We acknowledge that everyone has a right to privacy. Because many Internet users have become justifiably sensitive about what personal information they provide to online services, we have formulated the following policy regarding the privacy of our readers.

Here are the things we promise:

We will tell you why we want the information we ask for.

• The information you provide when you subscribe, especially your name and email address, are needed to distribute DargonZine, and also give us a rough idea of how many people read the magazine.
• The Reader Profile, which solicits demographic information, is intended to give us an idea about who our readers are, and what kind of readers we appeal to.
• The Reader Questionnaire is intended to solicit your opinion about what makes for good reading, and how we're doing in fulfilling your needs. We often use this to set the future direction of the project.

 

We will only ask for information which is necessary for those purposes.

• Ultimately, you don't need to provide any information to us in order to read DargonZine -- you can read issues for free via the Web or FTP or our RSS feed with complete anonymity. While we encourage readers to subscribe, subscriptions are entirely voluntary. And the only information we require subscribers to provide is their full name and email address. If you want, you can also tell us how you heard of us, but that's optional.
• While the Reader Profile solicits a lot of demographic information about you, it is entirely voluntary. Furthermore, it is also completely anonymous. There is no way for us to identify who or where a set of responses came from, and there is no attempt made to do so.
• Similarly, the Reader Questionnaire is voluntary, and your responses are purposely and aggressively kept anonymous. There is no attempt made to correlate responses with a particular person.

 

We will not use the information you give us for other purposes.

• The information you provide when you subscribe, especially your name and email address, will only be used for the distribution of DargonZine and material related to the magazine. They will not be used for any other purposes other than conducting DargonZine's normal business, nor will they be made available to other organizations at any price. Even if you ask us to.
• Responses to the Reader Profile are added up and summarized -- nowhere does one person's responses appear on the Web site.
• Recent responses to textual questions in the Reader Questionnaire do appear on the Web site, but are not (and cannot be) attributed to specific people.

 

We will take reasonable precautions so that others cannot make use of the information you give us.

• Online access to our subscriber list is only allowed through the Subscriptions page, which requires the user to provide a unique substring of their email address. We think we have made it difficult enough so that trying to extract our distribution list by trial and error is more effort than it's worth.
• Because Reader Profile and Reader Questionnaire responses are not kept on a publicly-accessible machine, it is impossible for anyone to obtain any more information than is printed on the respective response summary pages.

We hope this gives you an idea of how we feel about our readers' privacy, and gives you the confidence and willingness to share your opinions with us so that we can make DargonZine as successful a project as we can for our readers as well as our contributing writers.