Privacy Policy?

Privacy policies on websites are weird! They often seem to overcompensate for legal insecurities and ambiguities. They convey a sense of transparency without offering clarity, and thus emphatically evade any possible liability for the ramifications of using the respective website as a piece of software or the reception of its contents. But, then again, maybe ‘privacy’ is always a kind of performance? Indeed, the performance?

What we can say is that we don’t purposefully store personal information of yours beyond the data that is necessarily exchanged to view this website in your browser.

What we do know is that this website is hosted by SWITCH in Switzerland. If you are interested, there are several services to check the publicly accessible hosting information for any website.

You can check the Website Carbon Calculator to get an estimated carbon footprint for this website, too.

We also use a few ‘cookies’, although we aim to use as few as possible. Cookies are text files which are stored temporarily or permanently on your computer to identify you as a recurring visitor. We use them because it’s part of how the content management system that this website is based on works (WordPress).

Services that this website is built with (like WordPress and its plug-ins) or that are embedded on certain pages may use cookies, but we have limited control over this. Use browsers such as Brave or Firefox to avoid third-party cookies by default.

You can use the developer tools of your browser to see the local data stored by this website. It is generally a good habit to take a look at this every now and then anyway.

This website also deploys content and services offered from third-party providers, to do things like integrate videos and other content, for instance.

Service providers you’re likely to encounter on these pages are Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, Vimeo, SoundCloud, amongst others. The listing links to their respective privacy policies. But, to be honest, we haven’t read them.

Especially when we embed content from these services through their provided embed codes or APIs, this might trigger cascades of cloud-based processes that obscure the exchange of data between a bevy of servers and services that we are not totally aware or in control of. We treat these services mostly with the same naive mix of suspicion and convenience that seems to be the prevalent attitude for navigating the privatized corporate internet.

At the moment, we don’t use Google Analytics to track your visit to the site. But services from the mentioned third-party providers might be running tracking services in the background. Add Ghostery to your browser to see who tries, and who is prevented from doing so.

It seems almost too obvious to write this here, but as a regularly updated website, some or all of the content on this site may be amended, deleted or (occasionally) no longer shown after it has been published before.

The CML is part of the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland FHNW. As a service of FHNW, this website also adheres to their privacy policy.

Lastly, we’ll put ourselves on the safe side by adding the following very brief disclaimer (a peculiar legal term in itself): We or FHNW shall not accept any liability for any material or immaterial damage arising in connection with the use or non-use of the information offered, with the misuse of the connections or with technical faults.

We are not entirely sure what this means.