The impetus for the thread is the California Consumer Privacy Act, which went into effect on January 1st. Our privacy policy hasn't changed because we're collecting additional information; it's changed to include a new section for California residents as required by the new law.
You don't need to make a special request to find out what types of information our system collects - that's already listed in the site's privacy policy.
The thread was locked because this particular announcement is only relevant to California residents, who are welcome to contact us as indicated. The changes impact them. Aside from implementation of the CCPA, the privacy terms otherwise remain unchanged.
Given the current state and reach of surveillance capitalism, I understand that you and others have privacy concerns and have no problem fielding those - but a separate thread is a better venue for that because the announcement pertained specifically to the CCPA and your questions do not.
NikeTalk is not "building a profile." The terms you're most concerned about pertain to the use of personalized advertising, which are an industry standard used by virtually all ad supported sites.
You can find more information about those here:
https://computer.howstuffworks.com/advertiser-custom-ads.htm
As I mentioned in the announcement, you can use things like "do not track" settings in your browser or the privacy settings in your phone to limit tracking.
We don't have access to information collected by advertising cookies. I don't know what ads you're seeing - which can make tracking down and blocking bad ads challenging. Whatever data Facebook, Google, Amazon, et al. have on you, I'm not privy to it. That’s handled by the ad networks.
The information our system collects relates to your use of the site. In other words: every post you submit, the contact information you provide upon registration, IP information associated with your visits, your preferences, and limited diagnostic information - like what browser you're using to access the site. The site could collect more information than it does. It keeps track of how many people view a certain post, for example, but if you go into a user's record you can't see a list of every thread they've ever accessed and when.
Unless you specifically give us your real name, we don't know it. IP information can be used to determine a rough location, but nothing more granular than a general area and Internet Service Provider. We don't know your street address - unless you attended NikeTalk live and we just shipped you a free t-shirt.
We do not sell that information to third parties. Those terms are what they are because of ad networks - and we're not selling them your email addresses, IP history, etc. The tracking they do follows you across the web, hence why products you look at "follow" you around to other sites you visit. That information comes from tracking cookies. We don't have access to it. So if you get an ad for something in your local area, it's not because NikeTalk sold you out - it's because the ad networks themselves already have that information. The ad networks are the ones showing you personalized ads, and we don't know or see which ads any given user will get.
There's no big secret or conspiracy here. If you want to see the actual control panel we use and what types of information it stores, you can set up a private demo of the forum software we use and see for yourself:
https://xenforo.com/demo/
There's been some confusion on this point because we've had to change the way we've operated over the users. We've made no secret of this, either, and I've spoken about it several times now. If you don't want to search, here's a quick summary:
From 1999 through mid-2006 we ran the site completely ad free. NikeTalk's founder, Nelson C, and I paid out of pocket to buy "ad free" subscriptions for the site. When the prices rose into the thousands, we relied on user contributions through a "community chest." Ezboard, our platform at the time, was sold to a new owner who refused to grant us preferential rates and we've been forced to rely on ad revenue ever since.
From 2006-2012, we donated all the surplus ad revenue to charity. This was great in theory, but when Yuku's service quality deteriorated - along with the quality of the service's ownership - we didn't have any community funds we could use to finance a platform change. That left us in a precarious situation from which we were fortunate to recover.
Leaving Yuku required us to make use of actual
professional services to operate the site. Professionals, by definition, get paid.
Advertising keeps the site online, it's been used to finance over $400,000 in charitable donations and counting, and it's allowed us to offer the best quality experience that we can. This year, we brought back the thread gallery feature, for example. That's something that required custom development to achieve. The site takes up a vast amount of disk space, all of which needs to be hosted and backed up.
What would you have us do? Pass a collection plate around and hope people give us enough to cover those costs? We tried exactly that in our first few years. It wasn't enough. We also tried giving all the money we did make away. The service quality we offered was poor.
We'll welcome any suggestions, but I do find it odd that NikeTalk is being held to a different standard than literally every other service you use.
