NixNet/privacy-policy.md

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page Privacy Policy I encourage you to read the whole document. It's not particularly long or difficult to understand. What's being done with your data? /privacy/ /assets/posts/privacy.png

Privacy Policy

This will hopefully be the briefest "legal" document you've ever read as well as the most readable. If you need additional information let me know and I'll add it.

IP Address

Some applications (Gitea, Mastodon, Mumble, XMPP) collect your IP when you register. At the moment, that information is kept indefinitely. However, I'm working on either completely disabling it or setting something up that will periodically delete stored IP addresses. When I do, this document will be updated accordingly.

If you don't want me to have that information to begin with, just use Tor Browser.

Email Address

When you register for a service using an email address, that is obviously collected. You can control whether it's a real one or not. Even though I can see them for services like Gitea and Mastodon, I don't care and won't send you unsolicited mail.

Note: whatever address you use for git is visible in commits.

Browser Fingerprint

Your web browser communicates uniquely identifying information to all websites it visits by allowing the site to know details about your operating system, browser information, plugins installed, fonts installed, screen resolution, and much more. I don't care about that either and, if some services do collect that for their own use (I'm 99% sure none of them do), I'm not going to look at it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Usage and storage of collected information

For most services: Whatever data is collected is stored on one server in Germany and won't be shared with any third parties whatsoever.

For Nextcloud: Whatever data is collected is stored on one server in my living room and won't be shared with any third parties either. User's files are encrypted at rest so no one can hack into my server and steal them. I do have the encryption key so I could decrypt and view your files. I'm not going to bother with that though because I don't have any interest in looking at your personal stuff. That's your business and I won't invade your privacy.

DNS services

In short:

  • Haproxy TCP/HTTP logs are disabled. No IP addresses are collected.
  • Unbound debug logs are enabled (verbosity: 1).
  • Query amounts coming specifically from the DNS-over-TLS server aren't counted.
  • Website/DNS-over-HTTPS gateway's NGINX logs are disabled.

To elaborate on Unbound's verbosity, if you have it installed, you can run man unbound.conf, search verbosity and read it yourself. More human-readably . . .

  • Level 0 only outputs errors
  • Level 1 gives high-level operational information (how Unbound is running)
  • Level 2 gives detailed operational information
  • Level 3 shows the admin what queries are going through Unbound
  • Level 4 gives lower-level algorithm information
  • Level 5 logs client information

There's no warranty, no uptime assurance, etc. so I recommend using multiple resolvers; that also improves privacy because the DNS queries are spread across multiple providers

Exceptions

I do live in the US; I have two servers here, one in Germany, and another in Luxmebourg. If, for whatever reason, I'm compelled by law enforcement to give up your email, IP address, or any other information, I will. I don't want to. As such, I do whatever I can to make sure I don't have that information. If I don't have it, I can't share it.

Recommendations

To mitigate invasions of privacy like this, use a throwaway email address for registration, such as one from anonbox if you want a temporary address or cock.li for something a bit more permanent, provide a fake name, and use the service from behind Tor or a VPN. Rather than a VPN, however, I strongly recommend using Tor across all devices. They have an Android version now and there's another browser for iOS that they recommend called Onion Browser. I don't use iOS so I can't say whether or not it's any good, just that the Tor Project recommends it below the Android section.