{{define "title"}}Privacy Policy{{end}} {{define "content"}}

Privacy Policy

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 26, 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:

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:

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:

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):

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:

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.

{{end}}