The Shergold Guitars homepage is not run for profit, carries no commercial advertising, and has no affiliation with any commercial operation. We do not sell, distribute or otherwise disseminate any personal information gained from the operation of this site. All data is stored within the United Kingdom, part of the European Union.
The data that we gather can be classified as:

• Traffic Data - Our site automatically captures IP addresses. We use IP addresses to help diagnose problems with our server and to administer our website. This data is normally aggregated to help us predict and respond to trends, such as increased traffic adversely affecting our bandwidth quota, or denial of service attacks. Due to the nature of most Internet connections (dial-up or DSL/LAN) this data can only localise your requests to a temporary address at your ISP, not to an individual user.
• Email addresses - If you enter into any email communication with addresses within the shergold.co.uk domain, your address may be recorded by the receiving email program, and the message stored for future reference. For security, emails are rarely stored on the web-facing servers for more than a day before being downloaded to a secure workstation.
  Email addresses given for registration in the Forum may be used by us to notify individuals or the whole community of any issues. Be assured, that we will rarely do this.
  
• Cookies - A cookie is a small amount of data that is sent to your browser from our web server and stored on your computer's hard drive. These are used to let us keep track of your status in the Forum. You are perfectly entitled to delete or refuse cookies, but be aware that the Forum may not work, or will require you to provide your user details for most actions.

To reduce the amount of spam (unsolicted commercial email) that any publicly visible email address might get as a result of being placed on the Shergold website, we have two policies in place.

• The user profiles and member list of the Forum are only visible to registered members, once they have provided valid login details.
• Any other email address is obfuscated to deter automated email harvesting programs. Your browser knows how to translate it, but (at the moment) automated harvesters don't seem to be able to.
  For example, the address "andrew@shergold.co.uk" appears correctly in the browser you are using now, but to the browser (and any email harvesters) the text reads "andrew@shergold.co.uk".
  In a recent study, the Center for Democracy & Technology found that this method of obfuscation completely eliminated email harvesting. Their full report gives all the details.

As it is probable that the email harvesters will catch up with the obfuscation technique described above at some point, we would still recommend the use of a "disposable" email address for any publicly visible use.

Shergold Guitars Homepage, May 2003.