Privacy

We are acutely aware that you have chosen to trust Skeptive, and that we have the responsibility to protect your privacy. Truth be told, we are pretty gung-ho about privacy around here, and we don't want people collecting information about us, either. We are also all Skeptive users, so when we say that we are serious about protecting user privacy, we mean it. We won't collect any information about you that we wouldn't want collected about ourselves.

All information is voluntary. We require no information from you, beyond the email address when you sign up. Any other information is yours to give or withhold, as you see fit, and if you don't feel like answering a dispute anywhere on the website, feel free to ignore it. The disputes are there for you — the more information you give us about your preferences and beliefs, the better we will be at making sure that we are giving you customized, accurate, relevant, and up-to-date information. But if you don't feel like telling us your age, or whether you trust Elvis Presley as an information source, then by all means don't. The only thing that happens when you decline to give us information is that our predictions for your beliefs are less accurate. In other words, if you don't tell us much about who you are and what you believe, then our computers will just assume that you're an average joe.

We will not look at your information. No human at Skeptive will ever look at your personal information. The computers use information that you provide to provide you with better service. But no human being will ever see any information you give us.

We will not disclose your information. We will never sell, give, loan, or share your personal information with an outside party for any reason, commercial or otherwise. That means nobody sees your personal information, ever, for any reason. The one exception to this is when we are required by law to do so. If the government asks to see your personal information, we will use every legal means to prevent it, but when faced with a court order there's not much we can do. From time to time, we may release to select parties aggregate information about our user base, but it will be aggregated and anonymized, so there will be no way to determine any information about any individual user.

All personal information remains under your direct control. If at any point, you would like to delete your personal information, you are free to do so. We will not retain a copy if you choose to delete your information.

We tell you what information we save. We let you know what information we save, why we save it, and how we use it to improve your experience. If you choose to submit it to us, we currently save the following information (all of which is voluntary):

User demographic information. This is the survey about who you are and where you live. We save this information because, believe it or not, it is useful in predicting what sources you trust. For example, you’re more likely to trust your local paper than the local paper of another town. If you don't want us to have this information, feel free not to send it to us. If you already sent it to us, and you’d like us to delete it, click here.

User assessments of source reliability. This is your rating of various sources on the internet. We save this information because when two sources disagree, we want to make sure that we are weighing most heavily those sources that you trust the most. Source reliability is the basic underlying data that we use to predict what sources you (and other people like you) trust. If you don't want us to have this information, feel free not to send it to us. If you have already sent it to us, and you’d like to delete it, simply go to your "my trusted sources" page and delete those ratings that you don't want us to have.

User rating requests. This is the list of websites for which your skeptive toolbar has requested a rating most recently. We save this information on a temporary basis so that we can optimize your user experience (for instance, speeding up the process by pre-loading data on sites you visit frequently), and the experience of other users (for instance, doing more analysis on the sites that our users tend to visit more often). Again, no human will ever look at your data, but if for any reason you would like us to delete your personal rating request history, click [here]. In any event, under no circumstances, do we retain this information for more than six months.

Knowledge structure data. This is the information that you submit when you edit a dispute, or when you add support for a particular viewpoint. This information is public (i.e. it is visible in the history section of each dispute), and we publish who submitted the information. We publish and retain this information, because changes made to the knowledge structure affect all users, and we think that users act more responsibly in submitting such data when their submissions are public. Wikipedia does the same thing.

Again, we are serious about protecting your privacy. If you have concerns about our privacy policy, or ideas about how to make it stronger, please do let us know.