Protecting your privacy

QED will do all that is feasible to protect your privacy, though you should be aware that the general web is not a secure medium. 

When you make contact through our web form, your message to us will not appear on our website, nor will your name and address be visible to anyone other than QED admin. You will have the option to preview your message, and then to edit it before posting it to us. We won't store your e-mail address willy-nilly: we'll just use it for getting back to you on your comments within your message. Unless, of course, these comments indicate otherwise.

When you take part in any of our online discussions (in QEDLife, for instance), your name will appear as the author of the comment, but there will be no published link to your e-mail address, website or whatever. In general, we deprecate the publication of e-mail addresses, since we all know that it leads to the bane which is as certain as death and taxes — spam (and lashings of it).

If you use either of the above means of communication to us, you may find your name and e-mail address already filled in. Let us be clear that this has not been filled in by QED: it is a standard use of cookie storage which recalls previous use from a small file placed on your computer. In our case, cookie content is arranged by TypePad, our site hosts.

Turning now to our outbound contact, we have decided to use a system which allow you to control our messages to you, rather than have us push all our news down your throat. Our feed-based system lets you choose which areas of our online world interest you sufficiently to request to be alerted when something new appears in that area.

This is so much better than using outdated last-century means such as the e-newsletter (which clogs up the net, pushes everyone over e-mail quota, and so on). Because we use a trusted third party, we don't need to hold your contact details for these alerts, so you are free to come and go as you wish, and we won't be in your mailbox the day after you unsubscribe, aggressively cajoling you to come back into the fold, because we don't know who our current subscribers are.