We do require you to provide a name and email address to post. We’re not going to harvest that email address and sell or give it away to any third parties. Heck, right now we don’t even have a way of verifying that it’s real, though we sincerely hope that you’re not lying to us. What if we want to reach you? Obviously, you’re not required to give a real name either. For spam-blocking purposes, we do keep track of your IP address.
We may at some point implement site tracking, statistical reporting and analytics. This means we may record who you are and what you do when you’re surfing our site. That doesn’t mean we’re spying on you — once you leave The Bitter Quill, we don’t keep track of you any more. While you’re in our (metaphorical, online) house, though, we reserve the right to watch you, so no monkey business!
We may or may not use cookies to keep track of you and your information, especially (but not exclusively) if you’re one of the few that have a posting account here (you don’t need an account to post). This is intended as a convenience for you, the Bitter Quill reader. If you don’t like it, feel free to reject or delete our cookie. We don’t care!
We are writers, and thus like most whores, we aren’t in the business of selling anything but ourselves. However, we may at some point post links to outside sites, and some of those sites may try to sell you something — hopefully something that you want to buy. They aren’t us and we aren’t them. Occasionally these other sites might pay us for your business. In politics, this is called a kickback, and is usually a crime. Otherwise, this is called an “affiliate program”. We won’t ever knowingly point you towards scam artists, but the internet can be a shady place and sometimes we’re more gullible than we’d like to be. Before you do business with anyone, make sure you do your due diligence and check their policies, privacy or otherwise. Caveat emptor.