FLAAR Privacy Statement

Your privacy is important to us, after all, we too are netizens.

You do not have to give us personal information to visit our site.

First, we do not obtain, nor seek to wring out of our web servers, any information about your personal name, address, or your e-mail address. Why? Because we are busy doing evaluations of equipment so have other things to occupy our entire staff.

Besides, we figure that most readers are students, just curious, or industry people wanting to know what we say about our products. So there is no incentive to even attempt to figure out who all these people are (besides, there are over a million people a year who read FLAAR web sites. We could not possibly handle keeping track of all them even if we wanted to.

You will note that we never ask for anyone’s Social Security number. We never ask for any credit card number. Sure is nice not to have to sell anything on a web site.

General

Since FLAAR has its offices at Universidad Francisco Marroquin in Guatemala (a residue of doing large-format photography of Mayan art and archaeology at the university museum of Mayan antiquities, Museo Popol Vuh) its kind of not realistic for FLAAR staff itself to telephone you international long distance to follow up.

Another of our offices is in Germany (a residue of receiving a PhD in art history from Karl-Franzens-Universitaet, Graz, Austria and then meeting an attractive female German law student who happened also to like Mayan archaeology). Again, rather impractical for us to telephone personally from Cologne to follow up.

Fortunately our main office is in Ohio (Bowling Green State University) (a residue of having been born in nearby Detroit). However our staff at BGSU is working with the printers, scanners, RIPs, laser printers, and all the other hardware and software. Plus, neither FLAAR nor the university has the budget to telephone the thousands of people who reads our reports (www.wide-format-printers.org, in a single month, gets over a million hits from over 15,000 individual readers).

So we go to all the tradeshows to check out which company is the best in RIPs, so they can provide follow-up. We have attended Seybold San Francisco (three years), Photokina (twice), DRUPA, PhotoExpo East, DPI, B.I.G., BigPicture Show, IMI, SGIA, ISA. We got so many readers from India we went to the sign tradeshow in Mumbai to find a capable partner in that part of the world to assist in handling the inquiries only from that part of the world. Same with our other sponsors: whether in Germany or Georgia, we only accept partnership with companies who share our role to serve as a source of information, the class of information you would expect from a university as a public service.

As an example: When you check off that you seek help on laminators: first FLAAR itself personally sends you our own laminator report. But we do not have the staff to explain all the differences between hot and cold lamination, between laminators that can also mount vs those that can’t. So we found a lamination company that has a program of public information (LEDCO, who are neighbors in Cleveland, Ohio). Thus after we have sent you our own FLAAR report, we forward your e-mail to LEDCO to ask them if they can please follow-up on how a laminator can help you in your own business. If you are located in Oregon instead of Ohio, they may in turn ask a dealer in Oregon to provide local assistance.

Cookies

"Cookies" are small utility software tools that many Web sites employ. A cookie contains information that a site may use to track the pages you've visited. However, the only personal information a cookie can contain is information you supply yourself. A cookie can't read data about you or your company or read cookie files created by other sites; a cookie can only be read by the Web site that served the cookie to you. FLAAR itself does not program cookies (again, we work with digital imaging, not software programming). But our impression is that nowadays all web sites and all web servers work with cookies.

FLAAR itself does not overtly uses cookies directly because we do not have any software programmers on our staff. Besides, we have 12 web sites using at least five different servers on three continents read by over a million people a year (we get over a million hits a month on just a single web site). We have no earthly idea of how any of the servers handle cookies. To us they are just remove computer servers making it possible for FLAAR to provide information to readers in 42 countries in three languages.

I first freaked out when I initially heard about cookies. Then I found that it was awkward to surf if you turned them off. The use of cookies is an industry standard, and many major web sites use them to provide useful features for their customers. When I do my own surfing on other sites I just ignore them. I realized it would be a sad day when your life is such that internet cookies are a matter of immediate concern. In any event, FLAAR does not have any manner of prying into your intimate life’s secrets. Besides, that’s not our mission in life.

