Legal notice
(Required by German law)
Dirk Schwieger, c/o Reprodukt, Gottschedstraße 4 / Aufgang 1, 13357 Berlin, Germany
Email: dirk [æt] peoplenotseen [dɒt] com
My public PGP key for email encryption is available here.
Fingerprint: 80F1 174C 39BE 8030 0686 02AB 47D3 091B 7C92 BE69
Ethics and Privacy
When you visit this website, I do not track you. And I won't let others.
Online privacy is no luxury, but a fundamental condition not only for the creative process, but for freedom of thought and democracy itself – so I don't take this lightly:
- There are no cookies on this site.
- There is no intrusive personal data-collecting analytics tracking.
- There are zero external scripts and no third-party fonts.
- There are no banner ads or sponsored articles.
- You are not plugged into any global surveillance network when visiting this site.
The only third-party resource I currently employ is a video hosted on Peertube. Peertube is a decentralized, open-source video streaming platform, free of any data mining and surveillance, free of any third party involvement. It is non-commercial and run by volunteers. I signed up on libre.video (hosted in Germany), and if you do not use a VPN or the Tor browser when watching the video, the admin of this instance might see your IP address.
Ghost
Your privacy matters to me, way beyond marketing babble. So instead of plugging you into Google's data mining network with a blogger.com account or signing up for the privacy nightmare of the WordPress platform, I opted for the Ghost blogging software.
Ghost is GDPR-compliant and maintained by a nonprofit foundation which pledges that no data will ever be collected, retained or analyzed. As Ghost is completely open-source, this can and has been externally audited.
For utmost transparency, the Ghost team has published a list of components that might affect your privacy that you can find here. Please note that in the case of this website, the list is even shorter as I did not implement any sharing buttons for centralized surveillance companies like Facebook or Twitter, and edited out the comments section.
Also, I use a fork of Ghost's Casper theme created by a gifted guy called angristan, who replaced the original Google fonts and added the font files and the jQuery file to the repository so that they do not make any external calls, which adds even more to the level of privacy.
Hosting
This website is hosted in Germany at Uberspace. The folks there have a reputation of taking privacy and security very seriously, which their privacy policy underlines.
When you open this website, the Uberspace webserver automatically gathers
- an anonymized version of your IP address
- time and date of your visit
- the URL that was accessed
- the referrer URL of the website you were on before opening mine
- what kind of browser you use
- possibly information about your operating system
Uberspace anonymizes your IP address using IP masking, so they do not collect any personal data.
If this is still uncomfortable for you, I recommend using the Tor Browser. It is a lot faster nowadays, and your IP address, OS, browser type and referrer will be hidden when you surf with it.
When you send me an email, I can obviously see your email address, but I don't give it to anyone or analyze it in any way. It is for you to decide whether you want to use a real or a temporary one. I won’t send you unsolicited mail either way.
Along with the domain, I purchased the email address mentioned on this website from Strato. If you send me a mail, it will land on their servers and then be redirected to my actual mail provider mailbox.org. Both are GDPR-compliant, while mailbox.org goes the extra mile for protecting customer data.
I don't archive my mails at Strato (which would apparently make them potentially accessible to external service providers from Singapore), but to be entirely sure that they don't have any access to your mails, you would have to ask them at datenschutz@strato.de.
In any case, let me know if you want me to delete something or have any further questions.
Mastodon
The only social media button you will find on this site is for my Mastodon account.
Like Peertube, Mastodon is a free, open-source social network run by volunteers. Both are part of the larger so-called “Fediverse,” a network of federated services that can communicate with each other. But while Peertube is a video platform, Mastodon is for microblogging. Think Twitter, but with hard-wired anti-abuse tools and without Nazis, surveillance, censorhip or algorithms that try to keep you engaged by delivering distorted information.
So there's no tracking, cookies or anything of that sort on there, either. It's a nice crowd, too. If you decide to give it a try one day, don‘t forget to say hi.