Cruise Bruise
About Our Privacy Policy
About Our Privacy Policy
Many Years ago, I spent a great deal of time doing research in San Diego California, researching a wide range of topics for various reasons, which included some college research for term papers, as well as numerous other reasons. That research took me on several occassions to the law library in downtown San Diego. At that time, it was a small room with hundreds of volumns of case studies and rulings. I found it fascinating to read through the cases and verdicts.
I mention this, because at that time, in order to use the library all that was required to gain access, was to sign in on a login sheet. Visitors didn't have to be attorneys or their staff to gain access. But, the library liked to know who was visiting and why. Understanding why people come to research centers is very important. It helps management see what works are being used, and which ones are not, even when they are 'read only', not checked out, such is the case with all 'reference collections' of libraries. This informatiion is helpful when it comes to expansions and renovations of the reference collections. Cruise Bruise is an electronic version of the reference collections, on the topic of cruise industry incidents.
In the electronic world of the web, sign-in really is not required in many cases. Each website on the internet has a built in sign-in process, that automatically logs each visitor by IP address. The IP address in most cases, for personal use only tells the webmaster who runs the site, where that visitors came from, such as New York City. It is pretty general. But, even in that case, it may only tell the webmaster where the internet connect was made, which may not be the city the visitor was actually in, due to complex routing systems for high speed internet.
For example when I log in one of our internet connections, it says I am in New Jersey, no matter which city and state I log onto the internet from. When I travel, I can be in Key West, Florida, and my internet connection may originate out of Seattle, Washington, because the connection was routed to that location, when I logged on. When I log in through a cable connection, it says exactly which city I am. The same would be true of a dial up or dsl connection.
That is as much information as a webmaster gets about who you are. The rest is logged on the servers that hosted your connection for internet usages, and can be recovered by law enforcement. Those more specific details can bring law enforcement right to your door. Webmasters do not have that detailed information, and could not get it, if they wanted to. In addtion to city, we generaly get technical information such as screen resolution, OS, browser type and other minor information that helps us design pages that you will be able to view, base on the type of machine you use.
When it comes to businesses surfing the web, it is another story in many cases. Each business computer has a name. In most cases it is the company name. So, when I use Wi-fi to access the web, and I am in a restaurant, I search for signals and may come up with quite a few being available, such as locations in Seattle. One may be identified as a Starbucks, another a Dennys, another a McDonalds, when my computer detects the available wireless connections. It makes it easy for me to identify the signal, so I can enter the internet through the connection I want. It also makes it easy to see which signals are a business connection, and which signals are privately owned wireless routers. Though those private wireless routers may not be locked due to the stupidity of the private party, it is illegal to use them. In my travels I have seen thousands of those mistakes.
However, even on computers that are in offices, using a dedicated internet connection such as cable or dsl, the computers are generally named when they are set up. In some cases the business has their own branded internet connection. In any case, when the business owner or their employees surf the web, they are identifed by the company name as part of their electronic signature.
Examples of this would be the visitors with an electronic signature of EOP. EOP is the
Executive Office of the President of the United States. When we see EOP we know that somebody from the office of the president has been on our site. Many police departments have their offices identified as City Of Whatever Police. The same is true with cruise lines, airlines, law offices and many others we deal with day to day at Cruise Bruise.
So, just looking at our visitor logs, can tell us a great deal about who visits, when they arrive on a business computer. Cruise Bruise has recently come to realize that information can be very important to our case details. We have seen in several ongoing cases the persons of interest, perhaps the persons who committed a crime, spending a lot of time on our website watching their cases, to see what we have learned and posted to the web.
An example of this was in early July 2006 when an attorney for a 'person of interest' in the then ongoing coroner's inquest of the Dianne Brimble case contacted us to say his client was not pleased with some things we had posted in that case file. Hypothetically, if that person of interest was later charged with a crime, it would be good knowledge for prosecutors to know that person had accessed our site, specifically, and which pages he spent the most amount of time viewing.This is visitor information we have.
