Who We Are
Our website address is: https://www.scuderiaquantistica.com
What The Expletive Is This Page?
We’re a website for a fictional motor racing organisation. Seriously, that’s who we are. And WordPress, bless ’em, put this page into our site in order to comply with the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation which came into force in May 2018. (No, I’m not being sarcastic there; WordPress is just trying to lighten yet another load of red tape that has been dumped on people’s collective head.)
Have you read it? 88 pages of sanctimonious verbiage which never quite gets to the point but babbles on endlessly about how righteous and virtuous the EC is. I guano you not, if you can make it to page 10 without gouging your eyes out or expiring from boredom, you will find this as one random example:
Personal data which are, by their nature, particularly sensitive in relation to fundamental rights and freedoms merit specific protection as the context of their processing could create significant risks to the fundamental rights and freedoms. Those personal data should include personal data revealing racial or ethnic origin, whereby the use of the term ‘racial origin’ in this Regulation does not imply an acceptance by the Union of theories which attempt to determine the existence of separate human races.
Oh, perish the thought. For verily I know that thou art most righteous.
The average person has a working life of maybe 40, 45 years. They have that much time to imagine possibilities and implement them. To create new ideas and things which can drive mankind forward.
And spending hour upon hour upon hour wading through self-righteous dross like this Does. Not. Help.
What, specifically, is this item (item 51, if you can be bothered) asking for?
And lest you think that I’m cherry picking, the whole sodding document is like this. As for the writing, oh, the writing…
When I’m trying to teach Italians to speak English, I often say “If you have more than two commas in a sentence then you probably have too many”. There are of course exceptions to that (like sentences which contain lists), and there’s no denying that commas can be useful to break up a sentence. But when, they cause, the reader, to have to pause, after every few words… you get the idea. Item 59:
Modalities should be provided for facilitating the exercise of the data subject’s rights under this Regulation, including mechanisms to request and, if applicable, obtain, free of charge, in particular, access to and rectification or erasure of personal data and the exercise of the right to object.
Oh, lord…
I can’t imagine why Euro-sceptics speak of the Bureaucracy Of Brussels as one of the reasons for their scepticism. But bureaucrats being bureaucrats, the only way they can ensure their livelihood is through more regulation. The wordier, the better since that enhances the justification for their positions. Let us be honest, being a member of the European parliament is one of the more lucrative sinecures in the world.
However every so often they indulge in transparent PR exercises like this to try to show themselves to be “the good guys”. Look at bad American Facebook! We are protecting you from it!
I despise Faceplant and I’ve no time for Zuckerberg but the reality is that:
- Faceplant has no more data on people than they themselves give it;
- The concept of “if something is free, then YOU are the product” really isn’t hard to get one’s head around;
- The only way that “fake news” became a thing is that people took faceplant seriously as a news source.
For frick’s sake, faceplant prioritises what you get to see based on how much people pay for it. What you want to see is immaterial; it will filter out the posts from people or organisations that you follow and show you what it THINKS you want to see and/or who has paid the most for their promotion. Was this not a clue?
Yes, we need to have privacy protection provisions. We need them laid out as clear, unambiguous regulations in point form, ideally in under 10 pages. We do not need pontificating, philosophical, time-wasting navel gazing on the nature of humanity.
I’ll leave the rest of the content that WordPress kindly provided, but here’s this site’s data policy in a nutshell. Variations to the WordPress terms appear in
What information do we want about you? None. If you leave a comment, that’s up to you. Once you’ve left a comment, it’s on a public page. Guess what? Any company like Cambridge Analytica can see that page. They can harvest the data. It’s your choice whether you want to leave the comment. The power is in your hands. If you’re smart enough to follow Scuderia Quantistica, you will already know this. However I mention it for any Archer BMR fans who may have snuck in here.
Who do we share your data with? By choice, nobody. It’s on the servers which host this site. Can I guarantee that they won’t harvest it? No, but if they were caught doing so I expect that they’d have a “Going Out Of Business” sale shortly afterwards so it’s odds on that they won’t. But me? I don’t sell it and I don’t share it.
What personal data we collect and why we collect it
Comments
When visitors leave comments on the site we collect the data shown in the comments form, and also the visitor’s IP address and browser user agent string to help spam detection.
An anonymized string created from your email address (also called a hash) may be provided to the Gravatar service to see if you are using it. The Gravatar service privacy policy is available here: https://automattic.com/privacy/. After approval of your comment, your profile picture is visible to the public in the context of your comment.
Media
If you upload images to the website, you should avoid uploading images with embedded location data (EXIF GPS) included. Visitors to the website can download and extract any location data from images on the website.
Contact forms
Cookies
If you leave a comment on our site you may opt-in to saving your name, email address and website in cookies. These are for your convenience so that you do not have to fill in your details again when you leave another comment. These cookies will last for one year.
If you have an account and you log in to this site, we will set a temporary cookie to determine if your browser accepts cookies. This cookie contains no personal data and is discarded when you close your browser.
When you log in, we will also set up several cookies to save your login information and your screen display choices. Login cookies last for two days, and screen options cookies last for a year. If you select “Remember Me”, your login will persist for two weeks. If you log out of your account, the login cookies will be removed.
If you edit or publish an article, an additional cookie will be saved in your browser. This cookie includes no personal data and simply indicates the post ID of the article you just edited. It expires after 1 day.
Embedded content from other websites
Articles on this site may include embedded content (e.g. videos, images, articles, etc.). Embedded content from other websites behaves in the exact same way as if the visitor has visited the other website.
These websites may collect data about you, use cookies, embed additional third-party tracking, and monitor your interaction with that embedded content, including tracing your interaction with the embedded content if you have an account and are logged in to that website.
Analytics
Who we share your data with
How long we retain your data
If you leave a comment, the comment and its metadata are retained indefinitely. This is so we can recognize and approve any follow-up comments automatically instead of holding them in a moderation queue.
For users that register on our website (if any), we also store the personal information they provide in their user profile. All users can see, edit, or delete their personal information at any time (except they cannot change their username). Website administrators can also see and edit that information.
What rights you have over your data
If you have an account on this site, or have left comments, you can request to receive an exported file of the personal data we hold about you, including any data you have provided to us. You can also request that we erase any personal data we hold about you. This does not include any data we are obliged to keep for administrative, legal, or security purposes.
Where we send your data
Visitor comments may be checked through an automated spam detection service.