ATS Privacy Policy Reminder

There has recently been either some confusion and/or concern about the privacy of our members. Based on a recent inappropriate and misinformed comment by a member, and some privacy questions through our contact form, I thought it important to clarify your privacy.

ATS Privacy Policy

In short, we collected very limited information about you (on purpose) and commit never to share that information unless we receive a specific law enforcement request. (We have never received such a request.)

Your specific information is never shared with advertisers and will never be shared with advertisers.

Also, if you don't want people to harvest your email from ATS, please use the settings menu to disable the showing of your email addy publicly.

I forgot I had it enabled and recieved several emails already with people asking me to join their sites, advertisements and plain insults from people that disagree with me.

Rather stuppid of them to email me in that case considering my specific skills ...

Anyways, if your email ends up recieving mails from people that got it from ATS, its because you have it set to show publicly in your profiles settings.

Also if you don’t want people to track you down don’t add you're msn, yahoo, aim details.

It's very easy to quickly find a lot of information about someone using there screen name.

And to anyone reading this thinking of joining if you don’t want people finding out information about you, don’t use your common "online handle" especially if it's pretty original and not a lot of people will have it.

It only servers to limit the amount of matches returned on google when some one searches on it.

Try putting Burgess in to google you get 4,220,000 results. Now all the posts i've ever made anywhere on the net are in there they’re just buried under millions of pages.

Now if my name was Burgess122378634 and i'd always used that name, when some one searches it on google it's going to be easy to find information relating to that name. Granted it might not be the same person but (depending on the originality of the login) it’s a strong bet it is.

Why do you think I'm Agent Smith... LOL hahahaha...
I type my name in and I can't see ANY posts I've made! Not for pages and pages anyway!

Wow.

Goooogled my handle and got most of my posts to 'abovetopsecret.com'.

Is that bad. I do have my email disabled and no msn or yahoo info.

One thing I have been wondering about is ... some folks here have a 'script', I guess, imbedded in their signatures that returns my IP, my ISP and weather, too, I think in one case.

In another case, on the users post signature I am also informed that I am pwned.

Who else can see this information. If the user is able to run this 'script' would the person running it not be able to log who is viewing the post/thread?

What guarantee of anonymity, if any, is there?

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Those scripts are pretty harmless, they just use bounce your info back to you, it runs on your computer and the information doesn't really leave it I believe.
If someone had a script to identify the person specifically then they would be quickly banned I'm sure, and I don't think there is one that would narrow the IP address down to a specific poster anyway, I don;t really see how it could be done.

Your online name isn't really anything to worry about unless you use the same name on other forums where you divulge more details about yourself or something.
It's easy to find all posts people have made everywhere if they do this and this can be bad for some people.

That's one of the reasons I chose AgentSmith, as well as loving the Matrix films and the fact that it was the only main character that wasn't taken on here at the time, it is so common as a username and because of the films that even I havn't been able to find anything I posted by Googling it! not easily anyway.

Originally posted by AgentSmith
Why do you think I'm Agent Smith... LOL hahahaha...
I type my name in and I can't see ANY posts I've made! Not for pages and pages anyway!

Try my name ...

Its the only thing I would thank that movie for. Before it came out, you could track me down rather easily online. But now its all about that movie.

I do however have something in my profile that I cary everywhere that will give you each and every ATS post I ever made in a jiffy on google.

[Originally quoted by AgentSmith
Those scripts are pretty harmless, they just use bounce your info back to you, it runs on your computer and the information doesn't really leave it I believe.

Okay, thanks for the feedback, AgentSmith.