While some may view that as reason for us to back off the case details, let me clear that up. In the same case, we also had a witnesses come to us with information, that police investigating the case didn't have. The police came to us to find who our witness was, and what information they had on the case. They were only aware of that witness, because we posted it to the case, as part of our research. Our research center is open to all, just as the legal library in San Diego was 30 years ago, and may still be open to the public today. I don't know, I haven't been there in decades. This means of course that both sides of the law have access to the case files.
In another very high profile case during this same time period, we began to see traffic from a certain law office on one particular case. Because the visitor came in on a business computer internet connection, I could see instantly why this perrson or persons from this law firm might be keeping such a close eye on the case. This law firm had been the employer of the victim, and of a person of interest questioned in the death of the victim. There could be many reasons they were visiting our site, such as simple curiosity, but one reason was of particular interest to us.
When police contact witnesses, they are looking for any details that might help them build a case of motive and/or opportunity. Often, the witnesses see and hear things that don't seem significant to them, but upon close examination by law enforcment, they become very relevant to the case. Over time, things that were seen or heard become lost in the memory clogged with decades of daily life details. Things lost in the back of the mind, may suddenly come forward in memory, when triggered by some related facts.
Let me give you an example of that. I have a trucker friend who delivers tractor loads of bread products to warehouses for grocery stores. He is telling us about the 'bread run' when suddenly I remember there was bread truck parked about 20 feet from the bank, right around the corrner from it, when it was robbed. I had seen it as I walked to the Deli next to the bank, and didn't give it a thought. Later, I heard the bank was robbed, while I was at the Deli. Only several weeks later, do I remember, while talking to my friend, that the bread truck was there, with the engine running, and no driver in the driver's seat. It may be nothing, but it may be related to the bank robbery. Had my friend not mentioned that bread run, I may not have thought about calling police to tell them about the bread truck. It could be the single most important information in the case, and crack it wide open.
This is the overall benefit of The Cruise Bruise Research Center. Not only do we have cases that provide evidence of past incidents such as solved cases or cold cases, we have ongoing case details in open cases.
More importantly, we will begin to take a look at the impact our featured cases are having on society as whole. Information such as we have seen in the past, with clusters of politicans visting certain cases, and others such as consumer groups, industry watch dogs, political groups, local, state and federal agencys will give us some insight into changes that are taking place today, and those that are probable to take place in the future.
Because we are a research center, our case details are here forever. They are not purged periodically, like media sites. We are a collection of case details, and those people who visit our site, when they are related to a case, are very important details. In July 2006 we recognized that, and decided it was time to post those details to case pages, so that they become part of the case file. That information could prove to be very important to police investigators, as well as to potential witnesses, when it comes to jogging their memory.
We came up with a new privacy policy, that still protected the average private users, but divided the business machine users from those private machine users, so we can include them into the case details. Because this was a departure from our past privacy policy, we posted the new change on our privacy policy page, and we posted a new link that identified that change on main page July 14, 2006. The policy takes effect on September 1, 2006, having given six weeks advance warning of the policy change.
As a matter of normal general internet usage, all sites have Terms Of Service and a Privacy Policy. Sites like Cruise Bruise have no way to contact 99% of our visitors, so changes to our Privacy Policy and Terms Of Service are posted on those specific pages. It is prudent for all internet users to know the Terms Of Service and the Privacy Policy of every site they visit, immediately upon arriving on the sites they visit. This is why there are almost always links to the Terms Of Service and Privacy Policy on the bottom of every page in every site on the web. We, the webmasters, try to make it easy for all vistors to check those details upon arriving on the website, no matter which page the visitor arrives on first when finding us through search engine results or links from other sites. It is not not the webmaster's responsibility to contact visitors and force them to view the revised policies of a website where no log-in is required to access the website.
Cruise Bruise urges all visitors to our sites, to view our Disclaimer, Terms Of Service, and Privacy Policy upon each visit to our site to check for revisions.
