OpenWiki:Privacy policy

This installation of OpenWiki keeps as little about you as it can while still working as a wiki.

• Page text. Every revision you save is kept permanently, along with the name it was credited to and the time of the edit. This is public by design: an encyclopedia that anyone can edit has to record who changed what.
• Your account, if you register one. A username and a password. The password is never stored: what is kept is a scrypt hash of it, with a random salt unique to your account, which cannot practically be reversed to recover the password.
• A session cookie. Logging in sets a cookie called ow_session holding your username, an expiry date and a signature. It is marked HttpOnly, so page scripts cannot read it, and the signature is checked on every request, so the cookie cannot be edited to claim another name. It expires after 30 days, and logging out clears it immediately.
• The address anonymous discussion messages are posted from. If you post in a discussion without being logged in, the IP address your request came from is stored with the message and shown publicly beside it, in the same way unregistered edits are attributed on Wikipedia. It is what lets you correct or delete your own message afterwards, since there is no account to identify you by.
• Display preferences. Your theme, text size and layout width are stored in your browser's local storage. They never reach the server.

An IP address is personal information in many jurisdictions, so it is worth being exact about what happens to it here:

• It is recorded only for discussion messages posted without an account. Page edits record no address at all – they are attributed to Anonymous and nothing else.
• It is shown to everybody who can read the message, and it stays there as long as the message does.
• Logging in avoids it entirely. A message posted from an account records the account name and no address.
• An administrator running this site can set OPENWIKI_SHOW_ANON_IP=0, which keeps messages tied to their origin, so you can still edit your own, but publishes a short pseudonym such as #4b7c instead of the address itself.

If you are running OpenWiki publicly rather than for yourself, treat that setting as a real decision: publishing addresses is long-standing wiki practice, but it exposes readers who did not think about it, and data-protection law in several countries expects you to have a reason for it and to say so plainly.

No email addresses, no analytics, no third-party scripts, and no addresses for anything other than the case described above. Nothing is sent to any other service. Because no email address is collected, there is no password reset: an account whose password is lost cannot be recovered.

Editing does not require an account. An edit made without being logged in is credited to Anonymous, always that exact name, with nothing recorded that would distinguish one anonymous editor from another.

A name in a page history is either Anonymous or a registered account. Registered names are unique and reserved, so an edit attributed to an account really was made by someone holding that account's password. Names are not tied to real-world identities, and OpenWiki makes no attempt to verify who anybody is.