Site Management Web Visit Logs

For site management the webmaster assesses what pages are of most and least interest, determining technical design specifications, and identifying system performance or problem areas. Site management is employed by the server, but by FLAAR. This server includes the pages visited on the site, the date and time of the visit, the internet address of the referring site, the domain name and IP address from which the access occurred, the version of browser used, the capabilities of the browser, and search terms used on our search engines. FLAAR makes no attempt to identify individual visitors from this information. None of this involves seeking your personal information in the sense of your name, your e-mail address, or even your spending habits (another advantage of not selling anything). We make absolutely no effort to identify people’s e-mail nor any personal identifying characteristics of people who visit our site (don’t have the time or funding and would not have enough staff to handle the resulting data anyway). You are welcome on all FLAAR sites even if you never buy anything.

Electronic Newsletters

FLAAR will eventually offer free electronic newsletters that are dispatched by e-mail. FLAAR would send the newsletter based on the e-mail addresses of individuals who voluntarily fill out any inquiry-dialog, download, or survey form.

Surveys

The way you yourself can most improve the features, options, and mechanics of digital imaging hardware is to let FLAAR know your “ideal future equipment,” sort of your wish list. Thus FLAAR conducts user surveys to better target our content to our audience or for the benefit of third parties with whom we have partnerships. Accordingly, the aggregate survey results are shared with our sponsors and partners. We never share any survey information about specific individuals with any third party. Keep in mind that in a survey, the name or e-mail address of an individual is not needed whatsoever. Statistics only seek to understand whether x% percent of anonymous users prefer dye ink or pigmented ink, whether you prefer a 24” printer or a 60” printer, etc. Indeed this is how you can assist the overall educational program of our web sites, by indicating what features of printers cause problems, by identifying what mechanical glitches you want to avoid, and by suggesting what features an end user really needs in a printer, RIP, inkjet paper, ink, or laminator.

Letters to the Editor and Inquiry-Survey Forms

Visitors to FLAAR web sites may send a letter to the editor, an inquiry, or otherwise contact FLAAR staff or editor(s). These communications result in your receiving a benefit, namely the answer and/or the FLAAR Reports. All communications you write to obtain these benefits become the property of FLAAR. In some instances (about 2% of incoming e-mail´s) your observations may be more useful to other readers than our own in-house results. In such a case, what you say may be edited for length and/or clarity and may be published or republished in any format or medium and/or licensed to others for publication. If we publish your letter or e-mail, so as to maintain your privacy, we will not attribute comments to you by name unless you expressly request that your name be included. If you do not wish to have excepts your letter or e-mail published in an actual-factual review, please notify us by fax, (419) 372 8283 (keeping in mind we rarely publish your e-mail in-toto unless it is part of our “actual-factual” survey. In order to deliver better services, we also perform statistical analysis to establish priorities and allocate resources.

E-mail this Page to a Friend

Many of the pages of our Web site include a feature that permits users to electronically forward that page to someone else by clicking on a link. The sender provides his or her e-mail address, as well as that of the recipient. The sender's information is to let the recipient know who sent the page and as an aid to FLAAR to know who might also wish updates via our upcoming newsletter service. The friend and the sender may contact FLAAR with an e-mail to FLAARtest@aol.com to request the removal of this information from our database.

Partners

There is no realistic manner that FLAAR can exercise hourly control over partners other than common-sense selection of ethical partners to begin with. We deal only with partners who are recognized and long established in the field of digital imaging. If any company is not treating you properly FLAAR wishes to know. Sometimes it’s just a new employee at that company that needs to learn that the purpose is digital imaging tips, help, and assistance. FLAAR selects it’s partners by checking them out at tradeshow booths. In most cases we subsequently visit their company headquarters to make sure they have the proper technical experience. Most importantly, we wish to be sure they realize the educational and informational nature of the FLAAR system.

Self-Destruct future information reports
If you wish to be totally expunged from our records at FLAAR, we will do our best to delete you totally. Please send an e-mail to FLAARtest@aol.com asking to be removed and asking that no further information by FLAAR be sent to you.

Most recent updated April 16, 2004, First posted, october 2002, last updated, August 2003