Privacy:

This website is intended for the private use of the family and their friends.   This is a "word of mouth" site.  Generally, someone had to tell you about it for you to find it. 

Although the website has never been registered with any search engine, at least one search engine has picked up on the location of the site.  The search engines have tended to pick up the banner on the home page so you may find some recent family event (that was recent at the time the search engine came by months ago) listed as the definition of the website.  I haven't figured out how to get them to either leave us alone or pick up something different as the site definition.

The traffic on the site is monitored several times daily for any unusual patterns.  While I can't tell who's been visiting by name, I can tell whether they came in from nemonet.com (Northeast Missouri Network) or the Bank of Long Island (and we don't know anyone who works there), and I can tell what pages/pictures were looked at.  That gives a pretty good view of whether the visitor was "friend or foe". 

So far there has been no need to protect the site with a password.  It is of a nature that is only interesting to family members.  Any strangers who appear to stumble in leave as soon as they read the home page.  They realize they don't know who the heck we are and they don't care what we did on our summer vacation. 

Our main protection is anonymity and boredom.  We're hard to find and strangers aren't particularly fascinated by our 4th of July photos.  Think about the type of anonymity you have on a very crowded big city street.  (This does not include Monroe City, Shelbina, Kingfisher or Seguin.)  In a "big city", which the world wide web certainly is today, nobody pays attention to you unless you strip naked and do the hula.  On second thought, on the world wide web, nobody pays attention even if you do that unless you figure out something else really kinky to do at the same time.   At least this is what I have concluded just by reading the headlines on the spam that comes in every day.  (I've really got to learn that parental control mechanism to protect myself from the smut that is so earnestly trying to gain my attention every day.) 

It is my hope that we can continue operating our little private family reunion without requiring passwords. 

However, if anyone feels that their private information has been used inappropriately by a stranger visiting this site, please let me know right away at alice@alicebell.com .

Even if you don't vote for passwords, if there is any detail like your address or date of birth that you would like removed from the website please write to me at alice@alicebell.com .