Privacy notice

WoolMap is designed to know as little about you as possible. Reading is anonymous and needs no account. This notice explains, in plain terms, the small amount of data the site does handle.

The short version

• Readers get no cookies, and there is no analytics, advertising or tracking of any kind.
• If you reply to a post, we store the name you typed and your reply. We do not ask for an email address.
• If you use the contact form, we store your name, email, topic and message, and delete them after 90 days.
• Our web server keeps standard access logs for about two weeks for security and operations.

Replies on posts

When you reply to a post we store the name you entered, the text of your reply and the time it was sent. Guest replies are held for review; approved replies are shown publicly under the post with your name. Replies that are not approved are deleted automatically after 30 days. If you would like an approved reply removed, contact us.

Contact form

When you send a message through the contact page, we store your name, email address, the topic you chose and your message. We use them only to read and answer your message or handle your request. Contact messages are deleted automatically after 90 days.

Writer profiles

Invited writers choose what appears on their profile: name, portrait, short bio, optional location and website link, and the posts they publish. That information is public by design. Writers can ask us to remove posts or their whole profile at any time.

Technical data

To protect the site against spam and abuse, your IP address is used in memory to limit how many replies or messages can be sent in a short time. It is not stored in the site’s database. Separately, the web server keeps standard access logs (IP address, page requested, browser user agent and time) for security and operations. These logs are rotated and deleted after about two weeks.

What we do not collect

To be clear about the things you might expect a social site to gather: WoolMap does not ask readers for an email address, does not build reading histories or profiles of visitors, does not record which posts you open, and does not use your data for advertising. There is no “people you may know”, no contact upload and no location tracking.

How long data is kept

• Unapproved replies: deleted automatically after 30 days.
• Approved replies: kept with the post until the reply, the post or the profile is removed.
• Contact messages: deleted automatically after 90 days.
• Server access logs: rotated and deleted after about two weeks.
• Rate-limiting data: held in memory only, never written to the database.

Cookies

Readers receive no cookies at all. The only cookie WoolMap sets is a session cookie for the site’s administrators when they sign in to moderate. We do not use analytics, advertising networks, tracking pixels or third-party scripts.

Third parties

Two outside services are involved when you load pages:

• Google Fonts (fonts.googleapis.com and fonts.gstatic.com) delivers the typefaces the site uses.
• Unsplash (images.unsplash.com) delivers the photos on the home page.

When your browser fetches those files, the provider receives your IP address and browser information, as with any web request. The site itself is served over HTTPS using Let’s Encrypt certificates. We do not sell or share data with anyone else.

Security

Pages are served over encrypted HTTPS connections. Pending replies and contact messages are visible only to the site’s administrators, who sign in to a separate moderation area. No system is perfectly secure, but we keep the amount of data small so there is little to expose.

Your requests

You can ask what data we hold about you, or ask us to delete it, through the contact page using the topic “Privacy request”. Please include enough detail (such as the post a reply was left on and the name you used) for us to find it.

Changes to this notice

If the way WoolMap handles data changes, we will update this page and the “Last updated” date at the top.