Privacy Policy
At Observed.org, your privacy is not just respected. It is protected. We believe the free and regular exercise of your rights should never come at the expense of your personal privacy. That is why we collect only what we actually need, keep it only as long as necessary, and protect it with the highest standards of security and discretion.
This page says exactly what we collect. Where a third party is involved, we name it.
Information collected automatically
Like nearly every website, our web server keeps access logs. Each request records the IP address it came from, the browser's user-agent string, the page requested, the referring page if your browser sent one, and a timestamp. These logs are generated by the hosting software, not by anything we added.
We use them for security and troubleshooting: identifying bots and abusive traffic, diagnosing errors, and understanding roughly where visitors arrive from. Logs rotate monthly and older archives are discarded. We do not build profiles from them, and we do not combine them with anything else to identify individual readers.
We do not run Google Analytics or any other analytics package. There is no gtag, no measurement pixel, and no behavioral tracking script on these pages.
Site search
Search runs entirely in your browser using a static index. Your search terms are not sent to our server or to anyone else, and we have no record of what anyone searched for.
The pledge form
If you sign the pledge on our Take the Pledge page, we record your name and email address, your optional message if you write one, and your IP address and user-agent, which are captured with the submission to help us block spam and abuse.
That information is stored so we can record your pledge and occasionally send updates, no more than four messages a year. Your email address is never shared with anyone. We do not sell it, rent it, trade it, give it to advertisers, or pass it to any other company for their own use. We will not add you to any other list without asking you first. Signing is voluntary.
The form is protected by Cloudflare Turnstile. When you submit, Cloudflare processes limited technical data including your IP address to confirm you are a person, under Cloudflare's privacy policy.
Payments
If you buy advertising from us, payment is handled by PayPal. Billing and card details go to PayPal directly and are processed under their privacy policy. We never see or store your card number. What reaches us is the contact information you provide for the ad and confirmation that the payment succeeded.
Advertising
Three different things can fund this site, and they have very different privacy characteristics. We think you should be able to tell them apart.
Display ads sold directly by us. Businesses, usually law firms, book a slot on a specific page through our advertise page. These are labeled "Advertisement," reviewed by hand before they appear, and served entirely from our own servers, including any image the advertiser supplies. No outside network places or targets them. An ad appears only on the page it was booked for; pages nobody booked carry nothing. To bill fairly we keep first-party counts of how often an ad was shown and clicked. Those are aggregate totals on our own site, not a profile of you, and they go to no one else.
Google AdSense. When enabled, AdSense loads a script from Google on our pages. This is a third-party advertising network, and it behaves like one. Google and its partners may set and read cookies or similar identifiers on your device, may use them to show you ads based on your visits to this and other sites, and may collect information about your device and browsing. That processing is Google's, governed by how Google uses information from sites that use its services. You can review and change what Google personalizes at My Ad Center, and opt out of personalized advertising from many companies at once through the DAA WebChoices tool. We do not receive the underlying data Google collects, and we cannot delete it for you.
Sponsored and affiliate links. Some pages suggest a way to get help, such as connecting with a lawyer online, through a link that earns us a commission. These are labeled and tagged as sponsored in the page code. Nothing is tracked while you read. Tracking begins only if you click and leave, at which point you are on that company's site under their privacy practices, which we do not control. Using one costs you nothing extra; the price is the same as if you had found them yourself, and you are never charged for clicking.
If you make a purchase or donation
If you buy something from us or make a donation, additional information such as a billing address and payment details may be collected temporarily by our payment processor for the sole purpose of completing the transaction. We do not store or retain your financial information. Non-essential data is deleted promptly once the order or donation is processed. What we keep is your name and email address, for the communication described above.
What we do not collect
- We do not use persistent tracking cookies or third-party behavioral analytics of our own.
- Session data, such as login tokens or form security, is used only during your visit and is destroyed automatically shortly afterward.
- We do not share, sell, rent, or trade your personal information. Ever.
Data protection and disclosure
- Information is encrypted in transmission and in storage.
- Access to your data is strictly limited and monitored.
- We run our own server rather than renting space on someone else's, and accounts are isolated from one another at the kernel level using CloudLinux, so no other site on the machine can reach this one's data.
- Our systems are designed on zero-trust principles, meaning even internal access is tightly controlled.
We will never voluntarily disclose your information. If we are compelled by law, we will release only the minimum legally required, challenge any request that overreaches, and notify you if we are legally permitted to do so.
Why we cannot hand over the pledge list
Pledge signatures do not live on the web server. They are exported off it periodically and archived offline, and that archive is encrypted with a key we do not hold.
Two things follow from that, and both of them are in your favor. A demand aimed at this server, or at anyone hosting it, finds nothing to seize, because the signatures are not there. And an order directing us to produce a readable copy accomplishes nothing either, because we have no way to make one. We cannot decrypt our own archive. This is not a promise about how hard we would fight a demand. It is a limit on what we are capable of doing at all.
We take every measure available to resist any effort to identify readers who have taken the pledge. We defend your privacy with the same seriousness we bring to defending our own rights. We are all in this together.
Your rights
- You can unsubscribe from communications instantly, without giving a reason.
- You are welcome to use a pseudonym and a private email address. We encourage you to do whatever feels safest.
We have never sold anyone's personal information and have no intention of starting.
Children
This site is written for adults dealing with legal problems and is not directed at children under 13. We do not knowingly collect information from them.
Read it with them, though. Teaching a young person what their rights are is one of the better uses of this site, and we would rather they learn it from you at the kitchen table than from an officer at a traffic stop. We ask only that the interactive parts wait. Signing the pledge, writing to us, or filling in any form should happen once they are old enough to do it as an adult.
Changes to this policy
If what we collect changes, this page changes with it, and the date at the top moves. Turning advertising on or off changes what is described in the advertising section above, so check that section rather than assuming.
Questions about any of this go to info@observed.org.