Privacy policy

Version 1.0. In effect from 10 July 2026.

We argue that software should keep your data where you can see it. A privacy policy that did not hold this website to that standard would be an argument against itself.

The short version

• Reading this site sets no cookies and loads nothing from anyone else’s server. There is no analytics script, no tracking pixel, no advertising network, and no font, image, or piece of code served from a third party.
• We ask for your email address in exactly two places, and only if you choose to fill them in. Nothing happens until you click a link in a confirmation email.
• We have never sold, rented, traded, or shared personal information, and we will not. There is no exception for partners, affiliates, or an acquirer.
• Everything we hold sits in a database on a server we administer. No customer data platform, no marketing suite, no third-party form host.
• Write to privacy@reclaimourdata.org and we will tell you everything we hold about you, correct it, or delete it.

Who we are

Reclaim Our Data operates reclaimourdata.org and decides how the information described here is handled. Under the GDPR that makes us the data controller. You can reach us at privacy@reclaimourdata.org.

When you simply read this site

No cookie is set. Nothing is stored in your browser except one thing: if you use the light and dark switch in the header, your choice is saved locally under the name rod-theme. It never leaves your browser and it is never sent to us. Clearing your site data removes it.

Our web server keeps an access log, as every web server does. Each line records the IP address of the request, the time, the page asked for, the response code, the number of bytes sent, the browser’s user agent string, and the referring page if the browser sent one. We use these logs to keep the site up and to see whether it is being attacked, which is a legitimate interest under Article 6(1)(f). We do not use them to build a picture of you, and we do not feed them to any analytics tool. The log files rotate as they fill, and old ones are discarded.

That is genuinely the whole of it. You can check: open your browser’s network inspector on any page here and every single request will be to reclaimourdata.org.

Videos

Videos on this site are hosted by YouTube, which is Google. An ordinary YouTube embed contacts Google the moment the page loads, before you have decided to watch anything. Ours does not. What you see is a still image, served from our server, with a play button drawn over it. Google learns nothing about you.

If you press play, the real player loads from youtube-nocookie.com and Google receives your IP address, your user agent, and the page you were on, and handles that data under its own privacy policy rather than this one. That is the trade, and it is yours to make, not ours to make for you. If you never press play, no request ever reaches Google.

If you join the supporter list

We ask for an email address. We store it, along with the time you submitted it, the IP address you submitted it from, the page you submitted it on, and the exact wording of the consent you agreed to. Those last four exist so that we can show, if we are ever asked, that you really did ask to hear from us.

We then email you once, with a link. Until you click it, nothing is confirmed and you are on no list. If you never click it, the pending record is deleted seven days after that email was sent. If our mail queue never manages to send it at all, the record is deleted after thirty days. Once confirmed, we keep your address until you unsubscribe, which you can do from any email we send or by writing to us.

The legal basis is your consent, under Article 6(1)(a). Withdrawing it is one click and costs you nothing.

If you take the pledge

Taking the Local-First Pledge means publishing a promise. Some of what you send us is therefore meant to be public, and some of it is not.

Published on your listing

The name of the software, the developer or studio name, your website address, your own privacy policy address if you gave one, the platforms, the category, your description, your logo, the date you pledged, and the version of the pledge wording you agreed to. If the pledge is ever revoked, the date and the reason are published on the same listing.

Kept private

Your email address, the IP address you submitted from, the time, and a fingerprint of the exact pledge text you agreed to. The email address is used to confirm the submission and to reach you about the listing, including if somebody reports a violation. It is not published, it is not added to the supporter list, and it is not used to market anything to you.

Your logo

If you give us a logo address, our server downloads that image once, and from then on the directory serves our own copy from our own domain. We never write your address into the page. If we did, every person browsing the directory would silently send their IP address and referring page to your web server, and to the web server of every other developer on the list. We would have assembled a tracking network out of the logos of people who promised not to build one. This is the same reason the badge is yours to host rather than ours to serve.

Why a listing does not simply disappear

The pledge is worth something only because a broken one stays on the record. Ask us and we will delete your email address, your IP address, and every other private detail we hold. The listing itself, and any revocation attached to it, remains published: it is a record of a public statement made about a piece of software, and keeping it is the legitimate interest that the whole programme rests on. If you pledged under your own name rather than a studio name, tell us and we will replace your name with the name of the software.

A withdrawal is recorded as a withdrawal. It is not a revocation, and we will not describe it as one.

A note on both forms

The forms software we use records each submission together with the IP address it came from, the browser user agent, and the time. We keep it to catch spam and abuse. The forms are protected by a hidden field that people never see and automated submitters usually fill in, and by a limit on how many times one address may submit per hour. There is no CAPTCHA on this site, because every CAPTCHA worth using reports you to a company whose business is knowing who you are.

Email we send you

Our messages are delivered by Oracle Cloud Email Delivery, which acts on our instructions and sees the recipient address and the message. It is the only company that touches an email we send you.

Our emails are plain text. They carry no tracking pixel, no images, and no rewritten links. We do not know whether you opened one, and we prefer it that way.

Where all of this actually is

• The server. A virtual machine we administer, running in an Oracle Cloud data centre in Chicago, in the United States. Oracle supplies the machine. The database, the software, and the data on it are ours.
• The database. Reachable only from the site itself. It is not exposed to the internet.
• DNS. Cloudflare answers the question of which address reclaimourdata.org points at. It does not sit between you and this site, and it does not see the pages you request.
• Email. Oracle Cloud Email Delivery, as above.

That is the complete list of companies with access to anything. If you are in the United Kingdom or the European Economic Area, your information is processed in the United States, which does not have an equivalent data protection regime. We hold as little as possible precisely because of that.

What we do not do

We do not sell your personal information. We do not rent, trade, or share it. We do not disclose it for advertising of any kind, cross-context behavioural or otherwise. We do not profile you, we do not make automated decisions about you, and we do not enrich what you tell us with data bought from anybody else. Under the California Consumer Privacy Act we have no sale and no sharing to opt out of. If your browser sends a Global Privacy Control signal we will of course respect it, and there is nothing for it to switch off.

We will disclose personal information if a court with jurisdiction over us orders us to. If that ever happens and we are permitted to say so, we will say so.

Your rights

Wherever you live, you may ask us for a copy of everything we hold about you, ask us to correct it, ask us to delete it, ask for it in a portable format, or object to what we are doing with it. Depending on where you live these rights come from the GDPR, the UK GDPR, the CCPA as amended, or another law, and in some places they are worded differently. We do not intend to work out which one applies to you before helping you, so we extend all of them to everyone.

Write to privacy@reclaimourdata.org. We will reply within thirty days. We will not charge you, and we will not make you create an account to ask. We may need you to write from the address you signed up with, because it is the only thing that ties you to a record. The single limit is the published pledge record described above.

If we get it wrong you can complain to your data protection authority. In the European Economic Area and the United Kingdom that is your national supervisory authority.

Children

This site is for adults who build or choose software. It is not directed at children, and we do not knowingly collect anything from anyone under sixteen. If you believe a child has sent us something, write to us and we will delete it.

Keeping it safe

The site is served only over HTTPS. The database accepts no connection from outside the machine. Administrative logins are rate limited. No third-party JavaScript runs on this domain, which removes the largest single route by which websites leak their visitors. None of this makes a breach impossible. If one happens we will investigate it, tell the people affected, notify whichever authorities we are required to notify, and publish what went wrong.

Changes

This policy is versioned and dated at the top. When we change it in a way that matters we will raise the version, and we will tell the supporter list rather than quietly editing the page and hoping nobody compares. The history of this document is public, in the same repository as the code it describes.