At OK Topic, your privacy is very important to us. Because of the value of information these days, we feel it’s important to disclose how we collect, and use your personal data, as well as who we share your data with.

Let’s get serious for a minute. Your data is your most valuable asset on The Internet. That’s no joke, companies would pay a full quarter’s worth of profits just so they can successfully market expensive products to you with higher success.

We want to protect your data. Why? Because your data is important. We also believe that your data is not ours to keep. Not forever anyway. All that said, we’d like to tell you what we collect, how we collect it, and who we share it with. Read on, because this stuff is important.

Click here for the super short version of our privacy policy. – This is not the legal version, but should suffice for those who prefer to wing it. You’re bound to the privacy policy on this page (https://www.oktopic.com/privacy), not the shorter version on this page (https://www.oktopic.com/privacy-short).

Data Collection & Usage

Your IP address. We need this. Every website needs it. Without this wonderful number, our website wouldn’t know where to send our awesome articles to. Your IP address is very unique (sometimes). This can be used to identify your location, Internet Service Provider (ISP), and quite possibly some of your online activity (you can thank Wiki websites and sites that publish their statistics in plain sight). When you visit a website, you voluntarily give your IP address to the website you’re visiting. It’s impossible to prevent this (unless you’re on a VPN or proxy, which is fine, and actually a great idea). You shouldn’t feel threatened by reputable websites who have this number. Just stay away from the bad ones.

Your user agent. We might not need this, but it’s helpful for making our website better. A user agent is a string of text that identifies what browser you’re using, and which operating system you’re running. This makes it possible for our website to change shape based on your system’s specifications. It’s nice to make our website fit in your browser, and user agents help us accomplish just that. We actually don’t look at your user agent ourselves, but it is stored in server logs. These logs are purged frequently. We don’t actively monitor user agents, nor do we have an interest to do so. Our website is tested with various user agents to make sure our website fits just right in each browser that finds our website, so we don’t actually collect this information intentionally. Your browser just sends it to us. If you’d like to spoof your user agent, you’re welcome to do so! Just make sure the website looks nice, or we’ll be very sad.

Your comments on the website. We love these! On our website, within every single article we write, we make available a comment form. Here, you’re able to talk to us, which is great! We want to hear from our readers. We however must ask that you only provide information you’re not afraid to make public. Anyway, we collect comments, you know what they’re for, and we’ll leave it at that.

Cookie data. OMG, we don’t use cookies! Cookie-Checker will vouch for us on that one. We have no plans on ever putting these tasty treats on your computers. We’re sorry, no cookies for you. Ever. We’ll stop now, sorry (please read the Future Changes to The Privacy Policy section because we will be using Google Adsense in the future, which does use cookies).

Anything else? Nope. Why would we need more?

Who We Share Your Data With

Google. Well, not directly. Google collects this information through code we’ve embedded within our website. We use Google Analytics (a tracking script) to capture traffic patterns. We need the insights Google Analytics provides to us to tell us how we’re doing. We don’t use this information for monetizing traffic. Although we do plan on using Google ads in the future, the two will be completely separate and never referenced side by side. We like to know where our visitors are coming from, and if we should translate our pages for readers of a different language. Google will have access to this information, but nothing they don’t already know (we think so anyway).

Our Crew. Not all your data, but some. Your comments are shared with our entire team so we can respond to them. Your IP address is shared with our system admins (and our super duper firewall) to block all you evil doers out there! The traffic insights we gain from Google Analytics are only read by one person currently, but may be read by several people in the future to make our website better. We promise to only use your information for good, and that anyone who has such access will be bound to a non-disclosure agreement, and an oath to protect any data they hold.

Future Changes to The Privacy Policy

We plan on setting up advertisements on the website at some point. Right now, there are none. When we put advertisements up, we will maintain the highest level of privacy for all of our visitors, similar to what we have up now. We’ll publish a website notice before we decide to make such changes.

We’re planning on going through with this route when we have about 10~15 articles. Our ad provider will be Google. We will make sure to get things right from the start.