WMAC Website Privacy Policy

Last revised 3 April 2018

The following is the Privacy Policy of runwmac.com, the website of the Western Mass Athletic Club (WMAC) and of the Grand Tree Trail Race Series. Although the general intent of this policy is not likely to change, details may as software evolves, therefore the policy may be revised in the future.

In brief, the policy is to minimize collection of user data and to prevent its use (or misuse) by outside entities, to the extent reasonably practical and within the level of knowledge of the webmaster. WMAC is a nonprofit organization that exists for the benefit of the community, and is not in the business of monetizing user data. There are no paid advertisements on the website, nor social media buttons, or web beacons loaded from third parties, which in effect track your browsing to profile you for advertisers. WMAC does not sell or distribute contact information of our members or those who register to use the Message Board, although on occasion WMAC may email membership about club business or matters considered important enough to the community to warrant a mailing.

The primary risk to your privacy is in registering to use the Message Board:

1. Any information you volunteer to add to your user profile is visible to others who have registered;
2. If an attacker gains administrative access to the database, your password could be exposed.

Therefore,

• do not put more information into your profile than you want to share,
• DO NOT USE THE SAME PASSWORD for the Message Board as you use for, say, banking or websites that have access to your credit card information.

Users younger than 13 years old must have parental permission to register to use the Message Board.

Details less likely to be worth your time to read follow.

This website uses phpBB forum software and (soon) the Grav CMS web platform. Both are open source, and as deployed appear not to link to third parties for fonts or api services that could track your browsing, with the exception of Google captchas that have you identify objects in images to prove that you are a human. The Message Board excludes bots by asking you questions instead, and the Grav captcha would only appear if needed for some atypical function.

Resources downloaded in the background by third party links may be present inadvertently or introduced by future phpBB, Grav, or website updates. If the website asks your browser to request, for example, a Google font, Google may identify you (or the person usually using that computer) personally by a combination of IP address, unique device identifier, browser fingerprinting, and previously acquired browsing history, in order to add the factoids of your visits to runwmac.com to its profile of you. For this reason, Message Board avatars images that you may select from the gallery are local to the server, and users are not allowed to link their avatar images from third parties (but may upload their own avatar images). You may use privacy protecting browser plug-ins for some protection. Your ISP likely also profiles your browsing, which you can avoid by using a VPN service or by other means. The Electronic Freedom Foundation provides information and resources for those concerned by internet privacy issues.

The website may place session or website preference cookies on your browser, but not tracking cookies. These improve operation of the website or enable maintaining a log-in to the Message Board. phpBB3 provides a WMAC - Privacy Policy page, which adds privacy policy information generic to use of phpBB software. phpBB includes optional VigLink software as a way to raise money for the phpBB project or the website from users buying products as a result of page content. It is not relevant to us and is not enabled.

The website is hosted at Pair Networks, Inc. and served over https by default. The server, and the database if you use the Message Board, log your IP address. The log files are available to Pair (primarily to troubleshoot problems and defend against hacking), the webmaster (primarily to identify and remove spammers from the Message Board), and if served with a warrant, to law enforcement.

If you find privacy or security problems with the website or errors in the above statements, please contact the webmaster.