Confidentialité

Reading this site asks nothing of you. There is no advertising and no tracking: nothing follows you from one post to another, or from one day to the next, and your browser loads nothing from any other site. The theme you choose in the header is remembered by your own browser and never sent here.

Like every website, this one is delivered by a host, Vercel, which handles each request, including your IP address, under its own privacy notice. The site’s own database never records the address itself.

Of your reading, the site counts one thing: how many people open each post, a number only I see. Opening a post loads an invisible image from this site; once that has counted you, your browser keeps the image for up to a year, so opening the post again asks for nothing. So that a browser that keeps nothing, such as a private window, is not counted twice in a day, the site keeps a hash of the day, the post, your IP address (only the first half of an IPv6 one) and the name your browser gives itself, made with a key only the site holds, with the time it was made, and deletes it within two days. Because the post is part of it, the hash cannot tell that two posts were opened by the same person. On a day so busy that counting has to stop early, the site notes when it stopped. To know when that is, it keeps a running total for the day (how many views it has counted, how long requests for views have kept the database awake, and when the last request came) and deletes it within two days. Reading comments, a person’s page or the images on them also goes on one running total for the whole site: how much such reading has left, and when the last signed-out request came. The counts, by post and day, and those notes are kept for good. Nothing else about a visit is kept, and nothing of it is tied to an account.

Signing in is only needed to comment and to like, and, on a day when the site has had to stop showing comments to everybody, to read them. You can sign in with GitHub, Google, an Ethereum wallet, or an e-mail address and a password, and this is what is kept:

Your account. From GitHub or Google: the name, e-mail address and picture they share, and their ID for you, so that signing in again finds your account. The site keeps no access to your account there. From a wallet: its address, and its ENS name if it has one, looked up through an Ethereum node when you sign in. With a password: the address you gave, and the password only as a salted hash, never the password itself. And any name or picture you choose yourself on the account page.
Your session. A cookie keeps you signed in until you sign out, or for about a week after your last visit. Signing in, and staying signed in, are the only things the site sets cookies for.
What you write. Your comments, the images in them, and your likes. Before an image is sent, your browser redraws it if it can, which drops what a camera stores with a photo: the time, the device and, on a phone, the place. The site also takes out anything of that kind still in an image, or in a picture you choose, when it arrives. An image you upload but do not post is deleted within two days.
Mail. Messages you ask for, to confirm your address or reset your password, and, unless you turn it off, a message when somebody answers your comment. They are sent through Resend.
Limits. So that nobody can flood an inbox, guess a password or use up what the site may read, it counts the messages sent to an address, wrong passwords, changes of picture and the bytes of private images read for each account, keeping only hashes made with that key, and only for two days, three at the outside.

Who sees what

Comments are public, with your name and picture, and so is your profile page: your name, your picture, the month you joined, what you have written and, if you signed in with a wallet, its address, shortened. Likes are counted, not listed. Your e-mail address is never shown on the site; I see it, with your account, when I moderate.

A private comment can be read only by me, by you, and, if it answers somebody, by them. New comments, private ones included, are also e-mailed to me, so that I see them in time.

Deleting

You can delete any comment of yours: its text and its images are removed from the database. If somebody has answered it, its place stays, marked as deleted, so that the answers keep their thread.

You can delete your account on the account page. That removes the account, its ways of signing in, your picture, your likes and your images, and empties every comment you wrote in the same way. A copy of a comment already e-mailed stays where it went: in my mailbox, and, for an answer, in the mailbox of the person it answered, unless they turned those messages off.

I can delete comments too, and block an account and remove what it wrote.

A copy of the database is made every night, encrypted so that only I can read it, and kept for fourteen days, so what you delete stays in those copies until they expire.

What this page says is deleted within two or three days depends on a clean-up that GitHub is set to start twice a day. It can start late or not at all, so now and then something may stay longer.

Where it is kept

The database is hosted by Neon, in the United States; the site by Vercel; mail is sent by Resend; and the nightly copy, encrypted, is kept by GitHub. Signing in with GitHub or Google involves them as well, and signing in with a wallet involves an Ethereum node, to look up its ENS name.

My promise

I will never sell anything this site knows about you, and never give it away: not to advertisers, not to data brokers, not to anyone. The services above hold it only so that the site can run. The one thing that could make me hand any of it over is a court order.

— VincentC

Questions

Write to vincentc@continualab.com about anything this page leaves out, or to have something deleted that you cannot delete yourself.