Privacy policy

DoudouLinux fully respects a user’s privacy and we do our best to provide a good service while keeping private information from the eyes of others. We strongly believe electronic equipment and online services should absolutely never be used as a kind of Trojan horse to build detailed profiles of their users, especially, if this is done behind their backs. We believe human beings are worth much more than companies, even the largest ones. For this reason we have banned such practices from DoudouLinux and will always reject them. Similarly, we do our best to preserve user privacy of DoudouLinux users on the Internet.

NB: As a start you can choose right now to not be tracked on our website although we do not use the collected data for any other purpose but knowing how DoudouLinux is popular and will never do other things with these data.

Privacy on our website

As any other website, the DoudouLinux website is recording information on its visitors. There are several tools that perform such recordings. Basic statistics, recorded by our web server provider, are totally anonymous and sufficiently global to not allow any user’s tracking. Their goal is purely to give information on the website traffic. The tools, well known free softwares like Awstats and Webalizer, are designed with this goal in mind.

That said, we currently have two additional tools to collect more detailed information about our users. The first one is Piwik, another free software dedicated to web analytics. It can record all users actions individually. However we have set its privacy level to the recommended level, which means our record logs do not contain enough information to build detailed profiles. Moreover you can decide to escape its tracking job thanks to the form on the top of this page.

Additionally, the world map of our visitors, in the column on the right side of every page, is provided by ClustrMap. Although they claim to not resell personal information about our visitors, they tell in their privacy page that they use them to make targeted advertising on their website. We currently have no better alternative to display this world map. If you want to escape ClustrMap, the only solution for you is to find a plugin for your web browser that would block ClustrMap calls. This is what the web browser of DoudouLinux is now doing with the release 2.0!

Privacy in our computer system for children

Our system does not contain any software that would send information about users, to us or any third party, behind their backs. As our project is fully open, anyone can check this point. DoudouLinux is designed by parents for parents and their children. We want only the best for our children and we do believe spying on our users is really not part of the best even if they would accept it. The only tool that can send information to us is the hardware issue reporting tool. With it we can know what hardware configuration you have and what language you are using – this is its purpose!

Concerning Internet, content filtering is not performed by a central server under our control, which would mean we could know everything about our users activity on the Internet. Instead filtering is performed locally, on each DoudouLinux computer individually, and thus remains entirely in parent’s hands. Of course we provide defaults settings that block given websites and not other ones, but anyone can again check what we are doing. No log is sent to us and we cannot know what site has triggered blocking from DansGuardian [1]. Note that it is possible to make DansGuardian record (locally) the full address of every requested web page, but this has not been activated in DoudouLinux and would not allow us to spy on users anyway. We have thought that most parents would not be interested in spying this way on their children either. That said, parents could do if they really want to!

Finally note that, when running the DoudouLinux system on a computer you are not the owner of (LiveCD), even if the computer data are still accessible, we made special effort to keep them off of eyes for most users: data cannot be accessed simply from the file browser. The computer owner privacy is then quite well respected. However it is still possible to access local data using more technical tools, for instance the command line. This is then not perfect and cannot be since we want to be able to access local storage devices at least to be able to setup data persistence or to install DoudouLinux onto disk.