General Principles

Look, privacy policies are complicated and corpos do their best to obfuscate their intent with legalese and jargon because they know that most people aren't trained to figure that stuff out. In short, they're assholes and enjoy making asshole policies to perpetuate assholian virtues.

We don't like assholes, so we're trying to keep our privacy policy simple and easy to understand. This privacy policy is intended to limit the collection and retention of your information to only those things we need to provision your account, communicate with you for admin and moderation actions, and provide you with a way to access the fediverse. Outside of that limited scope, we will do our best to limit the collection and provisioning of your data.

Note that to allow us to provide a Mastdon instance, we must collect the IP address of the device you log in from, your browser type, and the app you are using to access The Speakeasy. Mastodon stores the logs of your IP for up to 12 months, so we strongly recommend that you use a VPN.

For the website, we collect only the incidental data needed to provide access.

Overview

We don't collect your personal information.

That's it. That's the policy.

Where the law requires us to gather your information for the purposes of what the fuck ever, we say... no. Fuck you we won't do what you tell us.

Information Collected

Between fuck and all.

Having said that, our web host may collect some basic information like your IP address and by proxy, your location. We can't do much about that. It's how the Internet works! And hey, they probably have a log of where you're visiting from, but we really don't care.

The following applies to the Speakeasy Mastodon Instance/

Account Registration & Profile Completion

Registering an account on this server requires the following information:

• A Username


• An E-Mail Address


• A Password

You may also, optionally, choose to provide additional profile information including but not limited to:

• A Display Name


• A Biography


• A Profile Picture


• A Header Photo


• Links to External Accounts

Due to the nature of Mastodon, your username, display name, biography, profile picture, and header image are always listed publicly. Your list of follows and followers is also listed publicly by default.

We at the Speakeasy cannot protect your "by default" public information, so we strongly recommend you take the following precautions:

• Do not re-use user names, display names, profile and header pictures, or biographical information unless you are comfortable with the possibility of your presence online being tied to your Speakeasy account.


• Do not share personally identifiable information that would allow someone to determine where you live, work, or adventure.


• Consider using a separate email address for your speakeasy account to further distance your Speakeasy and other online personas.

Message Submission

When you submit a message, the date and time is stored as well as the application you submitted the message from. Messages may contain media attachments, such as pictures and videos. Public and unlisted posts are available publicly. When you feature a post on your profile, that is also publicly available information.

Your posts are delivered to your followers and are visible by admins and users on other instances with which we federate. They may also be searchable using keywords and hashtags on other instances. While your security settings can limit this reach, speakeasers posting on the fediverse should assume that their posts may end up visible to the general public and protect themselves accordingly.

Boosting and favoriting posts should also be considered public acts; do not favorite or boost anything with which you would rather not be associated.

Direct & Followers Only Posts

Do not rely on direct and followers only posts for security.

Direct and followers only posts use the infrastructure of Mastodon and the fediverse generally to limit the reach of those posts, but direct and followers only posts are not secure. They are not encrypted, nor particularly well protected, and can be viewed by the administrators of both the originating and destination instances. We strongly recommend that you limit sending sensitive information through direct or followers only messages unless you have thoroughly considered the risks.

For secure communications, The Speakeasy recommends Signal. Diotima would be happy to walk you through the basic of setting up a fediverse only Signal install should you wish to do so.

Followers and Follows

You have the option of either allowing all follow request or to limit your follows to approved people only. Note that every administrator on every server for your every follower can, in theory, see your followers only posts. If you intend to use followers only posts, we recommend vetting your followers carefully.

Use of Information

The information we collect from you may be used in the following ways

• To provide the core functionality of Mastodon. You can only interact with other people's content and post your own content when you are logged in.


• To aid moderation of the Speakeasy instance, for example comparing your IP address with other known ones to determine ban evasion or other violations.
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• The email address you provide may be used to send you information, notifications about other people interacting with your content or sending you messages, and to respond to inquiries, and/or other requests or questions.

Security of Your Data

We will make sure that our host is ensuring that the Mastodon software on which the instance is running is up to date and secure. We pledge to move the instance should the host fail to do so.

We operate on a principle of non-cooperation with anti-privacy and anti-rights regimes. While we cannot guarantee that the host will not share what they know, we at the Speakeasy will never share your information in support of anti-rights or anti-privacy regimes. We may, however, cooperate with law enforcement if you've violated laws that we consider legitimate (stalking, harassment, threats) uses of government power.

We may use your information when moderating the instance, but we pledge to limit our use of that data to no more than is necessary to complete our moderation activities. We may also share that information with other, trusted instances to properly investigate a claim.

We do not sell your data, we will never sell your data, and we will have words with our host if they attempt to sell your data. Your data is yours. We will only share your data as is necessary to ensure the operation of the instance.

We will encourage you to maintain your own personal privacy to limit what we could be forced to share under duress. Fuck authoritarianism. Fuck Fascism.

Data Retention Policy

You may delete your account at any time. We will make a good faith effort to delete any backups of your data maintained by our host.

You may request and download an archive of your content, including your posts, media attachments, profile picture, and header image, once every seven days. We recommend you do so regularly in case of catastrophic failure of the instance.

Age Restrictions

There is no age requirement to use this website.

Given the distributed nature of the Fediverse, we have no means of age verifying those who browse the public feed of the Instance, nor would we institute one if we could. Fuck agewalls.

To join the Speakeasy, you must be at least 18 years old. By accepting an invitation to create an account, you agree that you satisfy the age requirement.