Privacy Policy

Who we are

Our website address is: https://www.eskimo.com.

What personal data we collect and why we collect it

EXTERNAL APPS

Many external applications also collect data.  If you do not wish your real name collected you can use a pseudonym in these applications.  Many do not have provisions for dumping or erasing data so please use real information only if you agree to not require these things.  We are working on these capabilities but this site is very complex with many apps.

Linux

For access to Linux shell we do require a real name, and a telephone number and e-mail address.  In addition we ask for a city, state, and nation.  Your real name is shared with other users in Linux as it is part of /etc/passwd, however, you can change this to a pseudonym by logging into “eskimo.com”, and using ‘passwd -f’ or ‘chfn’.  We will still have your real name internally only the name in the password file is shown to other users.

We need to know who is using our facility in order to prevent abuse of our services or allowing our services to be an abuse vector for other services.  This information can only be deleted if you elect to delete your account here.

If you pay by credit card, we will also need credit card information and the address the card is billed to.  We use this to process your payment but we do not retain it ourselves.  The processor will retain it if you elect to take advantage of automatic recurring payments.

Also when credit cards are processed,  the processing company ipayment, will retain the last four of your credit card, address, and telephone number, along with transaction history.  These are needed for administrative purposes and in the event of any billing dispute or refund disbursement.

If you are under the age of 16 in Europe or 14 in the United States, you must have a parent or guardian apply for an account and give consent for us to use your personal information as specified in order to access this site.

Comments

When visitors leave comments on the site we collect the data shown in the comments form, and also the visitor’s IP address and browser user agent string to help spam detection.

An anonymized string created from your email address (also called a hash) may be provided to the Gravatar service to see if you are using it. The Gravatar service privacy policy is available here: https://automattic.com/privacy/. After approval of your comment, your profile picture is visible to the public in the context of your comment.

Media

If you upload images to the website, you should avoid uploading images with embedded location data (EXIF GPS) included. Visitors to the website can download and extract any location data from images on the website.

Contact forms

When you apply for a Linux account, it is necessary to provide contact information so that we have a means to contact you.  This is necessary for billing and also to prevent abuse of our facilities.  If you are under 16 in Europe, please have a parent or legal guardian fill this out and consent to our using this information for the purposes specified. If you are under 14 in the United States, please have a parent or legal guardian fill this out and consent to our using this information for the purposes specified.

Cookies

If you leave a comment on our site you may opt-in to saving your name, email address and website in cookies. These are for your convenience so that you do not have to fill in your details again when you leave another comment. These cookies will last for one year.

If you have an account and you log in to this site, we will set a temporary cookie to determine if your browser accepts cookies. This cookie contains no personal data and is discarded when you close your browser.

When you log in, we will also set up several cookies to save your login information and your screen display choices. Login cookies last for two days, and screen options cookies last for a year. If you select “Remember Me”, your login will persist for two weeks. If you log out of your account, the login cookies will be removed.

If you edit or publish an article, an additional cookie will be saved in your browser. This cookie includes no personal data and simply indicates the post ID of the article you just edited. It expires after 1 day.

Embedded content from other websites

Articles on this site may include embedded content (e.g. videos, images, articles, etc.). Embedded content from other websites behaves in the exact same way as if the visitor has visited the other website.

These websites may collect data about you, use cookies, embed additional third-party tracking, and monitor your interaction with that embedded content, including tracing your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that website.

Analytics

Who we share your data with

If you make a credit card payment, the information required is shared with our credit card processing company, Ipayment Inc.

Some of our web properties have Google Ads on them.  While we do not share your information with Google, when using these websites your browser may share information with Google.  To prevent this configure your browser not to allow third party cookies or use an Ad Blocker.  We do not prevent you from using our services if you block ads. Also, even if you disable third party cookies, Google still may obtain your IP address.  You can prevent this by using a web proxy service or tor.

How long we retain your data

If you leave a comment, the comment and its metadata are retained indefinitely. This is so we can recognize and approve any follow-up comments automatically instead of holding them in a moderation queue.

For users that register on our website (if any), we also store the personal information they provide in their user profile. All users can see, edit, or delete their personal information at any time (except they cannot change their username). Website administrators can also see and edit that information.

Linux Account information is retained indefinitely if you do not inform us that you wish the account to be deleted unless we find out that you are deceased in which case we do not retain the account information.

What rights you have over your data

If you have an account on this site, or have left comments, you can request to receive an exported file of the personal data we hold about you, including any data you have provided to us. You can also request that we erase any personal data we hold about you. This does not include any data we are obliged to keep for administrative, legal, or security purposes.

Where we send your data

Visitor comments may be checked through an automated spam detection service.

Your contact information

Your e-mail address on Linux can be deduced by your login in the password file and our domain.  Since this is publicly viewable to other customers logged in, it can be obtained by any logged in user.  Also while you are logged in, it maybe obtained by others via our website web apps section rwho.  The purpose of providing this information is to allow people using chat services such as ntalk to contact you while you are logged in.

Additional information

How we protect your data

Your real name is kept in the password file unless you elect to change it as we have described above.  It is not required that you keep the name in the password file as your real name, however, if you send e-mail, the “From” address in the e-mail will reflect the name in the password file.

What data breach procedures we have in place

If we become aware of a breach we will notify users as soon as possible.  We have not had a system wide breach since 1995 but we do have personal accounts breached, usually by brute force password guessing or by a customer using the same login credentials on other less well secured sites.  On this site we do have facilities in place that block IP addresses after several incorrect login attempts.  With individual account compromises of this nature we will notify the affected customer(s) and we also disable the accounts until new authentication information can be arranged.

What third parties we receive data from

We do not source data about customers from third parties.  Neither do we provide data to third parties unless required by a court order.

What automated decision making and/or profiling we do with user data

We do not perform any automated profiling and the only automatic decision making is whether or not to allow a customer to login based upon the correctness of authentication information and the account being not expired.

Industry regulatory disclosure requirements