Our Web is not funded by knowing things about you, so this policy is mostly a list of things we don’t do. What follows describes what the software actually does today.
The short version
- No ads, no advertisers, and nothing about you is sold or shared for money.
- No analytics, no tracking pixels, no third-party scripts on any page we build.
- Even the fonts are served from our own domain rather than Google’s, so no request leaves for a third party before the page has finished loading.
- One cookie, and it only keeps you signed in.
- We ask your date of birth once and never store it.
What we hold
Your account. Email address, display name, handle, and your password stored only as a bcrypt hash — we cannot read your password and could not tell you what it is.
What you make. Your profile, posts, comments, direct messages, uploaded images and video, your theme and custom code, who you are connected to, and your notifications. Direct messages are stored as ordinary rows: they are private from other members, but they are not end-to-end encrypted and an administrator with database access could read them. Don’t use this site for anything that needs real secrecy.
Sign-in records. For each active session we keep the browser you signed in from and the IP address it came from, so you can tell your own sessions apart and so we can throw out one that shouldn’t be there. You can see that list, and sign any of them out, under Settings → Your data. A session record is deleted a week after the session ends, so this is a list of where you are signed in now — not a history of everywhere you have ever been. IP addresses are also used, briefly, to rate-limit sign-in attempts and signups.
Your date of birth — for about a second. Signup asks for it, the server works out whether you are 18, and then it is gone. What we keep is a timestamp recording that you confirmed you were an adult. There is no column for it in our database.
What we don’t do
We don’t build advertising profiles, run analytics, embed third-party trackers, sell or rent anything about you, or use your posts to train machine-learning models. There is no data broker on the other end of any of this.
One honest exception, and it’s worth understanding: members write their own pages, and a page can pull things in from elsewhere — an embedded frame, an image, a background or a font named in their CSS. When you look at a page that does this, your browser contacts that other site directly, and it can see your IP address, and a frame can set its own cookies. We can’t prevent that without removing the feature.
Two things narrow it. Profile pictures must be files uploaded here, so an avatar can’t follow you around the site reporting back to someone else — that one was possible until September 2026 and is not any more. And frames are sandboxed, and told not to send the address of the page they are on. What is left is the page you chose to open, loading what its author put on it, which is the feature working as intended.
Companies that hold data on our behalf
Running a site means renting infrastructure, and these providers necessarily touch your data in the course of storing or delivering it. They act on our instructions and none of them are given data for their own purposes.
- Neon — the database, so everything above except uploaded files.
- Render — runs the API, so requests pass through it.
- Netlify — serves the website itself.
- Google Cloud Storage — holds uploaded images and video.
- Resend — sends our email, and so handles your address and the contents of those messages.
Cookies
One: sn_refresh, which keeps you signed in. It is set to be unreadable by JavaScript, which is why signing in survives closing the tab without leaving anything sensitive lying around in your browser’s storage. Your short-lived access token is held in memory only and disappears when the tab does. There are no advertising or analytics cookies to decline.
Who can see what you post
Every post is public, friends-only, close-friends-only or private, and that setting is checked on the server every time anything is read. Public means public: a public post is readable by anyone on the internet, whether or not they have an account.
Uploaded files are held in a private bucket. When you are allowed to see one, the site mints a link that works for about an hour and then stops working. It means a friends-only photo is genuinely restricted rather than merely unlisted — the file itself isn’t reachable without a signature.
The limit of that, stated plainly: while one of those links is still fresh, anyone you pass it to can open it. Sharing a link to a private photo shares the photo.
Email we send you
Confirming your address, resetting your password, a welcome message when you join, and notifications about things that happen to your posts. Notifications can be turned off; the ones needed to operate your account cannot, because they are the only way back in when something goes wrong.
How long we keep it
Your content stays until you delete it or delete your account. Deleting your account removes your profile, posts, uploaded files, connections and notifications, and clears your files out of storage.
Three things survive on purpose. Backups roll off on their own schedule over a matter of days, so a deletion takes a little while to reach every copy. When an administrator removes something, a record of that action is kept — what was removed and when — because an accountability log that can be erased by the person it holds accountable is not a log. And if somebody reported you, the report itself stays in the moderation record with your name removed from it; the copy of whatever was reported is deleted ninety days after the report is resolved. None of the three is visible to other members.
Everything else that has an end date has a short one: a used or expired sign-in link is deleted after a week, and so is a finished session.
What you can ask for
Two of these you can do yourself, right now, without asking anyone. Under Settings → Your data you can download a copy of everything we hold about your account, and you can delete the account outright. Neither goes through us.
For anything else — a correction, a question about what a particular record means — write to support@ourweb.social. We are a small site and will answer in days, not months. If you are in a place with laws about this — the UK, the EU, California — those rights apply to you and this is how to use them.
Under 18
Our Web is for adults. We don’t knowingly collect anything from anyone under 18, and if we learn that an account belongs to someone under 18 we close it and delete what it held. If you believe a child has an account here, tell us at support@ourweb.social.
Changes
If this policy changes in a way that matters, we’ll say so on the site rather than editing the page and hoping nobody notices. The date at the top tells you which version you’re reading.
Talking to us
support@ourweb.social, or the contact form. Our Web is run by Cole Wuilleumier, an individual.