Site Policies
This page describes all site policies: those pertaining to comments, disclosures and advertising, privacy, and reuse.
Comments
Comments are moderated, edited, and deleted at the discretion of the administrator. Relevant and polite comments are welcome. Unfortunately not all comments received can be so described. Hence, this comments policy.
With a nod to the broken windows theory, inappropriate content will be removed from this site as it will otherwise encourage more. Therefore, comments will be edited or removed for reasons including, but not limited to, the following: The comment includes
- Rude, vulgar, ad hominem, or otherwise irrelevant content,
- Links to other sites with objectionable content,
- Links to other sites having nothing whatsoever to do with the post on which the comment appears,
- Spam.
A comment may also be removed independent of its content is if it is submitted by an individual who is known to be a nuisance on another site or has become one here. If removal or deletion of a comment occurs it will be done so without warning or explanation. Inquiries about this comments policy or about modified or removed comments will not be entertained. (See also How to Lose an Argument Online, by Seth Godin.)
Disclosures and Advertising
Disclosures. Most things reviewed, endorsed, or suggested on this blog are either free to everyone or purchased by the reviewer at the normal market price. On the rare occasion a gifted or complementary product is reviewed that fact will be disclosed explicitly in the review, as mandated by the FTC.
Advertising. In general this blog does not accept paid advertising. However, the site does post automatically generated ads made available by Google’s AdSense program based on keywords that appear on the site. As such, they can’t influence content (causality runs the other way). Payment from Google to Austin Frakt (blog administrator) occurs only if someone actually finds them useful or interesting enough to click on.
Also, Austin Frakt is registered with the Amazon.com Associates program. Products reviewed (mostly books) may include links to Amazon.com tagged with his Amazon.com Associates tracking ID. Austin Frakt is paid 4% of the purchase price each time a reader clicks through such a link to the Amazon.com product and purchases it. This pay-per-click (and purchase) arrangement does not influence blog content. Books reviews with Amazon.com links would be provided anyway. Moreover, payment is triggered by the activity of users, not by Amazon.com.
The revenue generated by Amazon.com Associates links and Google ads is tiny. If viewed as a wage for time spent administering and writing for this site it would be pennies per hour. Every cent of revenue above operating cost (which is tiny) is given to charity.
Privacy
The privacy of visitors to The Incidental Economist is important. Here is information on what types of personal information is received or collected when you use or visit the site and how the information is safeguarded. Your information is never sold to third parties.
E-Mail Addresses. The WordPress blog software used requires an e-mail address when you add a comment to a blog post. It does not have to be a real e-mail address unless you want to use the “notify me of followup comments via e-mail” feature. Please use anon@example.com if you don’t want to enter your real e-mail address. Whether you enter your real e-mail address or not, it will not be published. Your e-mail address will not be used for marketing and it will not be disclosed to any third party unless required by law.
When you subscribe to blog updates by e-mail using the service provided by Feedburner, or when you contact The Incidental Economist using the contact form, site administrators can see your e-mail address. It will not be used for marketing and will not be disclosed to any third party unless required by law.
Web Analytics Data. As with most other web sites, The Incidental Economist site collects and uses data from third-party web analytics services. The information provided by the web analytics services includes your IP address, your ISP (Internet Service Provider, such as Verizon or Cox Cable), the browser you used to visit the site (such as Internet Explorer or Firefox), the time you visited the site and which pages you visited throughout the site. This is not personally identifiable information.
Cookies and Web Beacons. The site uses cookies to store information, such as your personal preferences when you visit the site. This could include remembering the information you entered last time when you add a new comment.
This site also uses third-party advertising companies to serve ads when you visit. These companies may use information (not including your name, address, email address, or telephone number) about your visits to this and other websites in order to provide advertisements about goods and services of interest to you. This is generally used for geo-targeting purposes (showing New York real estate ads to someone in New York, for example) or showing certain ads based on specific sites visited (such as showing cooking ads to someone who frequents cooking sites).
Google, as a third party vendor, uses cookies to serve ads on this site. Google’s use of the DART cookie enables it to serve ads to you based on your visit to this site and other sites on the Internet. You may opt out of the use of the DART cookie by visiting Google’s privacy center.
You can choose to disable or selectively turn off cookies from this site or third-party cookies in your browser settings, or by managing preferences in programs such as Norton Internet Security.
Reuse
Original material on this site is licenced under a Creative Commons license. Anyone may reuse portions–a few paragraphs and not the entirety–of posts that appear on this site provided they (1) do not alter the material quoted and (2) attribute the use by hyper-linking to the URL on this site where it originally appeared (for online reuse) or printing the blog’s name, “The Incidental Economist,” (for print reuse) and (in either online or print reuse) mentioning the author’s name (Austin Frakt or the named guest author). Permission for use in any other manner must be obtained from Austin Frakt prior to use.
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