What is the Secure Surfing Organization?
The Secure Surfing Organization/Secure Surfing Network is published as a public service by the Wired Web Press Network. The Wired Web Press Network is wholly owned by Walking Dolphins Consultancy Inc., legally incorporated under the laws of Canada and the Province of Saskatchewan. Contact information is available on the Contact page.
Why does Walking Dolphins Consultancy Inc. sponsor the costs of this service?
The subject matter and purpose of the service are a personal interest and life-long avocation of the principal of Walking Dolphins, Glenn Caleval. Mr. Caleval has been operating in the area of computer communications since before the internet became a public mass medium and operated dial-up bulletin board services and satellite data feeds more than 30 years ago. It is truly a personal passion.
Do you get money in other ways?
The Secure Surfing Organization continues to operate in a loss position. However, it does have two sources of revenues in addition to the funding by Walking Dolphins.
1. Membership fees and user donations.
The Secure Surfing Organization offers memberships to the general public. In return, the member receives essentially labour services, as most of what is provided is explained in detail on the site so that any user can do the tasks themselves. Members also receive special e-mail addresses and other services as detailed on the Membership page. Some users who do not wish to become members do donate small amounts of $5.00 to $25.00 (we have ever only received one donation larger than $25.00 and it was from a business.)
2. Vendor commissions.
You will see advertisements on the site. Some advertisements are displays such as the banners at the top and bottom of pages and some are “text links” that can be placed on the sidebars or within some of the content. For a list of current third parties with which we work and expanded privacy issues, please see the end of this page.
The Secure Surfing Organization does not earn any revenue as the result of a user simply clicking on any of the ads. They are NOT Google Adwords and there are no Google search ads on the site. Rather, these ads earn revenue for the site only when a user not only clicks on the ad but proceeds to purchase a product from the vendor at that time.
For example, if a user clicks on an ad for Anonymizer.com and actually signs up for a subscription from Anonymizer, then we will be paid a commission from the value of the purchase.
We do declare biases in favour of some products over others.
The biases we declare are based on our own reviews, actual use and experience and/or input provided by our own members or professionals in the field. The fact that a product is advertised on the site does not mean it is the product we recommend in its class.
For example, you may see ads promoting various anti-virus products such as Kasperski or Norton products. But the Secure Surfing Organization strongly recommends the Free version of Avast! Anti-Virus. When users choose to accept our recommendation, the site receives zero compensation from Avast! We do not even recommend that the average user upgrade to the paid version of the product.
In such cases, our recommendations literally cause us to give up revenue that we could earn by recommending a paid alternative.
Where we do recommend a paid alternative such as Anonymizer, it is because our good faith belief is that they are the best alternatives for users.
Third Parties
The Secure Surfing Organization web sites currently act as an Affiliate through Commission Junction and LinkSysnergy.
Specific products/companies for which we act as an affiliate include Anonymizer, TigerDirect, PC Tools, Hewlett Packard (HP Computers), and some others. Walking Dolphins Consultancy acts as an affiliate for Sears.ca, Office Depot, Lenovo and several others.
None of these companies endorses the Secure Surfing Organization and we do not specifically endorse any particular company. We do recommend specific products where our own judgement is that the products are of particular value to our Members or computer users. We recommend many products from suppliers for whom we do not act in any capacity and which companies are not even informed that we are recommending their products.
Note on 3rd party cookies
As explained in our Privacy Policy, we exercise no control over the content of third party� cookies nor the privacy practices of anyone other than ourselves. When a user clicks on an ad from one of the companies for which we act as an affiliate, a cookie will be set that includes securely encrypted information detailing that the cookies was set on a Secure Surfing Organization page and the vendor identification information. If you are selecting a particular product, such as Anonymizer, then the cookie will also contain information identifying the product so that the web site will be able to display the correct product to you. For example, when we are specifically discussing Anonymizer Total Net Shield, then the cookie will ensure that when you land at the Anonymizer site, you will be presented a page related to Total Net Shield. If we are discussing anonymizing services in general, you may be taken to a page that compares the different Anonymizer products.
When you arrive at a third party site, whether through an ad or a regular link, cookies will be set according to the practices of that particular site. This will commonly include recording your IP Address, which we consider personal information.
The only practical way to deal with this is to use a service like Anonymizer to hide your IP address without compromising your web experience.
We may also use Google Analytics or other traffic analysis systems to measure the performance of our web sites, in particular what content is providing reader value as measured by the number of visits and what subjects seem to be unhelpful.
We don’t care what IP address is accessing any of our content and so we do not give any attention to IP information. BE CAUTIONED that if you are not using an anonymous browsing service like Anonymizer, Google WILL track and store your IP address and associate it with your visits to this or other of our web sites. This tracking will occur, not just with Google but pretty much everywhere you go on the web.
