Forging The Future — The Best of Our Blog 2/5/12 — 3:52 EST

Privacy & Security

We are currently developing formal privacy & document retention/destruction policies. Until they have been officially adopted and indicate otherwise, assume that any contacts online or offline with The IEUC are matters of public record that might be shared, disclosed, or used in any manner for any purpose. This notice is effective with this release of our website and supersedes any prior statements regarding privacy with respect to any contacts with the Institute from June 1st, 2010 onward, until such time as a newer version of this policy supersedes it with respect to subsequent contacts from that point onward.

We hold no Personally Identifying Information in digital form on any residents of Massachusetts.

Third Parties hosting our website and email infrastructure, contracting with such provider(s), or (in the case of Google) providing us with website analytics, may have digital and/or physical access to records related to your visit or email to us over which we have no control and which must accordingly be excluded from any privacy guarantees we may directly offer.

In any case, we will release any material that we are compelled to disclose by force of law and we reserve the right to comply with any information requests made by government or law enforcement authorities.

201 CMR 17.00: M.G.L. c. 93H Exempt

The Institute for End User Computing, Inc., is not subject to Massachusetts's Data Privacy Law 201 CMR 17.00: STANDARDS FOR THE PROTECTION OF PERSONAL INFORMATION OF RESIDENTS OF THE COMMONWEALTH because it does not own or license personal information about any residents of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts as defined in the statute. Any such information coming into our possession will be destroyed as quickly as practicable, so if you are a resident of Massachusetts we ask that you do not disclose any Personal Information to us.

FEDERAL TRADE COMMISSION —16 CFR Part 255 Disclosures

The following disclaimer is required under the FTC's Guidelines Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising via Section 5 of the FTC Act (15 U.S.C. 45):

§ 255.0 Purpose and definitions. Our site may contain "badges" and/or links to some of the software used in its development. We are not "endorsing" them for use by any other individual or organization.

§ 255.1 General considerations. All comments with respect to products/services mentioned on our pages represent the honest opinions, findings, beliefs, or experience of each page's respective author and are factually truthful to the best of his or her knowledge and have not be solicited with any financial renumeration.

255.2 Consumer endorsements. The vast majority of items mentioned here, particularly our many literature references, are items we have individually purchased for collection in our personal libraries making us actual consumers of the technical literature (the same applies to the software items mentioned although, most of them are free open source projects). Any polls or surveys on our site are totally unscientific unless presented as being otherwise. No claims have been validated by any objective measure.

§ 255.3 Expert Endorsements. The Institute is composed of many volunteers with extremely high levels of individual technological expertise, however, our volunteers are generally not typical End Users so their experiences with and reactions to any technologies mentioned here will not necessarily bear any resemblance to those of a typical consumer or purchaser. Thus no pointers to items characterized as being useful to them or of general utility should be taken as expert endorsements for your use of them.

§ 255.4 Endorsements by organizations. Likewise, as an organization we have not undertaken to formally pool the expertise of our officers, directors, staff, and volunteers to ground any pointers to external work in a scientific vetting process. Accordingly you are on notice that anything mentioned in these pages is not being endorsed for purchase by our organization and that it is instead being pointed out by the author of the page(s) on which it is mentioned for informational purposes only.

§ 255.5 Disclosure of material connections. All Officers and Directors of The IEUC are required to disclose any direct conflicts of interest with those of The IEUC, however we have not undertaken a complete forensic accounting audit of all of all of their investments, nor of those of all volunteers contributing to our website, making it impossible for use to determine whether they might indirectly benefit from positions taken by the organization or from any attendent publicity generated by mention of any product, program, publication, standard, project, group, or individual mentioned in on our website. You should accordingly assume that anything mentioned or linked to from our pages may have been received for free in the mail, at a trade show, or as part of a beta testing program and that the page author may be a friend or colleague of the item's author/developer or a spouse/significant other thereof. Eastgate System's Tinderbox by Mark Bernstein was one of the programs used in generating our site. Mark was one of our Found Directors and now serves on our Volunteer Advisory Board. Our webmaster is a Beta Tester for Tinderbox and purchases an annual update license with his own funds. We also make use a number of free Google services. Any conferences or events discussed herein may been trade shows, lab tours, or academic/industry "open house" events with free food, t-shirts, or other minor swag intended to garner corporate publicity or have been attended with directly or indirectly vendor-sponsored free "Expo Only" passes, complimentary passes, or discounted "academic" rates (which are often sponsored by an academic unit and its corporate patrons). Some books cited may have been review copies or trade show give aways by their authors, publishers, or unrelated vendors or free books given to us by friends or as discarded items & book sale leftovers by public libraries.

