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Given we have a strict privacy policy, we want to be open with everyone. We wanted to give everyone insights into how we operate our site in a way to protect your privacy.
To start off we use Plausible analytics, but not the hosted version. In order to ensure that a 3rd party company isn't stealing data we host Plausible ourselves, and we make our dashboard public at all times. You can view that dashboard (and thus what we collect) over on our analytics page. You'll note that IP address information isn't displayed, nor is any way of following specific users around. Only the count of users, page views, and the countries of visitors is available.
Second, we store minimal logs, we only store logs necessary to operate the site and protect it from attacks. We never send these logs to a 3rd party, and we never allow it outside our systems.
Third, we need to talk about 3rd party services.
While we'd love to avoid 3rd party services entirely, at the end of the day it's not always possible. With that said you will ALWAYS find a fully up to date list of vendors we use that might possibly collect your data and their privacy policies on our privacy policy page.
In regards to Cloudflare in particular (since it can be controversial) we do not use any of their Web analytics products, and we do not use any of their Worker services. The only services we take advantage of is the DDoS protection and CDN services. Additionally, Cloudflare so far has held up audits that have confirmed that they take user security seriously and they've taken the stance in the past of wanting to anonymize data. If they ever change this stance and/or start selling user data to 3rd parties we will drop their services ASAP.
Lastly, we want to note that we have Strict HTTPS enabled, and all data is encrypted at rest. Additionally, all backups are encrypted as well before uploading (not at the backup location, but on our servers).
We will never sell your data, sell ads, or compromise our values for money. That's a promise we're making to you, and a promise we'll keep.
Thanks,
SysAdmins Zone Admin Team