Informal policies generally followed by our site administrators

This document describes our current policies regarding use and abuse of the "Pollite Lens" opinion database.

We reserve the right to change these policies without notice, and to adhere or deviate from these policies without notice and at our sole discretion.

The motivation for these rules are the ideas expressed in the mission statement of the Pollite Organization .

Some specific intentions regarding the Pollite Lens project follow

The intent of this system is to provide a mechanism to assist people in expressing, evaluating and modifying their own opinions, and thereby improve their society and institutions.
It is not intended to be a general purpose communications system, although the technology on which it is based can be adapted for other purposes. It is also not intended as a replacement for email, news, chat, etc.
We specifically intend that the Lens not be used for commercial purposes.
Finally, in order that people express themselves as frankly as possible, we intend that persons be able to use the Lens without fear of persecution, harassment, or even annoyance by undesired contact with persons who have located them through the Lens.

Our editorial policy

Privacy of our users

Maintaining the privacy of the users of our discussion system is an important objective of our organization. Ensuring your privacy requires your cooperation, and requires that you understand how we use and disseminate the information you give us.

An informative treatment of privacy issues faced by users of internet discussion systems is provided on the Deja News Policies Page . Although we have no affiliation with Deja News, Inc. , we generally agree with the opinions expressed on this page. However, our users should recognize that the "Pollite Lens" opinion database is quite different from Usenet news in a number of ways. In particular, our database is centralized, rather than distributed. Even more important is the fact that information is not necessarily deleted from our database after any given period of time.

"Deja News" is a trademark of Deja News, Inc.

The information we collect

We collect your email address and chosen user-name when you create an account on our system. From that time forward, we collect information (claims and responses) that you post onto our system.

It is important to recognize that this information cannot be deleted by you, nor will we necessarily respond to requests that information be deleted. You must exercise discretion before placing any content into the Lens.

The username you select is visible to all users of our system. Therefore, if this is your real name or can in some way be used to identify you, you have possibly compromised your own privacy. It is advisable that you choose a fanciful user name.

You must also recognize that the aggregate of information you have posted into the Lens since creating an account is all visible to every user as your "platform". This combination of information is in some cases more informative than the parts taken individually. For example, one day you may innocently post your last name. Then the next week, you might post your first name, and the next week your home town. In this way, you have identified yourself to all users of the system in a way that is permanent and not deletable by you.

We also collect statistics and logging information to analyze trends and anomalies in your use of the system, and measure the system performance. This information is not made public, and no attempt to identify you is made.

How we use your email address

Your email address is kept in a private database. However, any database is potentially vulnerable to unauthorized access, or siezure by government authorities, and so it is possible that at some point your email address could be discovered and possibly made public. Therefore, you should always exercise discretion in the content of your postings.

We attempt to verify that the email address you supply is valid (i.e. corresponds to an actual internet email account somewhere). We also attempt to keep this information current, for as long as you are an active user of our system.

If you so choose, your email address may be used to send you occasional notifications of changes to our service, or to changes in contents which you have previously created or accessed. These features have not yet been implemented, however.

We do not use your email address for promotional purposes, to send you unsolicited requests for donations, or for other commercial "spam."

Your email address is not shared with any third parties, unless we are compelled to do so by legal authorities.

If you receive email that appears to be from our organization, you should always be aware that internet email is not generally a reliable or secure means of communication, and it is possible for others to send forgeries that appear to be from our organization. If you have any doubt about the origin of email or any other communication purportedly from our organization, please contact us as soon as possible.

Protecting your privacy

You place your privacy at risk when you publish any information that could be used to identify you into the Lens system.

What users may "publish"

Allowed Content

Claims to fact
Fiction
Lies which are not otherwise crimes in a relevant jurisdiction
Rude or profane speech
Propagation of ideas commonly considered unhealthy including racism, facism, etc.
Citations of any sources, including books and links to web pages, as long as the purpose of citation is substantiation of a claim, rather than advertising of a product or service.

Prohibited Content

Description or speculation of the "true identity" of any other user of the Lens.
Publication of the address, phone number, email address, or other identifying information for any person or organization.
Material which is considered obscene in some jurisdiction we deem relevant.
Storing of encoded, encrypted, compressed or binary (non text) data.
Conspiracy to commit specific crimes.
Solicitation to engage in criminal activity.
Speech which is specifically threatening or inciting violence or harassment agains any group individual. (You can say "Martians are evil" but not "Kill the Martians")
Embedding in Lens documents of Links/forms pointing at locations within the org.pollite domain.the polite lens. These links defeat part of the purpose of the lens database, which is to ensure that all links between documents are maintained consistently and reliably. Also, it may be possible to cause damage to the Lens database or hamper the ability of the Lens to operate efficiently using maliciously placed forms or links.

Other prohibited behavior

Any account used to engage in commercial activity, will be placed on hold, archived and emailed to the user with an explanation of why the action was taken.

Attempting to defeat the security mechanisms guarding the Lens (for example, in order to view or manipulate someone else's account.) is prohibited, and grounds for account termination and possible legal action.

Attempting to officially represent any public or private organization in the context of the lens is prohibited.Within the Pollite Lens, you are not "Pepsi", or "The Ugandan Secret Police" or "The Church of England", even if you are an official representative of such an organization in everyday life. Here you represent only yourself as an individual.

The idea is that noone should pay any attention to who someone says she is in the context of this system, and should instead evaluate each user's platform on its own merits.

Policy on "robots" and automated access

You may not, without permission, use a robot or automated querying program to access or submit information on our web site, except when occasionally indexing the static web pages of our documentation. This means that your robot may occasionally use the "GET" access method on any URL which does not contain a "?". We may change or deviate from this policy at any time. In particular, if your robot is determined to be burdensome to our system, we may need to deny service to some segment of the internet population in order to prevent access by this robot.

If you would like to provide access to our claim pages through your search engine, you may contact us and request permission to do so. We will evaluate each such request on its merits.