Sterlbooru

Privacy Policy

Last updated: July 5, 2020

This privacy policy describes what information Sterlbooru (collectively "we", "us", "our") collects about you when you use our website or services (referred to as our "Site" or "Services"), how we use your information, and what rights you have in relation to your information.

If there are any terms or conditions in this privacy policy that you do not agree with, please discontinue your use of our Site and our Services. If you have any questions or concerns about this policy, or our practices in regards to your personal information, you may contact us at [email protected].

What We Collect

Information You Provide To Us

Summary: We collect information you directly give us.

We collect information you directly provide to us when you use our Services. What information we collect depends on how you use our Services. The information we may collect includes:

  • Account information. We collect your username, password, and optionally your email address when you create an account with us. We also store your account preferences and settings. You may update your account information at any time, including to change your username or to deactivate your account, as described below.
  • Content you submit. We collect content you submit to the Site. This includes images, videos, or written content you post or upload to the Site, including posts, comments, forum posts, translation notes, wiki pages, pools, artist commentaries, and any other contributions you make to the Site.
  • Actions you take. We collect information about actions you take when using the Site. This includes favoriting or voting on content, flagging or reporting content, sending private messages, saving searches, sending private messages, and viewing forum threads. This also includes any edits or changes you make to any content on the Site.
  • Payment information. We collect information necessary to process your payment if you make a purchase with us. This information includes your credit card number, security code, and expiration date, your email address, your location (such as your country, your postal code, your billing address, and your location at time of purchase), and your IP address.
  • Other information. You may choose to provide other information directly to us. For example, we may collect information when you participate in surveys, polls, promotions, giveaways, or other site-sponsored activities, or you request support from us, or you contact us directly by email.
Information We Collect Automatically

Summary: We collect some information about you automatically, including your IP address, information about your computer, and information about your site usage.

  • Log and usage data. We may log information about you when you visit or use our Services. This information may include your IP address, browser type and version, computer or device type, device characteristics such as screen resolution or operating system version, language and timezone preferences, or your geolocation or country information. This may also include information about your usage of the Site, including posts you have viewed, pages you have visited, links you have clicked, and searches you have performed.
  • Cookies. We may receive information from cookies, which are pieces of data your browser stores and sends back to us when making requests, and similar technologies. We use this information to maintain login sessions and to store account settings and preferences.
Information We Collect From Other Sources

Summary: If you choose to link other sites to your Sterlbooru account, we will receive profile information about you from those sites.

We may receive information about you from other sources and combine that information with other information we have about you. For example, we may give you the option to link your Sterlbooru account to your accounts on other sites, such as your Google, Twitter, or other accounts. If you choose to link a third-party account to your Sterlbooru account, we will collect information about you from that account as described in the section titled How We Handle Linked Accounts below.

How We Use Your Information

Summary: We use your information to provide services to you, to operate the Site, and to enforce our Terms of Service.

We use your information to:

  • Provide services to you. We may use your information to provide you with our Services, and to provide you with support or customer service.
  • Manage your account. We may use your information to allow you to login and manage your account, to store your account preferences, to help you recover access to your account, and to send you administrative messages or notices pertaining to you.
  • Protect our Services. We may use your information to maintain the safe and secure operation of our Services, including to enforce our Terms of Service, to detect and prevent abuse of our Services, to moderate our Services, to block spam, to prevent fraud, and to debug and troubleshoot problems with the Site.
  • Monitor usage of our Services. We may use your information to maintain and improve our Services, to analyze trends, to monitor site usage and performance, to generate internal reports and analytics, to research and develop new Services, and to provide public reports about usage of the Site, including information about popular searches, popular pages, and post view counts.
  • Facilitate account creation and login. If you choose to link a third-party account (such as your Google or Twitter account) to your Sterlbooru account, we may use the information you allowed us to collect from those third parties to create a new Sterlbooru account for you, or to allow you to login to Sterlbooru using your third-party account. See the section below titled How We Handle Linked Accounts for further information.
  • Respond to legal requests. If we receive a subpoena or other legal request, we may need to inspect the data we hold to determine how to respond.

How Information About You Is Shared

Summary: Most activity on Sterlbooru is public. We won't share your information with advertisers without your consent. We won't share information about you with third parties, except as required under certain conditions.

