CCIL: Info: Policy: Privacy

Chester County InterLink
Chester County, Pennsylvania, USA
http://www.ccil.org/
Friday, July 25, 2008

We are required, according to the provisions of the Electronics and Communications Privacy Act, to inform you that you do not legally have an "expectation of privacy" for email or other information left on this system. We want to respect your privacy, but we reserve the right to examine and act on *any* piece of data deposited on our property in situations including (but not limited to) potentially criminal or tortuous actions. In other words, if you make us think we need to read your mail in order to protect ourselves, we will; otherwise, we won't.

We have chosen to operate on the legal model of a common carrier, not a publisher. This means that the content of this system is entirely the responsibility of its users.

Furthermore, any experience, positive or negative, that you have with the communications of others on this system, is your responsibility. No one forces you to dial up and log on; by doing so, you actively consent to view other peoples' ideas and acts, some of which may delight you, and some of which may challenge you or make you uncomfortable. That's life.

You have the right to control what you see. You can unsubscribe from any newsgroup you dislike. If you receive email you consider junk or abusive, and want it stopped, the City Wizards will do what they can to help, up to and including exiling users who repeatedly abuse email from the City.

If you are the moderator of an area, you have the right to control what is posted in your area. By entering it, other users consent to your policy.

If you are in loco parentis to a minor, you have the right to protect the child from material you consider harmful or injurious. However, enforcing that protection is your job and not ours. It is your responsibility to control and monitor your child's use of this system. We won't do it for you.

Please see the Parental Control/Age of User Policy.

Nobody has the right to control what free adults who have not consented to a moderation policy can see. The system operators will not censor on the basis of alleged obscenity, religious or anti-religious content, offensiveness, political incorrectness, "community standards", or any of the other currently or historically popular rationalizations for thought control.

Our common-carrier status does not permit us to do content control, and our principles would forbid it in any case.

Until recently, the Internet and many other non-profit media had what were called "appropriate-use" policies. These forbade most kinds of advertising and commercial activity, on the theory that commercial activity shouldn't be subsidized by other people's charitable contributions or by government.

We don't yet have a formal appropriate-use policy, and may never develop one. The Internet is moving away from "appropriate-use" constraints. There is some regulation of "appropriate use" on media run by non-profit 501(c)3 organizations, but that regulation assumes a publisher rather than common-carrier model. Our commercial content and business use policy is currently being formalized. Feel free to look around and see what other business's are doing. No point of sale is allowed. Don't include prices. Citizens can use the classified ad section.

This doesn't mean that anything goes. The City Wizards will not be pleased with anyone who broadcasts junk mailings, or floods newsgroups with advertisements that are not germane to the newsgroup topic.

We do not, by stating these principles and guidelines, grant anyone a license to use them against us. The City computers and software are our property, administered within the law by our rules. While we will generally accept and consider reasoned arguments to reverse a decision, when we say a decision is final, it is final.

Top