Keeping Things Veiled

This section of the Wheatland Hills Website is kept veiled through username and password login. To understand why and how we are doing this, read on. Otherwise just peruse the pages in this section by using the "Previous" and "Next" links in the footer of this page, or by accessing pages directly by hovering your cursor over the last menu item above (not counting the "Help" menu item).

Background

Anyone can visit a website given its URL (Universal Resource Locater, a unique address we enter into our Web browser to reach a particular website, such as our own: http://www.wheatlandhills.org). So, anyone can access and read our Wheatland Hills website. As long as we don't have any sensitive information posted in our Web pages, such as the login information for our subdivision bank account, we don't need to worry, right? Well, sort of. There are a few reasons why we will still want to take some precautions. We'll explain.

Web Security and Guaranteed Privacy

Web security has lots of levels. Sometimes we may want to save information on a website that we would prefer not to be easily accessible even though we know that it can actually found through other means. At the other end of the spectrum, we may be saving critically important files, such as login and password lists for our financial institutions, "in the cloud." This just means that we are saving a file on a hard drive on a computer that is owned and managed by some company, such as Amazon, Apple, Dropbox, or Google. We don't actually know where these computers are. We may just click on a button in a Web browser and the file is transmitted from our computer across the Internet to the remote computer "in the cloud" for storage. We certainly hope that this information cannot be accessed (i.e., hacked) by some nefarious group. In other words, we hope that the security precautions taken by our cloud services company are sound. For such critical information kept in the cloud we expect nothing short of complete security and guaranteed privacy. (As many reports have shown, this hope can be shattered.)

Web Veiling

As already stated, we certainly will not be keeping critically sensitive information on our Wheatland Hills website. Still, there are other reasons to take steps to veil certain pages on our website. By veil we mean make it difficult to see and gain access to the information kept on certain pages in the website. For example, names and contact information for individual residents often can be gleaned through a sometimes laborious Web search of County, State, and Federal public records, social media, and phone number search companies. However, if some individual or company were trying to target Wheatland Hills residents specifically with unwanted advertising, access to such a ready-made list on our website would make their task easy. On the other hand, if such a list is veiled, making access to residents easy but to others much more difficult, we can ward off unwanted uses of the list. That is what we are doing with this section of our website. If you have reached this page you have done so because you have a user name and password that has been distributed to Wheatland Hills residents by means other than this website. You should keep this login information private.

Resident Use of Veiled Information

Residents, given the discussions above we trust that you will know how to use the information in our veiled pages in a constructive and ethical manner.