AllIncontext Charter

The Charter for Internet Safety and Trust is a simple device that allows for questions that can be answered Yes or No. The questions give you a feel for what the site will and will not do and are put so that a Yes is good and a No is not good for your PC safety. If a site has no regard for your safety, why should you trust it?

The Charter for this web site is as follows:

1. Question: Will pages display if scripting in the web Browser is switched off? This means that the Browser is only sending plain XHTML tags and does not require the use of the client PC to run code.
   
   Answer: Yes.
   On any web site, if you don't want to have scripting turned on, the site should degrade its pages gracefully and not demand that you use scripting. After all, a web page that uses script wants to use your PC to run code, and there are far too many web Browser settings for anyone to be confident that any particular script isn't going to do harm on the PC. Many web pages these days use script to do Web analytics which can be used for both business and market research. As Tim Berners-Lee (the founder of the world wide web) has said:
   • No snooping with regard to data which you generate as you navigate the Internet.
   • It's mine you can't have it when referring to your Clickstream, which is worth quite a lot.
   
   
2. Question: Is there a link or visible text which defines the web site security policy and how personal information is handled?
   
   Answer: Yes.
3. Question: Is there a link or visible text for contact information?
   
   Answer: Yes.
4. Question: Is there a link or visible text about any Certificates used by the web site?
   
   Answer: Yes.
5. Question: Is there a link or any visible text about Company Information?
   Answer: Yes.
   In the UK a limited Company has a company number assigned by Companies House (the registrar of UK companies) and is "deemed" to have an Object Identifier (OID) based on this number which uniquely identifies that company on the Internet as part of the UK Company Arc. For AllIncontext Limited, this OID is:
   1.2.826.0.1.4624520
   There is also a Certificate of Incorporation provided to the company by Companies House that gives the company number.
6. Question: If a company has paid for a domain name, is the Whois information relating to the domain consistent?
   
   Answer: Yes.
   In the UK a domain name ending in co.uk will be registered by Nominet which requires the company to provide its company number in the registered data. Note: This domain is available to anyone world-wide so you need to check that the registration details include the UK company number. The domain ltd.uk is only available to UK registered companies.
   
   
7. Question: Is there a Charter defining what will or will not be done to ensure Internet safety and trust?
   
   Answer: Yes. This page.
8. Question: Does the Email from this site only use plain text and include images which only apply to this web site's domain?
   
   Answer: Yes.
   Since Email can be an HTML stream, the use of plain text and any images which are sourced from this web site's domain are essential to keep you safe. Links in the message you can see and avoid if you want to. You have no direct control over how your web Browser loads images. When an image loads it can be associated with a Cookie, so you might be tracked.
   
9. Question: Are images loaded into a web Browser from this site free of tracking Cookies?
   
   Answer: Yes.
   The only cookie is the session cookie which is needed for the web Browser to function properly.

You can check this information for consistency and come to some view on whether the web site can be given some basic level of trust (or not). The Charter provides information which is indicative of the likely outcome of an action performed on the site. However, you have to initiate some action to get the actual outcome, such as downloading something or making a transaction. The actual outcomes will allow you to gauge whether the level of trust can be raised or needs to be lowered.

Note: In the USA, company numbers are assigned sequentially. The Company Arc is 2.16.840.1. See this link for more information. There is also another Arc (1.3.6.1.4.1) for US Private Enterprises which is managed by IANA (The Internet Assigned Numbers Authority) to assign OID's for use in Network management.