Privacy notice

You can read folkroom without an account

Reading requires no account and no sign-in. We run no advertising trackers and no third-party analytics: nothing on this site tells any other company that you were here.

We do count how many times each page is read, because an archive that cannot tell which of its pages nobody can find cannot fix them. That counting is done by software we run ourselves, on our own servers, writing into our own database. It sets no cookie, stores nothing in your browser, and keeps no identifier for you. A visitor is counted as a one-way hash of an IP address and browser string, salted with a secret that changes every day — which means the same person is a new visitor tomorrow and cannot be followed from one day to the next, by us or by anyone who obtained the data. Your IP address itself is never written down, and there is no column in our database to put one in.

The record of a read holds exactly this and nothing more: the page address without its query string, the page’s title, the time, the website you arrived from if you arrived from one, and — of the request itself — the country, region and city the network reports, the browser and operating-system family, whether the screen is a phone, tablet or desktop, its size, and the language your browser asks for. Query strings are stripped before anything is written, so what you type into the search box is never stored. If your browser sends Do Not Track, nothing is recorded at all.

This is also why there is no consent banner. There is no cookie to consent to and no personal data to process for it; the counting is anonymous at the point of collection rather than anonymised afterwards.

What we collect, and why

• Your email address — to identify your account and send sign-in links. Required: there is no account without it.
• Your name and profile picture, if you sign in with Google — so your contributions can be attributed. Google provides these; we do not receive your password.
• What you contribute — edits, talk messages and the reports you file, with the time they were made. This is the public record the site exists to keep.
• Moderation records — if action is taken on your account, what was done and why.

What is public

Your edits, your talk messages, and the name shown on your account are public — that is what a public wiki is. Your email address is never shown to other users. Who filed a report is never shown to the person reported.

Who else processes it

We use a small number of services to run the site, and share with them only what they need: hosting and the database, email delivery for sign-in links, image storage, and bot protection on the sign-in form. We do not sell personal data, and we do not share it for advertising.

Your rights

You can exercise the first two yourself, immediately, without asking anyone:

• Access your data — download everything we hold about you as a file.
• Erase your data — delete your account. Your email, name and picture are destroyed and your sign-in links are severed. Your contributions stay in the encyclopedia, no longer connected to you: an article about Kathakali describes Kathakali, not the person who wrote it, and removing articles when a contributor leaves would empty the archive one departure at a time.
• Correct your data — edit your name with your sign-in provider, or write to us.
• Withdraw consent — deleting your account withdraws it entirely.

How long we keep it

Account data is kept while the account exists. Delete the account and the personal data is destroyed at that moment, not queued for later. Contributions are kept indefinitely as part of the public record. Moderation records are kept because a record that can be erased by the person it concerns is not a record.

Grievances

If something here has gone wrong — data you cannot get, an erasure that did not work, a use you did not expect — write to privacy@folkroom.org. We will reply within 30 days.

If you are not satisfied with the response, you may complain to the Data Protection Board of India.

Children

folkroom is not intended for children under 18, and accounts are not knowingly created for them. If you believe a child has created an account, write to the address above and we will delete it.