When you use the Site, certain information about you may be shared with other users, with Site moderators or other authorized users, or with the general public. For example:

  • Any content you create or submit to the Site will be visible to other users and to the general public, unless stated otherwise. This includes your uploads, comments, forum posts, pools, wiki pages, translation notes, and any other contributions you make to the Site.
  • Any edits you make to the Site will be visible to other users and to the general public, unless stated otherwise. This includes your tag edits, pool edits, wiki edits, translation note edits, artist edits, commentary edits, and any other kind of edit, change, or modification you make to any other content on the Site.
  • Your other personal activities on the Site, such as your favorites, favorite groups, and saved searches, will normally be visible to other users and to the general public, unless stated otherwise, or you choose to make these things private.
  • Certain information, such as your favorites or favorite groups, you may choose to make private. This information may still be visible to Site moderators or to other authorized users in connection with legitimate needs in operating the Site.
  • Your username will be publicly associated with any content you create or edit on the Site. The date and time you created or edited the content will also be publicly visible. Moderators may also be able to see the IP address associated with any content you create or edit on the Site.
  • When other users view your profile, they will be able to see information about your activities on the Site, such as your username, signup date, uploads, favorites, votes, post edit history, comments, forum posts, Gold or Platinum status.
  • When you send another user a private message, the recipient of that message will be able to see the content of your message, your username, and the date and time the message was sent. Recipients may choose to share your message publicly or with other users. Recipients may choose to have private messages forwarded to their email accounts and, as a result, any messages received by those users will be subject to the terms and policies of the user’s email provider.
  • We may, at our sole discretion, allow Site moderators or other authorized users to view private messages for legitimate needs in connection with operating the Site, such as to prevent spam or to enforce our Terms of Service.
  • We may allow third parties to access, collect, archive, or redistribute information collected from our API or from public data dumps we may provide. This information may be stored by third parties even after it has been removed from Sterlbooru.

Otherwise, we do not share, sell, or give away your personal information to third parties unless one of the following circumstances applies:

  • With your consent. We may share your information with your consent or at your direction.
  • With our service providers. We may share information with vendors, consultants, and other service providers (but not with advertisers or ad partners) who need access to such information to carry out work for us. The partner's use of personal data will be subject to appropriate confidentiality and security measures.
  • Aggregated or anonymized information. We may share information about you that has been aggregated or anonymized such that it cannot reasonably be used to identify you. For example, we may show the total number of times a post has been visited without identifying who the visitors were, or how many times a tag has been searched without identifying who the searchers were.
  • To enforce our policies and rights. We may share information if we believe your actions are in violation of our user agreements, rules, or other policies, or to protect the rights, property, and safety of ourselves and others.
  • To comply with the law. We may share information in response to a request for information if we believe disclosure is in accordance with, or required by, any applicable law, regulation, legal process or governmental request, including, but not limited to, meeting national security or law enforcement requirements. To the extent the law allows it, we will attempt to provide you with prior notice before disclosing your information in response to such a request.
  • In an emergency. We may share information if we believe it's necessary to prevent imminent and serious bodily harm to a person.
  • Business transfers. We may share or transfer your information in connection with, or during negotiations of, any merger, sale of company assets, financing, or acquisition of all or a portion of our business to another company.
How We Handle Linked Accounts

Summary: If you link other sites to your Sterlbooru account, we will receive profile information about you from those sites. We won't disclose any information about you to those sites.

We may offer you the ability to sign up or login using third-party social media accounts (such as your Google or Twitter accounts), or to link other third-party accounts to your Sterlbooru account. If you choose to do this, we will receive certain profile information about you from the third-party service. The profile information we receive may vary depending on the service concerned, but will often include your username, email address, profile picture, as well as other information included in your public profile.

We will use the information we receive only for the purposes that are described in this Privacy Policy, or to provide features that are described to you when you link your account. You may unlink third-party accounts from your account at any time, at which point we will delete any information about you we have collected from these services.

We will not use any information collected about you from third-party services for marketing purposes without your consent. We will not disclose any information about you or your usage of our Site to any third-party websites you have linked your Sterlbooru account with. Please note, however, that we do not control, and are not responsible for, the behavior of third-party websites. We recommend that you review their privacy policies to understand how they collect, use and share your personal information, and how you can set your privacy preferences on their sites and apps.

