privacy policy
knoxville.plus has and intends to keep a strict operating budget. there may be times the service is inaccessible, due to quirks in magic, internet routers, holding your mouth that way, or just too many requests to cheap servers.
we don't have a grand budget, so we run a tight ship. one of the nice consequences of keeping our bill small is that we don't need to sell your personal preferences or usage history under the table to eat.
/search: we see your search long enough to answer it, but we don't save the search text or build a history of what you search for.
we are interested in the general idea of what Knoxville is looking for – but only if it can be determined without stepping on anyone's privacy. it can. the strategy we found is the core idea from differential privacy: before a search is resolved, it is matched to the topic it is most similar to in the search list (matching to known keywords reduces specificity of results, improving privacy – see the list here). the next step is randomization, so that no individual submission can be taken as a statement of what was searched for.
the point is to not collect anything for certain. we tie our hands so we can't rebuild a history of your usage of this site. we're especially careful with search – we don't want the opportunity to build a profile tomorrow from data we overzealously collected today. we rely instead on statistics to allow the set of responses to tell the general idea of things like “people seem to be looking for laundromats more these days.” you can see the complete list of topics a query can be matched with and a visual explaination of how it works here.
/sports is a different animal. it stores an identifier in a cookie so you can keep a score streak and be recognized by your handle when making submissions. on the server, that identifier is attached only to your voting choices, game submissions, first and most recent dates active, current and previous handles, and when any of that occurred. it is not attached to your searches or other knoxville.plus activity.
#chat really should be regarded as having no privacy at all. a chat log is what it is, a public log of posts by one or more contributors under their chosen pseudonym(s). we cannot promise anonymity in a public chat history. even without a real name, what you write may identify you or be connected to your activity elsewhere. deletions (either by you or a moderator) only remove posts from public display; the post itself and metadata related to it may still exist on our servers.