Privacy Statement

Privacy and Use of Personal Information

All personal information submitted to or collected by Ritchie Bros. Auctioneers in connection with your use of the RitchieSpecs website will be handled in accordance with our formal Privacy Statement, available at www.rbauction.com.

If you only read the RitchieSpecs website, no more information is collected than is typically collected in server logs by web sites in general. If you contribute to RitchieSpecs website, you will be identified as the author of all submitted content. Data on users, such as the times at which they edited and the number of edits they have made are publicly available via "user contributions" lists, and in aggregated forms published by other users.

If you are logged into RitchieSpecs, you will be identified by your user name. This may be your real name if you so choose, or you may choose to publish under a pseudonym, whatever user name you selected when you created your account. If you have not logged in, you will be identified by your network IP address. This is a series of four numbers which identifies the Internet address from which you are contacting the wiki. Depending on your connection, this number may be traceable only to a large Internet service provider, or specifically to your school, place of business, or home. It may be possible that the origin of this IP address could be used in conjunction with any interests you express implicitly or explicitly by editing articles to identify you even by private individuals. It may be either difficult or easy for a motivated individual to connect your network IP address with your real-life identity. Therefore if you are very concerned about privacy, you may wish to log in and publish under a pseudonym.

In all cases, your IP address will be stored on the wiki servers and can be seen by RitchieSpec’s server administrators. Your IP address, and its connection to any usernames that share it may be released under certain circumstances (see below).

The web site will set a temporary session cookie (PHPSESSID) whenever you visit the site. If you do not intend to ever log in, you may deny this cookie, but you cannot log in without it. It will be deleted when you close your browser session.

Policy on release of data derived from page logs

It is the policy of RitchieSpecs that personally identifiable data collected in the server logs, or through records in the database via the CheckUser feature, may be released by the system administrators or users with CheckUser access, in the following situations:

In response to a valid subpoena or other compulsory request from law enforcement
With permission of the affected user
Where the user has been vandalising articles or persistently behaving in a disruptive way, data may be released to assist in the targeting of IP blocks, or to assist in the formulation of a complaint to relevant Internet Service Providers
Where it is reasonably necessary to protect the rights, property or safety of RitchieSpecs users or the public.