Controlling Your Information

Accessing and Changing Your Information

If you would like to review or change the information in your account, such as your user name, password, email address, or other settings, you can visit your account settings and update your settings.

Deleting Your Account

Summary: You may deactivate your account, but we may retain your IP address and your public contributions to the Site.

If you wish to to close your Sterlbooru account, you may deactivate your account here.

When your account is deactivated, we will delete your non-public personal information from our active systems, including your email address, password, account preferences, saved searches, and private favorites, and we will disassociate your username from content you have submitted to the Site, including your uploads, votes, comments, forum posts, private messages, translation notes, wiki pages, tag edits, and other public contributions you have made to the Site.

Please note that content that you have submitted to the Site will not be removed from the Site after deactivating your account. In particular, your uploads will not be removed from the Site, private messages you have sent to other users will not be deleted, your comments and forum posts will still be visible to others unless you delete them before deleting your account. Comments, forum posts, or messages posted by other users mentioning you by name or quoting you will still be visible to others.

We may retain certain other information about you even after you deactivate your account, including your IP address, your user ID, your past usernames, and other identifiers associated with your account. We may retain this information as required by law or as necessary for legitimate business needs, such as for preventing spam, abuse, or violations of our Terms of Service.

Controlling Email Communications

If you would like to opt out of receiving emails from the Service, you may unsubscribe by clicking on the unsubscribe link in the emails that we send or by disabling email notifications in your account settings. We may still send you emails relating to the use or security of your account, such as when resetting your password.

Controlling Cookies

Most web browsers are set to accept cookies by default. If you prefer, you can usually choose to set your browser to remove or reject first- and third-party cookies. Please note that if you choose to remove or reject cookies, this could affect the availability and functionality of our Site.

Other Information

Minors

Persons under the age of 18 are not allowed to create an account or otherwise use our Services. By using our Services, you represent that you are over the age required by the laws of your country to create an account or otherwise use our Services.

Data Retention

Summary: We keep your information for as long as necessary to fulfill the purposes outlined in this privacy policy, unless otherwise required by law.

We store the information we collect for as long as it is necessary for the purpose(s) for which we originally collected it. We may retain certain information for legitimate business purposes or as required by law.

When we have no ongoing legitimate business need to process your personal information, we will either delete or anonymize it, or, if this is not possible (for example, because your personal information has been stored in backup archives), then we will securely store your personal information and isolate it from any further processing until deletion is possible.

International Data Transfers

Summary: We store data in the United States and operate under US law.

We are based in the United States and we process and store information on servers located in the United States. We may store information on servers and equipment in other countries depending on a variety of factors, including the locations of our users and service providers. By accessing or using the Site or otherwise providing information to us, you consent to the processing, transfer and storage of information in and to the U.S. and other countries, where you may not have the same rights as you do under local law.

Information Security

Summary: We take reasonable measures to secure your data. We will promptly notify you of breaches of your personal information.

We take reasonable measures to protect your personal information from loss, theft, misuse, unauthorized access, disclosure, alteration, or destruction. We also enforce technical and administrative access controls to limit access to non-public personal information by staff members or designated representatives of Sterlbooru. However, although we will do our best to protect your personal information, transmission of personal information to and from our Services is at your own risk. You should only access our Services within a secure environment.

In the event that we become aware of a privacy breach which has resulted or may result in unauthorized access, use or disclosure of your personal information, we will investigate the matter and promptly notify you and the applicable Supervisory Authority of the breach, unless the breach is unlikely to result in a risk to the rights and freedoms of natural persons.

Changes to this Policy

Summary: We may update this policy from time to time.

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. The updated policy will be indicated by a new "Last updated" date at the top of this page. If we make material changes to this Privacy Policy, we may, at our discretion, notify you either by prominently posting a notice of such changes or by directly sending you a notification. We encourage you to review this Privacy Policy frequently to stay informed of how we handle your personal information.

Changes to this Privacy Policy will go into effect as soon as the updated Privacy Policy is accessible. By continuing to use our Services after changes to our Privacy Policy go into effect, you agree to be bound by the revised policy.