Privacy

Reading without an account

You can read every page here without signing in, and nothing asks who you are. There is no analytics, no advertising and no tracking of any kind.

Nothing on a page is fetched from anybody else. The fonts are served from this site rather than a font network, avatars are drawn here rather than fetched from Gravatar, and the sharing buttons are ordinary links that cost nothing until you click one. Each of those would otherwise report your visit to a third party on every page load.

If you make an account

A display name and an email address

The display name is public and appears beside every correction you make. It does not have to be your real name and nothing here ever asks for one. The email address is never shown to anybody else, and is used to confirm the account, to reset a password, and to tell you what happened to a correction you proposed.

However you sign in

A password, if you set one, stored only as a hash that cannot be turned back into the password. A passkey records the public half of a key and the device that holds it; the private half never leaves your device. Signing in with GitHub, Google stores the id that provider gave you and the email address it reported, so the same account is found next time. No password and no access token is kept.

What you write

Corrections, ratings and reviews, any earlier wording of a review you amended, and anything you post in a discussion. A correction is recorded against your name, which is the point: an edit history nobody can read is not a history. Discussion posts carry your display name too, and are public to anybody reading the entry they are on.

A picture, if you upload one

Re-encoded on arrival, which drops the camera data and location that a photograph usually carries with it. Without one you get a pattern generated from your display name, and nothing is stored at all.

Your IP address and browser

Held against your signed-in session so it can be ended, and in the web server's own logs. Not used to build a picture of you and not shared.

If you ask for something to be taken down

The form at the foot of an entry needs no account, so what it stores is whatever you type into it: a name, an email address, your stated connection to the work, and the two things you write about why. Moderators read all of it, and the notes they write to each other about the request are stored with it.

None of it appears anywhere public and none of it is in the downloadable data file. If the request succeeds, what shows on the site is the change itself, that distribution of this entry is denied, with no mention of who asked. The request is kept afterwards, because a decision to stop distributing something is one the site has to be able to account for later.

Who else sees it

Nobody it is sold to, and nobody it is shared with for advertising. There is no advertising here.

Four kinds of company handle it in the course of running the site: whoever hosts the server and its database, the service that delivers email so a verification or reset link reaches you, the storage and delivery network that serves pictures, and GitHub, Google when you choose to sign in with one. A provider learns you signed in here at the moment you use it, which is the trade you are making by choosing that button rather than a password.

The public data file

This site publishes its whole catalogue as a downloadable file, because the data it was built from is shared under a licence that requires it.

Nothing about the people using this site goes into it. No accounts, no email addresses, no ratings or reviews, and no names against the edit history. The command that writes the file works from a list of approved tables and refuses to run at all if it finds a table nobody has classified, so the default for anything new is to stay out. A published file cannot be recalled once it has been mirrored, which is why the rule is built into the code rather than left to memory.

Getting a copy, or getting rid of it

Both are on your account page and neither needs you to ask anybody.

Deleting your account takes your email address, your ratings, your reviews, your passkeys, your sessions and your uploaded picture. Your corrections to the catalogue stay, with your name removed from them: a correction is a fact other things rest on, and the record that remains identifies nobody. Discussion posts stay on the same terms and for a plainer reason, that a conversation with one person's half deleted stops making sense to everybody else in it.

Deletion is yours alone. It is never used as a punishment, and somebody stopped from editing here keeps both of these.

How long it is kept

Your account and what you wrote are kept until you delete them. Sessions expire on their own. Web server logs are kept for a short period and then discarded.

Cookies

Two, and both are needed for the site to work rather than to watch you. One keeps you signed in. One carries a token that stops another site submitting forms as you. Neither is used for advertising and there is no third-party cookie, which is why there is no cookie banner.

Your choice of light or dark theme is remembered in your own browser and is never sent here.

Asking about any of this

Write to [email protected]. Under UK data protection law you have the right to see what is held about you, to have it corrected, and to have it deleted, and you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office if you are not satisfied with the answer.