Comic Alert! Privacy Policy / FAQ

Since we're pretty cautious when signing up to other web sites, we thought it would be best to make our intentions clear regarding your personal information and what we use it for. This page will serve as a "full disclosure" document detailing why we do things the way we do, and will hopefully show that we truly are concerned about your privacy on the Internet. If you have a question not answered here, please let use know.

• What information do you collect?
• What cookies are set and what are they used for?
• What do you do with my information?
• What statistics do you collect?
• More on Statistics and the click.comicalert.com links...

What information do you collect?

When you visit Comic Alert! without a user account we collect no information about you at all, other than what's stored in the standard web server logs (which happens on every web site you visit).

When you sign up (create an account) with Comic Alert! we require only a username and password so that you can re-access the account in the future. ALL other information is optional. You don't even need to provide your email address!

We do require you to enter (and confirm) your email address if you wish to post reviews or comments on the site. This is done to help ensure a basic amount of accountability. ie: If you post slanderous comments, don't expect to hide behind us. However, we never reveal your email address to the public, your comments are indicated with your username only.

We also use your email address (if you provide it) to send password reminders (if you forget your password and you haven't entered your email address, you're out of luck) and we are considering adding a feature to send a daily email report with links to your favorite comics. Both of these items are voluntary - we won't send you any unsolicited emails.

We will never share your email address with any third party or send you unsolicited emails (spam).

What cookies are set and what are they used for?

We maintain session information (most importantly your user account info when you log in) via a session cookie. This cookie is composed of a random key, does not contain any personal information, and is only valid for the www.comicalert.com domain. It expires (is deleted) as soon as you close down your browser.

If you select the "Remember Me" option when logging in, a Login Key cookie will be set. This contains a random string of characters that will uniquely identify you next time you visit the main Comic Alert! site (www.comicalert.com). This cookie is only used when logging in and is not transmitted to the various other sub domains (eg: click.comicalert.com and vote.comicalert.com).

Some of the Comic Alert! features will create or modify a cookie named "prefs" that is site-wide for the *.comicalert.com domain. This cookie contains generic, non identifying information, such as your voting preference (yes or no) so we know to display the vote frame or not, or your last visit for pages that show you new items only. None of this information is, or ever will be, specific enough that it can be tied to your user account.

If you like you can disable cookies in your browser, however you may encounter difficulties using the site when you're logged in, and certain features may simply not function.

What do you do with my information?

We use the items in your personalized feed to provide you with your daily comics, and to calculate the "Most Subscribed to" comics.

We attach your username to any comments you make on the site (so people know who said what) and allow people to search for all the comments that one person made.

We use your email address to send you your password, should you forget it. We will, of course, also use it to send you email alerts, should you enable this feature (it's off by default).

We use your age and gender (if you provide it) to attempt to match up other comics you may like.

NONE of your personal information is ever shown, sold, or otherwise disclosed to any third party - it's all used internally. Your information is safe with us, but if you're not convinced, just don't provide it! We only require a username and password to sign up.

What statistics do you collect?

For the purposes of ranking comics by popularity we track a couple of different items. We track the number of subscriptions to each comic, as well as the number of times each comic is read every day. The number of subscriptions is an easy one, we just total the number of users subscribed to each comic. Done!

To get the number of times a comic is read every day (a far more accurate measure of popularity) we need to know every time someone clicks a news item to view a comic. That triggers a click tracking script which then passes you on to the actual comic. No personal information is stored during this, and there's no way to tie your "click" to a particular user account (we just want to know that someone's interested, not who they are).

More on Statistics and the click.comicalert.com links...

If you're interested in the technical specifics and exactly what happens when you click on a link, read on...

When you click a Comic Alert! news item in your news reader your browser (or news client) visits http://click.comicalert.com/<number>. This <number> is an identifier for a specific comic strip and is no way tied to you (if you like you can check a friend's link - they'll have the same number for the same strip).

When your browser requests the click.comicalert.com web page your IP address stored in a table along with the id of the comic you want to read. This is done so that multiple hits from the same reader (to the same comic) only count as one. Otherwise someone could click the same link all day long and artificially inflate the popularity.

Once an hour that table is summed and data that's more than 7 days old is cleared. We use 7 days instead of 24 hours because many web comics do not update daily. This provides a constant view of the comics that are "most read", but does not maintain a log of who read what (that "click" is not tied to your user account). Again, we don't want to know what you personally are reading. We just want to know what the community as a whole is reading. We think this is a fair method of balancing reliable stats gathering with privacy.

We use click.comicalert.com instead of www.comicalert.com because it keeps your Comic Alert! cookie away from the click tracking (again, we simply don't want to know which accounts accessed a comic, just that someone did).