LEGAL & PRIVACY

Effective Date: March 11, 2022

Last Revised: March 6, 2024: Removed Netlify and moved to Github Pages for hosting. Moved site behind CloudFlare free tier services to mitigate DDOS and malicious metered service exploitation, and updated CloudFlare verbiage accordingly. Added further clarification to Twitter/X statements. Added third-level headers to aid in searchability and ToC navigation. Moved Goatcounter to 3rd parties and added a list of what information is collected on a page view event.

This is a personal website and will be kept free of complicated rules and legalese if/where possible. Anything on this page applies only to websites. Questions or issues concerning this site, its policies, and its upkeep may be addressed by email to [email protected].

  • This website and the thoughts and opinions therein are my personal opinion. Unless otherwise explicitly specified, content on this site is not endorsed by other parties whom I am involved with or connected to.
  • Under no circumstances shall I be individually liable to anyone for any damages caused by third parties involved in the hosting, delivery, rendering, or upkeep of this site, unless my act or failure to act constitutes intentional misconduct, fraud, or knowing violation of the law.
  • These statements apply to all webpages on *.BeerMetalPC.com and *.FrankHelm.com.

Commitment to Privacy

This website and its operator do not collect personally identifiable information at any point or by any means. I do not collect your data, therefore I do not have access to your data, and I cannot modify or delete it.

This website does rely on and make use of other services which may collect personal data. I have made a best effort to inventory these additional services, see section Third Parties below. Any inquiries about personal data collected or held by third-party sites/services must be directed to those third parties directly.

First Party

Cookies

No cookies are collected or stored by this site or its operator.

Advertising

No advertising is served via this site. Besides, you should be running an adblocker anyway.

Google Fonts

Google Fonts are not used on this site.

Third Parties

GitHub

This site is hosted on GitHub Pages, which may collect identifiers, cookies, and website usage data. If you have specific questions about GitHub’s data collection practices, their privacy policies can be found here.

CloudFlare

This site is served from behind CloudFlare services, which may collect identifiers and usage data. Read CloudFlare’s privacy policy for more information.

Having said that, as a matter of principle I do not use CloudFlare as my domain registrar, and I only make use of CloudFlare’s free tier services. Cloudflare provides service to hate groups and has dragged their feet on deplatforming bad actors while most likely profiting from them. I urge you strongly to not give them your money and find alternatives where feasible.

Goatcounter

GoatCounter is an open source service used for site analytics. Goatcounter is configured to collect the following information, below. You can view GoatCounter’s privacy policy here.

  • Sessions: Track unique visitors for up to 8 hours; if you disable this then someone pressing e.g. F5 to reload the page will just show as 2 pageviews instead of 1
  • Referrer: Referer header and campaign parameters.
  • User-Agent: Browser and system name derived from the User-Agent header (the header itself is not stored).
  • Size: Screen size.
  • Country: Country name, for example Belgium, Indonesia, etc.
  • Language: Supported languages from Accept-Language.

You can disable GoatCounter by blocking gc.zgo.at in your adblocker or firewall.

You can view this site’s GoatCounter dashboard here. What you see on this dashboard is the same thing I see.

Embeds

This site may include embeds from other websites. As a preemptive measure, I provide here the privacy policy or most relevant policy of the services from which I have embedded content previously or anticipate doing so in the future.

  • Mastodon: As Mastodon relies on multiple instances brought together via federation, Terms of Service and Privacy Policies may vary from instance to instance. I link here to infosec.exchange’s privacy policy, as it is the instance I interact with most and am most likely to embed any posts from.
  • Threads.net: Threads Privacy Policy
  • YouTube: Privacy Enhanced Mode is utilized wherever a YouTube embed is present on this site.
  • Twitter/X: Twitter for Websites - ads info and privacy. Note that as of 2023 I no longer make use of Twitter/X and have deleted my account. I advise you to approach any policy statements by X as potentially misleading and subject to change.

All Else

You may be trackable through external links to other websites. Websites and services other than this site and their cross-site tracking methods are outside the scope of this privacy statement. You must do your own due diligence in this regard.