcan collects information from users when they register an account, perform account activities,create advertisements, create groups, post messages to groups, edit wiki pages, or perform searches.

The Findcan site makes uses of Yioop search engine software which is freely available for download at SeekQuarry. The source code of this can be used to understand in detail exactly what information is stored by the Findcan web app. One can verify from this source code that the app itself does not directly transmit data to third parties. Third party thumbnail images may appear on yioop during news and video searches and these might be used by third parties for tracking. Findcan's advertising platform also tracks search impressions and advertising clicks, information on which is available to ad purchasers. For registration, account purposes, and to maintain the integrity of the Yioop site, Findcan keeps track of user IP addresses and may store email and other personal information such as Full Name. Data posted to Findcan groups or written to the wiki and read by more than one person might become public knowledge. The search facility in Findcan does not associate search query results with IP addresses or user identification.

The Findcan website is served using a web server. As is standard for most web server software, log file entries are generated for requests made to the web server. Log file entries are also generated when an error occurs with a request or within the web server. As an example of the format of an access log entry consider:
99.88.77.66 - - [17/Mar/2012:19:00:00 -0700] 
   "GET /index.php?q=secrets&limit=80 HTTP/1.1" 
   200 34940 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (My Super Browser)"
Such an entry has an IP address, a date, a query, and a User-agent. From the IP address one can determine the geographic location of the person making the query. The User-agent can be used to reveal if you are coming from a web browser (human) or are a web spider (non-human). All of the above information could in theory be correlated across multiple requests to the website. Thus, your queries made to Findcan could potentially be revealing.

In addition to Web Server logs, a computer as part of its daily operations stores temporary and less temporary files which may contain some of the information related to the web server's operation, and so might also contain information about requests made by a user on Findcan.

Finally, Findcan, since it is a search engine, has a crawler component. This component downloads pages from various web sites. You may be the owner of such a site, and despite the best efforts on the Findcan team's part to make sure that Findcan only crawls sites it is allowed to, it might have inadvertently downloaded some content you would prefer it didn't.

How information collected by Findcan is used

User registration data is not sold nor are group posts or wiki files of private groups data mined. We reserve the right to index and mine public group data in the future (at this point the users can't create public groups so this is a moot point). Aggregated statistics of queries are generated to help make future versions of Findcan better. As an example of software that analyzes web log statistics one can look at awstats/. Typically, this data is discarded periodically. If we need to investigate a website intrusion, or if required by law enforcement, we reserve the right to retain these records and any other collected data. Information about the behavior of non-human users of Findcan (spiders) might be shared in order to ensure the integrity of the Findcan site.

If you are a content provider, and find that there is data in the search results or in public groups or wikis for which you are the copyright holder that you would not like available through Findcan, you can contact allanp73@gmail.com or chris@pollett.org to ask that your data be block from search results or taken down from the groups or wikis in question.
 
Previous versions of this privacy policy are available on request.
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