Privacy Policy

What information do we collect?

• Basic account information: If you register on this server, you may be asked to enter a username, an e-mail address and a password. You may also enter additional profile information such as a display name and biography, and upload a profile picture and header image. The username, display name, biography, profile picture and header image are always listed publicly.
• Posts, following and other public information: The list of people you follow is listed publicly, the same is true for your followers. When you submit a message, the date and time is stored as well as the application you submitted the message from. Messages may contain media attachments, such as pictures and videos. Public and unlisted posts are available publicly. When you feature a post on your profile, that is also publicly available information. Your posts are delivered to your followers, in some cases it means they are delivered to different servers and copies are stored there. When you delete posts, this is likewise delivered to your followers. The action of reblogging or favouriting another post is always public.
• Direct and followers-only posts: All posts are stored and processed on the server. Followers-only posts are delivered to your followers and users who are mentioned in them, and direct posts are delivered only to users mentioned in them. In some cases it means they are delivered to different servers and copies are stored there. We make a good faith effort to limit the access to those posts only to authorized persons, but other servers may fail to do so. Therefore it's important to review servers your followers belong to. You may toggle an option to approve and reject new followers manually in the settings. Please keep in mind that the operators of the server and any receiving server may view such messages, and that recipients may screenshot, copy or otherwise re-share them. Do not share any dangerous information over Mastodon.
• IPs and other metadata: When you log in, the Mastodon software records the IP address you log in from, as well as the name of your browser application. All the logged in sessions are available for your review and revocation in the settings. We also may retain server logs which include the IP address of every request to our server for the purposes of troubleshooting and diagnostics. These logs for Postgres, nginx, and redis are removed automatically after approximately 7 days (we use logrotate with daily rotation and a rotatesetting of 7).
• BackupsWe take regular backups of the system to safeguard against accidental data loss, which necessarily requires keeping copies of whatever was in the system at the time. Backups are retained on encrypted, offline storage, but we try to limit the data that makes it onto the backups to only that data required to successfully restore the service.
• Suggestions WelcomeIf you have suggestions for how we can keep less information about users of the service and therefore limit the amount of data available for discovery or abuse my malicious actors, we are happy to receive them.

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What do we use your information for?

Any of the information we collect from you may be used in the following ways:

• To provide the core functionality of Mastodon. You can only interact with other people's content and post your own content when you are logged in. For example, you may follow other people to view their combined posts in your own personalized home timeline.
• To aid moderation of the community, for example comparing your IP address with other known ones to determine ban evasion or other violations.
• The email address you provide may be used to send you information, notifications about other people interacting with your content or sending you messages, and to respond to inquiries, and/or other requests or questions.

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How do we protect your information?

We implement a variety of security measures to maintain the safety of your personal information when you enter, submit, or access your personal information. Among other things, your browser session, as well as the traffic between your applications and the API, are secured with SSL, and your password is hashed using a strong one-way algorithm. You may enable two-factor authentication to further secure access to your account.

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What is our data retention policy?

We will make a good faith effort to:

• Retain server logs containing the IP address of all requests to this server, in so far as such logs are kept, no more than 90 days.
• Retain the IP addresses associated with registered users no more than 1 week.

You can request and download an archive of your content, including your posts, media attachments, profile picture, and header image.

You may irreversibly delete your account at any time.

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Do we use cookies?

Yes. Cookies are small files that a site or its service provider transfers to your computer's hard drive through your Web browser (if you allow). These cookies enable the site to recognize your browser and, if you have a registered account, associate it with your registered account.

We use cookies to understand and save your preferences for future visits.

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Do we disclose any information to outside parties?

We do not sell, trade, or otherwise transfer to outside parties your personally identifiable information. This does not include trusted third parties who assist us in operating our site, conducting our business, or servicing you, so long as those parties agree to keep this information confidential. We may also release your information when we believe release is appropriate to comply with the law, enforce our site policies, or protect ours or others rights, property, or safety.

Your public content may be downloaded by other servers in the network. Your public and followers-only posts are delivered to the servers where your followers reside, and direct messages are delivered to the servers of the recipients, in so far as those followers or recipients reside on a different server than this.

When you authorize an application to use your account, depending on the scope of permissions you approve, it may access your public profile information, your following list, your followers, your lists, all your posts, and your favourites. Applications can never access your e-mail address or password.

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Use of eigenmagic.net for research

Researchers who wish to study this instance or our users by collecting data using the API or through any other means that does not involve an "opt-in" from individual users are required to submit their protocol, analysis plan and all relevant ethics approval documentation from their institutional review board or departmental internal review documentation by email to: research at eigenmagic dot-com. You may also be required to submit code you plan to execute so that it can be tested to ensure it does not degrade the quality of service to other users.

This does not apply to, e.g. surveys circulated on the instance that individual users can consent to participating in. This does apply to database scraping software, or any means of recording user activity where our users might be surprised that they were included, because they were not given a chance to consent.

Many of our users came to this instance in order to avoid being included in unethical social media research, and so we place a higher value on conducting research on human subjects with informed consent than most other social media, in order to maintain high ethical standards.

At the admin's discretion, you may be asked to submit your research protocol, and the institution that is providing ethical review, even in the case that it is an opt-in survey. Failure to disclose your research plan may result in closure of your account, or having your network banned from our service.

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Site usage by children

This system is not designed to be used by persons under the age of 18. If you are under the age of 18, do not use this service.

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Changes to our Privacy Policy

If we decide to change our privacy policy, we will post those changes on this page.

This document is CC-BY-SA. It was last updated 13 January, 2019.

Originally adapted from the Mastodon privacy policy, which was itself originally adapted from the Discourse privacy policy.