NearlyFreeSpeech.Net Privacy Policy

Our Privacy Policy covers our treatment of information that we collect when you use our services. This information is divided into these broad categories:

Information About Members of Our Service

What we collect

We collect personally identifiable information when you register for a membership with us.

We automatically receive and record information from our systems about your use of our services, including but not limited to the following information about access to our member interface:

  • The User-Agent: header sent by your browser, if any.
  • The requesting IP addresses.
  • The date and time of the access.
  • Request content. (I.e., GET or POST parameters).

We use session cookies on our sites. These cookies should not be permanently stored on your computer; restarting your browser should eliminate them. We do not use third-party cookies, and we do not share cookie information with any third party.

How we use it

We use the information we collect for the following required purposes:

  • To manage your login information in our member interface.
  • To fulfill your requests related to our services.
  • To provide support to you.
  • To help verify your identity in the event you lose access to your membership.
  • To detect, investigate, and resolve problems with our service.
  • To detect, investigate, and prevent malicious activity.
  • To better understand how people use our service so we can improve it.

We use the information we collect for the following optional purposes:

  • To personalize your use of our community forum.
  • In conjunction with our provided installation of phpMyAdmin.

When we share it

For our business purposes

We provide web hosting services. The content of your website is information. We make that information available as necessary to provide the services you have requested in the way that you have configured them.

We share information with third-party payment processors to the minimum extent necessary to process payments you make to us or to resolve disputes, inquiries, or problems related to payments you make to us.

If you obtain domain registrations through us, we provide information to our registrar to the minimum extent necessary to process your registrations or to resolve disputes, inquiries, or problems related to your registrations. Domain registration contact information you provide is required to be published in the public Whois database!

For sales and marketing purposes

We will not use your information to market our products and services to you unless you specifically indicate you wish us to do so. Probably not even then. We do not use your personally identifiable information to market third-party products and services to you.

For filthy lucre

Over our dead bodies.

We will not sell, trade, or rent members' personally identifiable information to anyone. Ever. Period.

For legal reasons

We may disclose your personal information to law enforcement authorities of the United States of America if we reasonably believe we are legally required to do so.

We will not disclose your personally identifiable information to law enforcement authorities from other countries unless legally compelled to do so.

We will not disclose your personally identifiable information to any third party without your prior consent unless legally compelled to do so.

When we'll tell you

We will inform you of any cooperation we provide to any law enforcement authorities related to you or services you obtain from us unless we are legally prohibited from doing so.

We will attempt to notify you any time we are forced to disclose your personally identifiable information other than as described here, unless we are legally prevented from doing so.

How long we keep it

Most information is kept for the lifetime of your membership.

If your membership is terminated under normal circumstances, we will destroy active records containing your personally identifiable information as soon as it is reasonable to do so. Some information may continue to exist in our backups and archived records.

If we terminate your service for violation of our Terms & Conditions of Service or similar cause, we may retain enough information to document our action and the reasons for it, to prevent you from signing up for service in the future, to help detect and prevent similar actions in the future, or as needed for evidence for legal action or prosecution.

Information About Accesses To Member Sites

What we collect

We automatically receive and record information from our systems about all accesses to the sites that members of our service host with us, including but not limited to the following:

  • The User-Agent: header sent by the browser, if any.
  • The requesting IP addresses.
  • The date and time of the access.
  • The specific URL being accessed, including query parameters.

We do not store HTTP request bodies. We may store HTTP Response bodies for caching purposes.

In most cases, the information we record is not sufficient to identify an individual.

How we use it

Our information collected about access to our members' sites is used for the following purposes:

  • To fulfill the requests and provide our services.
  • To make sure our systems are operating properly.
  • For accounting purposes when sites are billed based on resource usage.
  • To detect, investigate, prevent, and resolve problems.
  • To detect, investigate, and prevent malicious activity.

When we share it

For our business purposes

We occasionally share our information about access to our members' sites with the security and abuse teams of other networks when that information pertains to accesses to or from their network and is directly relevant to malicious activity.

For sales and marketing purposes

Never.

For filthy lucre

Never, ever.

For other purposes

Our information about access to our members' sites is only disclosed when:

  • We have a really good reason and the relevant member's express written permission.
  • We are legally compelled to do so.

How long we keep it

Our information about access to our members' sites is typically retained for about four days.

In the event of problems or questions, it may be retained as needed to resolve the event.

In response to a reasonable request for preservation by United States law enforcement, we may retain information for a reasonable period of time pending the receipt of a legal order compelling disclosure of the retained information.

Other privacy considerations

Artificial intelligence

We do not train AI models using members' personally identifiable information, member site data, or our records of access to our members' sites.

Although we typically cannot necessarily prevent AI developers from scraping publicly accessible content of member sites, we do not purposefully share services that use or train generative AI models.

We suspect that our payment processors use AI models trained on transaction data, including our transactions, to detect and prevent fraud. Sadly, they don't appear to be very good at it.

Member site disclaimer

Our members may collect and retain information about access to their sites separate from the information we collect. This privacy policy does not cover their collection, use, or retention of information. Please contact individual site operators with any questions related to the collection, use, or retention of personal information by their site.