What we keep, and who else sees it

Stan's Legacy is a preservation archive run by a small research group. Most of the site is documents, and you can read all of it without an account or telling us anything. This page is about what happens when you do more than read.

Reading without an account

No account is needed to read the library, the patents, the forum archive, the bench notes, the glossary or the episodes. If that is all you do, what we hold is:

• Server logs. Your IP address, the page requested, the time, and your browser's user-agent string. These are how we find broken pages and abuse. They are not joined to an account and we do not use them to build a profile.
• A session cookie, so the site can remember a form you were part-way through and protect against cross-site request forgery.
• Your display preferences — light or dark, reading mode — which are kept in your own browser's local storage and never sent to us.

If you have an account

Accounts are by invitation and approval, because the forum is small and moderated. An account holds your name, handle, email address, a hashed password (never the password itself), and whatever you choose to add: an introduction, an avatar, notification preferences. We record when you last signed in and when you were last seen, so moderators can tell an abandoned account from an active one.

If you turn on two-factor authentication we store the secret and your recovery codes, encrypted. If you link a Discord account we store the Discord user id that link returns.

What you post is public. Forum posts, bench notes, comments and citations are the point of the site and are visible to anyone, including search engines. Treat them as published.

Private messages are not public, but they are not secret either. Messages between members are stored in our database in readable form. They are not encrypted end-to-end, moderators can read them where a report or an automated rule requires it, and we would have to disclose them if compelled by law. Do not use them for anything you would not want read.

If you buy or sell in the marketplace

Listing and buying involve more, because a parcel has to reach you and money has to move. For an order we store the buyer and seller, what was bought, the price and shipping cost at the time, the delivery name and address, the carrier and tracking number, and the status of the order. Sellers additionally store the country they ship from and the payment handles they have chosen to publish.

We never see your card. Payment is handled by Stripe; card details are entered on Stripe's systems and we receive only a reference to the session and the payment, enough to tell whether an order was paid. Stripe's own privacy notice governs what they do with it.

The buyer's delivery address is shown to the seller, because otherwise nothing can be posted. It is not shown to anyone else.

If you appear in a recorded show

Round tables are recorded. If you join one as a participant, your camera, screen and microphone are recorded, stored in our bucket, and published on the episode page along with a transcript of what was said. You will be told before recording starts. If you would rather not be recorded, do not join the call — watching is always anonymous.

Some episodes are made by the archive rather than filmed, and use synthetic voices. Where a synthetic voice reads words attributed to a real person, the episode says so on screen and the words are cited to a document you can read.

Who else your data reaches

We use a small number of outside services, and only these:

• Amazon Web Services — hosting, file storage, the content delivery network, and outgoing email. Effectively everything the site is made of sits here.
• Stripe — marketplace payments, as above.
• Google Analytics — aggregate traffic measurement. It sets its own cookies and reports to Google. It is not loaded in the admin area.
• LiveKit — carries the audio and video of a live round table while it is happening.
• Discord — only if you link your account, and only to confirm who you are there.
• Tenor — if you search for an animated image to post, that search goes to Tenor.
• YouTube — embedded players, loaded from the no-cookie domain so that watching a coil being wound does not earn you an advertising cookie.

We do not sell anything about you, and we do not share it with anyone not listed above except where the law requires it.

The site offers translation links that hand the page to Google Translate. Those are ordinary outbound links: following one takes you to Google, on Google's terms.

How long we keep it

Account data is kept while the account exists. Public contributions — forum posts, bench notes, citations — are kept indefinitely, because an archive whose record changes underneath its readers is not much of an archive. Order records are kept as long as we need them for tax and dispute purposes. Server logs are kept for a short period and then rotated away.

Deletion in our database is usually a soft delete first: the row is marked deleted and disappears from the site, and is purged afterwards. That is deliberate, so a moderator can undo a mistake.

What you can ask for

Write to privacy@stanslegacy.com and we will act on any of these:

• A copy of what your account holds.
• A correction to anything wrong in it.
• Deletion of your account and personal details.
• Withdrawal of consent to anything you previously agreed to.

One honest limit on deletion: we will remove your account, your personal details, your private messages and your name from what you posted. We will not usually delete the substance of public contributions that other pages cite and other members have replied to, because removing them tears holes in a shared record. If a specific post needs to go, ask and we will talk about that post.

To opt out of Google Analytics, use Google's own browser opt-out, or any tracker blocker — the site works perfectly well without it.

Children

This is not a site for children, and accounts are not knowingly given to anyone under 16. If you believe a child has an account here, tell us and we will remove it.

Changes

If this page changes in a way that matters, the date at the top changes with it and we will say so where members will see it. The current version is always here.

Who to write to

privacy@stanslegacy.com for anything on this page, or hello@stanslegacy.com for anything else. There is also a terms of use page, and an explanation of what the archive is.