Final Thoughts. The above should be painfully obvious common sense, but 16 CFR Part 255 is so broadly written and vaguely defined that we couldn't risk anything short of our best legalese to protect ourselves. Always remember that it is incumbent on the reader to investigate any potential purchases or service usages on his or her own and to asume that items mentioned may have come into the possession of potential reviewers here free of charge or have been brought to our attention in attempt to garner testimonials (which in most cases they are fully worthy of on their substantive merits since we wouldn't waste the space and risk our credibility by telling you about them if they weren't any good).

Green Advertising Disclaimer

Our web hosting provider has been promoting its efforts to power its server farms with renewable energy. Since we have no ability to independently validate these claims, we explicitly disclaim any endorsement of its Green advertising campaign. This is not to suggest that we have any cause to doubt the validity of those efforts, merely to insure that we can not be held liable under Federal or State Law in the unlikely event that those claims might not stand up to objective scientific scrutiny.

Advice for Disabled Visitors

We make limited use of Javascript to enhance our pages in an unobtrusive manner leaving them fully accessible if Javascript is turned off. (Eg., If Javascript is able to set a cookie, it will be used to play the audio greeting ,"Welcome to the Institute for End User Computing", the first time you visit one of our pages.)

Most of our PDF downloads should be accessible to disabled visitors, except for those that were generated from scans of physical documents, in which case they may have to ask a friend to read for them or employ whatever assistive technology they current use when dealing with hard copy.

Unfortunately, we don't currently have the resources to create fully accessible digital versions of all of these documents. So if you have trouble accessing any of our files, please let us know so we can give priority attention to converting them.

Federal Tax Status

The Institute for End User Computing, Inc. is a 501(c)(3) exempt organization that was classified as a Public Charity at the end of its advanced ruling period.

Other States :

Other states either do not require any registration at all, have similar registration thresholds, or are jurisdictions into which the IEUC is not directing any solicitations. Naturally, we will register in these jurisdictions before making any direct solicitation of support from their residents or upon our receipt of a level of unsolicited support from their residents that rises to a threshold requiring such registration.

Registration with any of these state agencies does not imply endorsement, approval or recommendation by any state.

Nondiscrimination Policy

Our Nondiscrimination Policy is very simple: As a general matter, The Institute will not discriminate on the basis of age, gender, sexual orientation, political affiliation, choice of computing platform, disability, race, ethnicity, or national origin.

We reserve the right to request ID from anyone attending or participating in Institute Programs so we can maintain a record of who is being served by our organization. This information may also be used to contact New York State residents as potential donors.

It should be noted that the IEUC can not provide verification of hours worked in fulfillment of any court ordered community service.

All Institute programs will be conducted in English and any non-English speakers will be expected to bring along a friend to translate for them since we lack the resources to assist in this regard.

Program size may be limited. Some programs may be restricted to members of defined benefit groups, such as programs for young adults or seniors.

Short courses, mentorships, and similar educational offerings may have formal pre-requisites and/or admissions procedures. Participants in such programs may be dropped from them if they fail to satisfactorily complete assigned readings and tasks.

Courtesy titles will be accorded to qualified volunteers in recognition of their service and may be withdrawn in the absence of ongoing active participation.

We further reserve the right to eject anyone from participating in IEUC activities if they are disruptive, represent a threat to program staff or other participants, or are believed to be engaged in a criminal activity such as computer hacking.

License Terms — Conditions Under Which You May Copy This Page

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License that permits you to copy content on this page with attribution to The Institute provided that you are not using it to create a derivative work or obtain a profit. If you are not sure what these terms mean, please consult your legal counsel. For other uses, please contact our licensing office.

Unless otherwise noted, the individual authors of materials incorporated in these pages have only granted us non-exclusive use rights to their work and can therefore grant reproduction rights to third parties as individuals independently of any action by The IEUC. In such cases the IEUC Logo, navigational apparatus, and other trade dress should be removed and only the granting author's words and content can be reproduced.

Since our site is subject to periodic reorganization and editing, if you wish to reference this page in a scholarly publication, you should print it out now or save a copy of it on your computer.

Trademarks

The name, The Institute for End User Computing, and our logo featured in the Masthead and print preview of this page are trademarks™ of The Institute for End User Computing, Inc. and should be identified as such if used elsewhere. The names of some affiliated projects and third party technologies discussed on these pages may also be subject to trademark protection as will be acknowledged where they occur. Unless otherwise noted, The IEUC does not control these third party marks, is using them under Fair Use, or has only been granted a use right to them by their respective owners.