Privacy Policy

Updated: February 10, 2025

This document applies to Beyond Intractability, CRInfo, all webpages, social media content, and newsletters produced by the Conflict Information Consortium (henceforth collectively referred to as the Consortium), located at http://www.beyondintractability.org and http://www.crinfo.org (and including any subdomains and subdirectories thereof).

It also covers the way in which Beyond Intractability handles our Substack newsletter: https://beyondintractability.substack.com/. It does not cover the things that Substack does (over which we have no control) in its management of the larger Substack system, including the way in which it handles subscriptions. 

Information Collection

The Consortium servers automatically record certain information about site traffic (which may include Internet protocol (IP) addresses, browser types, Internet service provider (ISP) information, referring pages and search engines, platform types, date/time stamps, and other data). This information is not further linked to any personally identifiable information; it is occasionally used by the Consortium to analyze trends, administer the site, track users' movement in the aggregate, and gather broad demographic information for aggregate use. Additionally, the Consortium may utilize Google Analytics, which independently records traffic using a modified version of the data described above (i.e. a segment of each user's IP address is deleted to further protect users' privacy).  

As a general rule and to protect user privacy, we strive to keep our collection of personally identifiable information to an absolute minimum.

We do not use cookies except in those extremely rare occasions when we need to authenticate "logged-in" user sessions (which are required to access seldom used, "premium content" which is intended for highly limited audiences).

In order to submit one of our contact forms, we require users to supply a name and a valid e-mail address (so that we can reply) plus the content of their comment.  To help limit the number of malicious, and "bot" submissions, we also require submitters to answer a "reCaptcha query" (to which Google's Privacy Policy and Terms of Use apply).

Any content submitted for publication on Beyond Intractability or in our Substack newsletter will (if deemed appropriate for publication based upon the sole judgment of the Consortium's Co-Directors) be published in accordance with the terms agreed to between Beyond Intractability and the authors. This may or may not include anonymous publication.  Public posting of such material is, obviously, not deemed "private."

Those who wish to sign up for our Substack newsletter are encouraged to use Substack's system for handling subscribers and followers.  (Substack also provides the tools needed to unsubscribe.)  It is important to note that the Substack system allows users to manage (and pay for) many different Substack newsletter subscriptions and Substack's rules and privacy policies (over which we have no control) apply.

We strive to ensure that the personally identifiable information that you privately provide to us via our contact form (or any other mode that may be reasonably deemed "private") will not be made accessible to anyone other than the Consortium Co-Directors and their immediate staff without your prior consent (except when compelled to do so by law). Only broadly aggregated information about such things as general user interests is shared more widely.

All information that we collect is stored on the Consortium's servers (and backup systems) as well as local project office computers. All such storage may be maintained for an indefinite period of time.

We would be happy to freely provide anyone with a complete listing of all of the personally identifiable information that we might have on them. Simply request this information using our Contact Us form.  We will follow generally accepted principles for verifying the identity of people making such requests.

We take site security seriously and strive to keep our office computers and Drupal-based system fully "up-to-date." We also try, to the best of our ability, to abide by the commitments made above. Unfortunately, the rapidly evolving nature of today's privacy and server security threats (threats that are beyond our ability to control), we cannot absolutely guarantee the security of the limited amount of information that we do collect.