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Privacy Policy, Terms of Use, Cookies, Credits and Licensing This document details the Privacy Policy and Terms of Use of my website and personal projects. It is written in a clear way so it's easy to read and understand.

Terms of use

When you participate in my website you are responsible for what you write or upload. Xavi Esteve is not responsible for any comments or information added by other users neither for links to other websites. I reserve the right to use, modify or delete any comments and submitted data I may find false, wrong, illegal, distasteful, spammy, offensive, off-topic or grammatically incorrect.

Disclaimer

Although every piece of information and tool in this website is checked and tested at the time of publishing, I do not take any responsibility for any outdated information or damage caused by it. Always use the information and tools in my website using your own judgement, common sense and at your own risk. No content on my website/s constitutes legal, medical, financial or any other sort of professional advice unless I explicitly say so, we sign a contract and you pay me for it.

Also, don’t be a dick if something you got for free is not working, we’ve all got busy lives, asking nicely will probably get you better results.

Disclosure

I use to write about my own experiences and whenever I mention a product I really like I may review it and sometimes include a link from which I sometimes get a referral fee or perk. I also have some ads. These two methods don’t make me rich nor serve as a job, they just help to pay for the web server costs and an occasional coffee, no big deal. To be completely honest with you, the return on investment is ridiculously low and the hourly salary is not even $1/hour (I’d make more money flipping burgers at McDonald’s). This is one of my ways of giving back to the community: sharing knowledge, helping out, and contributing to the Open Source community.

Privacy Policy

This site and apps fully comply with the European GDPR and the Spanish LOPD, all the information from and to these websites and apps is stored securely in private servers in the European Union (Spain and/or Germany).

By participating and using my website and apps you agree that any information posted, uploaded or submitted will be stored in a secure server in Europe, United Kingdom or the United States.

A name and email are stored when you comment in the blog, and any other personal information that you wish to disclose. I will only contact you if you are asking me a private question (if the answer can be public I’ll prefer to post it as a follow-up comment in the article so future readers can benefit from it) or if there is something really important that you need to know, such as a responsible disclosure or end-of-service for a product you use, in that case I will try to contact you personally. If you want your personal information removed get in touch and I’ll delete it ASAP, both my privacy and yours mean a lot to me.

Some information needs to be shared with third parties such as Cloudflare manages server infrastructure, serves some files and protects the server from attacks; Google serves web fonts, tracks analytics and provides advertisements; GitHub hosts some resources; WordPress powers this blog and uses some resources from their server.

Log Files

Like the 99% of the websites in the Internet, I collect and use the data contained in log files. The information in the log files include anonymous data such as an IP address, your ISP, the browser you used to visit the site, the time you visited the site and which pages you visited throughout the site, but never any identifiable information. So I will know that someone in France uses a brand new Macbook and reads my PHP articles, that’s it, I will never be able to figure out any name, email address or anything else which identifies you.

This helps me understand how the website works, what readers like to read, how to improve it so you get a better experience when you come back and increase the security of my server to prevent attacks.

Online tools

I have developed several free online tools available for public use, these collect non-identifiable information unless specified otherwise or submitted by you. In some tools you may create an account or add an e-mail address in order to receive notifications.

Some Online Tools have their own Terms of Use and Privacy Policy, those prevail over these ones.

I like to keep my tools free for everyone and host them with my own money, please use them with common sense and without any automated tools, I reserve the right to block abusing users or to retire the free tools at any time without notice. If you would like to use them a lot, please donate some money or at least let me know so that I am aware that the server is not being attacked and I can allocate more resources to that specific tool. Otherwise, I reserve the right to block you from accessing my websites and apps or to seek legal action.

I am not responsible for any damage or whatever happens by using my tools. I’ve spent hours working on them for free, host them for free and ask nothing in return, so please don’t be a dick.

Android and iOS Apps

Some Android and iOS Apps that have Push Notification features may use OneSignal to do so, in that case, here’s OneSignal’s Privacy Policy.

Cookie Law and Web Beacons

I use cookies to store information and improve your overall user experience, that’s great for you. For example, if you submit a comment, the next time you want to comment your name will already be typed in. Some tools may use your browser’s LocalStorage instead of Cookies, this is so the information is kept more private and not sent on every request, also saving you data.

I also use third party advertisements to support the site. Some of these advertisers may use technology such as cookies and web beacons when they advertise on the site, which will also send these advertisers (such as Google through the Google AdSense program) information including your IP address, your ISP, the browser you used to visit our site, and in some cases, whether you have Flash installed.  This is generally used for geo targeting purposes (showing London music concert ads to someone in London, for example) or showing certain ads based on specific sites visited (such as showing cooking ads to someone who frequents cooking sites).

You can chose to disable, selectively turn off or delete the cookies, third-party cookies and local storage in your browser settings. This may affect how you are able to interact with my site and other websites. Some problems might be: inability to login to services or programs, such as logging into forums or accounts.

Third party cookies I use are:

Third party vendors, including Google, use cookies to serve ads based on your prior visits to my website. Google’s use of the DART cookie enables it and its partners to serve ads to you based on their visit to my site and/or other sites on the Internet. You may opt out of the use of the DART cookie by visiting the advertising opt-out page. (Alternatively, you can opt out of a third-party vendor’s use of cookies by visiting the Network Advertising Initiative opt-out page).

Cookies sound scary but they are not, there’s few harm in them and if a website was to use them illicitly Google and antivirus softwares would ban them quickly. If, however, you are super paranoid about it, I recommend you use Mozilla Firefox and install the Ghostery extension with all filters on, it works great.

Trust

This website and those on Projects are made by me, a passionate individual on his free time, not by a business or corporation. What do I mean by this? While at first it may seem like “oh, there’s no company behind any of this! It’s just this random dude on the Internet, mah data is not safe!“. That’s not what you should be thinking. Putting it simply: I have no economical interest but pure passion, I have been maintaining this website and a hundred others since 2006 (think about how many online businesses have been running for that long?) and will continue to do so for a long long time. So be at ease, my websites are not going down due to company bankruptcy, or being sold to someone else for a sum of cash. Which sadly is pretty common nowadays with tons of websites selling out to some bigger Goliath that then just shuts it down.

Also, I have no motivation to sell your data to someone dodgy. I have my own job and my income comes from other sources, so there’s no motivation for me to screw you or sell you out. I have a reputation to keep, and my face is on the line, my clients have trusted me and continue to do so, for two decades, with their most critical projects. Again, it’s myself on the line and not some company that can shut down and start fresh without any consequences as if nothing happened.

Licensing of the site

All the content including images, resources, scripts and tools in this website are owned by Xavi Esteve unless specified otherwise. The work in my portfolio is licensed under Copyright by Xavi Esteve or their respective companies/owners unless specified otherwise. Blog articles and images (not web designs) authored by myself are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike-NonCommercial license unless specified otherwise. Other licensing terms can be considered, please get in touch.

Credits and attribution

Flat Miniset used in Project icons made by iconShock.

Other credit and attribution is provided in the specific pages where it is displayed. Where there’s no credit it either means the work is produced by Xavi Esteve (myself), there’s no way I could find the source, or it has been released under a Public Domain license.

Need more information?

Please get in touch.