This page describes the treatment of your data and privacy-related aspects of this website.
We reserve the right to update this page in the future. Here at {{PrettyTitle}} we are committed to respecting user privacy and are morally opposed to all of the shady tracking and selling of user data that goes on with other websites. We will not sell your information (including your e-mail address) and any kind of analytics software that may be added in the future will be "self-hosted" with your data never leaving our servers.
This page was last updated on August 29, 2022.
Any use of the word "we" on this page refers to the royal we; as this website is actually run by just one very passionate software engineer.
Website Privacy Features
Members of this website have the following features available in their settings to control their privacy from other members of the site:
- By default, your profile page on {{PrettyTitle}} may only be seen by logged-in members of the website.
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You may mark your entire profile as "Private" which limits some of the contact you
may receive:
- Only users you have approved as a friend can see your profile and your photo gallery.
- Your photos will never appear on the Site Gallery - not even to your friends. They will only see your photos by visiting your profile page directly.
- Optionally, you may mark your Public profile to allow a limited "logged out" view which shows only your square profile picture and display name. This may be useful to link to your profile from external sites (like Twitter) so the visitor isn't just redirected to a "login required" page.
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Profile photos have visibility settings including Public, Friends-only or Private:
- Public photos will appear on your profile page to any logged-in member of the website, except for members who you have blocked.
- Friends-only photos will only appear to members who you have accepted a friend request from, or members who have accepted a friend request that was sent by you ("friends").
- Private photos are visible only to yourself and any members for whom you have unlocked your private photos. You may also revoke access to your private photos after you had granted a member access.
- Notice: the square default profile picture that appears on your page will always be visible to all logged-in users. The full size version on your Gallery page may be restricted to friends or private, but the square cropped version that appears next to your username on many parts of the website is always seen by logged-in users.
Site-Wide Photo Gallery
One of the features of the website is the "Site Gallery" which features public photos of all members who have opted those photos to appear in the Gallery.
When you are uploading or editing a photo, there is a checkbox labeled "Gallery" where you can opt your photo in (or out) of the Site Gallery. Only your public photos will appear on the Site Gallery by default; your friends-only photos may appear there for people you approved as a friend, or your private photos to people for whom you have granted access. You are also able to exclude a photo from the Site Gallery by unchecking the "Gallery" box on that photo -- then it will only be viewable on your own profile page, given its other permissions (friends/private).
Deletion of User Data
When you delete your data (including photos) from this website, it will really be deleted. This website is currently run as a "passion project" on the owner's own budget and web hosting costs can get expensive when a website grows popular! So your deleted photos are actually removed from the server hard drive. You can verify this for yourself by right-clicking and "Open image in a new tab" in your browser, delete it, and refresh the other tab and see that the image URL no longer exists!
Members are free to delete their accounts and your data will be scrubbed from the server: your photos deleted and all database records about your account (including your profile data, direct messages, forum posts, comments, and so on) are removed. This is for full compliance with privacy regulations such as GDPR and CCPA.
Moderators
To help enforce community standards, website administrators are able to access ANY user photo. Specifically, this will include the following photos:
- All photos uploaded to your Profile Page, including private and friends-only photos.
- Any photo uploaded onto the Forums.
The contents of your Direct Messages are NOT regularly reviewed by site administrators. Your privacy is respected in one-on-one chats with others. However, if a user reports your message for violating the Terms of Use the messages may be reviewed by an administrator to verify the report and take action as needed.
Email Addresses
All members begin signup by verifying control of an e-mail inbox. On this website, your e-mail address is used for the following purposes:
- For logging in to your account (as an alternative to logging in using your username).
- To deliver e-mail notifications or to get in touch with you if necessary (see below).
We will NOT sell your e-mail address or send you any spam or junk mail and will NEVER do so in the future.
What kinds of e-mail messages we send
Currently the website only sends transactional e-mails (not marketing emails!) in response to important actions on the website, including (exhaustively):
- Upon first sign-up we send an e-mail to verify you control the email address you are signing up with. This message contains a link to click to verify you control that e-mail inbox and resume signing up an account on this website.
- If you have forgotten your password and request a password reset via e-mail, we will send you a message to your e-mail inbox with a link to click to set a new password for your account.
- If you change your e-mail address in your settings, a message will be sent to the new e-mail address to verify you control the new address.
- When your Certification Photo is either approved or rejected by a site administrator, you will receive a notification message to your e-mail inbox.
In the future, the website MAY gain a feature to deliver a "daily digest" e-mail if you have any pending friend requests or unread Direct Messages on this site. There will be controls on your Settings page to control such a feature.
Cookies
This website uses functional cookies only and does not run any advertisements or third-party trackers. The exhaustive list of website cookies and their use cases are as follows:
- A session ID cookie to remember your login status as you browse the website. This cookie holds a randomly generated unique value that corresponds to server-side storage about the details of your login status. The server-side details include, exhaustively: your login status (true/false), your user ID number, any temporary "flashed" success or error messages (which appear at the tops of pages in green or red banners on your next page load), and a "last seen" time stamp.
- A cookie to protect against a cross site request forgery (CSRF) type of cyber attack. This cookie holds a randomly generated unique value that helps protect you from a rogue third-party website attempting to perform actions on behalf of your account on this website.
Analytics Software
In the future we MAY deploy self-hosted analytics software to help understand how the website is being used and identify any pain points that users may be running into. This would probably be Matomo analytics, a free and open source program that would run on the same web servers as this website, so that analytics data does NOT leave this site and go to a third party such as Google or Facebook.
The author of this website is a privacy & security nut and he respects your privacy as well. Matomo Analytics is GDPR compliant, automatically respects your web browser's "Do Not Track" header and can be opted out of.