The authors of Worldview Manager are keenly aware of the many modern issues surrounding privacy on the Internet, and strive to balance anonymity and privacy with functionality and user experience. It is the purpose of this document to provide full transparency to users of the website, so that they can be better informed to make decisions that may have an impact on their privacy.
The web server on which Worldview Manager runs collects access and error logs for every connection made to the website. These logs record users' IP addresses, the requests made, and the times of the connections or errors. They do not contain any personally identifiable information, and are deleted approximately once every week.
In order for Worldview Manager to recognize the user so that he or she may proceed from page to page continuously, the website also tracks the user with HTTP "cookies" -- small text files that allow the website to recognize a client (such as a web browser) when it makes multiple requests to the website. Every page on Worldview Manager creates (or updates, if they already exist) three cookies on the user's computer, which, between the three of them, contain an internal numerical ID for the current user and another one for the current topic, if one is set. These cookies automatically expire 24 hours after the last connection is made.
Many pages on Worldview Manager feature a comment form where users may post thoughts, opinions, and other ideas about the content of the page. These comment forms feature an optional field for a "name". If the user chooses to enter a name, it becomes associated with the numerical ID stored in the cookie created by the website (see previous paragraph).
Every response given to a statement is kept in a database indefinitely for statistical purposes, along with the internal numerical ID of the user that gave the response. If the user chose to provide a name in the comment form, the responses can be identified with the provided name by the Worldview Manager authors and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (MIT CSAIL) system administrators. These parties pledge to never sell, rent, or otherwise share or distribute this data with any other third parties. The data is maintained strictly for internal, statistical purposes; if statistical results are ever published, they will only feature aggregate data and no personally identifiable infromation.