Privacy

Who holds it

Flapss is responsible for the personal data described here. The contact form reaches us about anything on this page, with or without an account.

We apply the rights below to everyone, wherever you live, rather than only to people the law happens to cover.

What we hold

Because you gave it to us

• Your name, handle, email address and password. The password is stored only as a hash and cannot be read back, by us or by anyone who obtains the database.
• Anything optional you add to your profile — a headline, a short biography, links, a location, the subjects you are interested in.
• Every answer you publish and every revision of it, along with whether you chose to publish it under your name or anonymously.
• Anything you send through the contact form, including the address you ask us to reply to.

Because you used the site

• Which questions you were dealt, which you answered and which you passed on. Passing is recorded so the same question is not put to you again.
• Who you follow, and which answers you have endorsed.
• Whether you have seen other people's answers to a question, and when. This is what makes it possible to say that an answer was written without sight of the others.
• Ordinary web server logs, which include your IP address, and which are also what we use to stop one visitor overwhelming the site. Kept for 90 days.

What we do not do

There is no analytics, no advertising network, no tracking pixel and no third-party script that follows you between sites. We do not build a profile of what you read here, we do not buy data about you, and we do not sell or rent anything about you to anybody.

What is public, and how public

Your handle, your name, your profile, and any answer you publish are public — readable by anyone, without an account, and deliberately visible to search engines. That is the point of the site, but it is worth being blunt about: an answer is published to the open web at a permanent address.

An answer published anonymously shows no name and no link to your profile, anywhere, including in the machine-readable copy of the page that search engines read. We still know it is yours, so that you can revise it.

Your email address is never shown to other members and never published.

Why we are allowed to hold it

• To run your account and publish what you asked us to publish. This is the agreement between us, and without it there is no service.
• To keep the site working and safe — logs, rate limits, acting on reports, preventing abuse. This is our legitimate interest, and it is limited to what that actually requires.
• Where you have specifically chosen something, such as answering a question marked sensitive. You can withdraw that choice.

Who else sees it

We use no marketing or analytics providers. Two others are unavoidably involved:

• Our hosting provider, which stores the database and serves the site, and which necessarily processes whatever passes through it.
• Google Fonts. The site currently loads its typefaces from Google's servers, which means your browser tells Google your IP address when a page loads. Nothing about your account or what you read is sent. We intend to serve the fonts ourselves and remove this.

We would disclose data to a public authority only where we are legally required to, and we will tell you if that happens unless we are forbidden from doing so.

Cookies

One cookie, which keeps you signed in. It is marked Secure and HttpOnly, so it travels only over an encrypted connection and cannot be read by scripts, and it is not readable by other sites. There are no advertising or analytics cookies, which is why there is no banner asking you to accept any.

How long we keep it

• Published answers and their revisions: indefinitely. That is what you came here for, and it is what section 2 of the terms describes.
• Your account details, for as long as the account exists.
• Server logs, 90 days.
• Records of reports and what we did about them, for two years, so that a pattern of behaviour is visible and so that a decision can be reviewed.

Deleting your account — what it does and does not undo

This is the part that interacts with the promise the rest of the site makes, so it is set out in full rather than summarised.

Ask us to delete your account and there is a 30-day grace period, during which signing in cancels it. After that we remove your personal identifiers — your name, handle, email address and profile.

Your answers do not silently disappear. Each becomes a tombstone: the count survives, the attribution does not. If four hundred people answered a question and you were one of them, the question page still says four hundred; it no longer says that one of them was you, and the text is no longer readable. We do it this way because deleting the answers outright would retroactively change every statistic anyone had ever cited, and leaving them attributed would not be deletion at all.

Two things are outside our reach and we would rather say so than imply otherwise. Anything already copied, quoted or archived elsewhere — including by search engines — is not ours to remove. And where an answer has been reported and acted on, we keep the moderation record, without the answer text, because deleting it would remove the evidence for a decision that may need to be reviewed.

Your rights

You can ask us to:

• Give you a copy of everything we hold, including every revision, in a portable format.
• Correct anything inaccurate. You can already rewrite your own answers yourself, at any time.
• Erase your account, as described above.
• Restrict or object to a particular use, including anything we do on the basis of legitimate interest.
• Withdraw a consent you previously gave.

Ask through the contact form. We answer within one month. There is no self-service export or delete button yet — the request is handled by a person, and the right is the same either way. If you are not satisfied with how we have handled a request you are entitled to complain to the data protection authority where you live.

Information about other people

Some profiles here are about public figures who have not joined. They hold only published statements those people actually made, each shown with its source and date, and each page carries a route to correct or remove it that does not require an account. A removal request is honoured without argument. This is described further in the about page.

Security, stated accurately

The site is served only over an encrypted connection. Passwords are hashed and cannot be recovered. Administrative access is restricted and separately gated.

Email addresses are stored in the database as ordinary text, protected by the security of the server rather than by separate encryption. We would rather tell you that than describe a protection that is not in place.

Children

FLAPSS is not for children. The minimum age is 13, or 16 where local law requires it. If you believe someone below that age has an account here, tell us and we will remove it.