After a long period during which obligations prevented my involvement in skinning and other pleasurable pursuits, I am glad to be returning at last to my favorite hobby. I was even more glad to have discovered that the heart of the former skinz.org community had relocated to wincustomize.com... until I began the process of registering for an account at this site.

I will state categorically that Stardock et al. have NO LEGITIMATE NEED for my real name, physical address, or email address. The email address alone could be justified if it were used as a verification measure, but it is not in this case, since I have immediate access to this board after entering a false address. There is no conceivable situation in which Stardock would need to contact me on an individual basis; any necessary information about Stardock sites, software, or other content can be provided on the sites themselves, anonymously accessible by the general public.

It is plain from their "privacy statement" that Stardock intends to put this information to work for the purposes of (1) sending JUNK MAIL to physical addresses: "Contact information from the order forms is used to ship... information about our company" and (2) sending SPAM to email addresses unless users opt-out per the "Choice/Opt-Out" portion of the statement. Neither of these is acceptable, and neither shows the respect for the skinning community that I, for one, came to expect as a member of skinz.org.

The "privacy statement" is alarming in its LACK of privacy guarantees to the registered users of this site. Perhaps Stardock assumes that most people do not take the time to carefully read such statements, or that the mere presence of a privacy statement is sufficient evidence of Stardock's concern for their personal information. Regardless, there are items in the statement which preclude any possibility that I would ever give such information to Stardock or any affiliate thereof:

- Most notably, Stardock makes NO GUARANTEE of how personal information will NOT be used. Under their statement, Stardock may provide the real names, physical addresses, and/or email addresses of registered users to ANY THIRD PARTY. Such parties would most likely include companies which send unsolicited advertisements (i. e. SPAM and/or JUNK MAIL) to users, since these are the entities which would pay for such data, and therefore the entities from which Stardock stands to gain by sharing such information. To further support this assumption, Stardock states in the "Advertisers" section that "Some customer data is shared with the advertising companies"; an example of a reason for such "sharing" is given, but no limitations on how Stardock will share this data are stated.

- When I first arrived, the wincustomize.com domain attempted to serve its cookie to my computer more than thirty times -- before I even interacted with the site. Stardock's privacy statement says "Our Site uses cookies to keep track of items in your shopping cart". However, there is no shopping cart on wincustomize.com, and the stardock.com domain serves its own cookie for such purposes. Thus, there is NO EXPLANATION given for the wincustomize.com cookie. It also shows the statement that "Unique identifiers are not currently collected from Web site visitors" to be deceptive, since cookies are a form of UID. The aforementioned statement is also false in another respect, since the "Information Automatically Logged" section confirms IP logging of all site visitors; thus, anyone with a static IP is also tracked by another form of UID.

In conclusion, while I fully intend to rejoin the skinning community now that I am able to do so, I will not be a part of this site under its current policies. I am not asking the admins of this site to address these issues, since I assume that those who administrate this site do not make Stardock policy. The only real purpose of this message is to let my friends and colleagues from skinz.org know why they will be seeing me and my skins at other skinning sites but not here where I find so many familiar "faces".

ADMINS: The information associated with the nick "amanwhoknows" is false. You would be well within your rights to delete this account, and I have no doubt that you will do so in short order. I am explicitly pointing this out to make it clear that my intent was not to defraud, but rather to deliver this message to the people here who knew me well as a member of skinz.org. Thus, I apologize to you for the misinformation and the inconvenience.

- amanwhoknows (aka maker)