Privacy

Nothing about you is stored. Browsing, searching, filtering, opening a listing and following a link to another site all work signed out, and none of it is recorded against you. The “recently viewed” row is kept in your own browser’s storage and never sent anywhere; clearing your browser data erases it.

Then these are stored, because the features need them:

• Your email address, so you can sign in and recover the account.
• Your password, hashed. The original is never stored and cannot be recovered from the hash.
• A display name, and a profile picture if you upload one.
• Your votes, your saved sources and any private note you add to one.
• Sources and corrections you submit, and reports you file.
• Sign-in sessions, as a cookie holding a random token — not your details.

Your email address is shown to nobody but you. Contributions are credited under your display name, or anonymously if you choose that when you submit.

Two numbers are kept, and both belong to a listing rather than to a person:

• How many times a site was opened. Pressing Visit adds one to a total on that listing. No account, no address, no session and no clock beyond the day the total last moved are recorded with it, so the number can say which sites people open and cannot say which sites you opened.
• Survey answers. If you answer the one-question survey, the answer is stored against your account so it is not asked twice, and it is only ever reported as a total with everybody else’s.

Both are on the statistics page, which is the whole of what is done with them.

• No third-party analytics. There is no Google Analytics, no Plausible, no PostHog, no tracking pixel and no third-party script on any page.
• No advertising, and therefore no advertising profile.
• No per-person browsing history on the server. Which listings you open is never recorded against your account or your address — see the counting section above for the one aggregate total that is kept.
• No location, no contacts, no device fingerprinting. Nothing on this site tries to work out whether you use an ad blocker.
• Nothing is sold, rented or shared with data brokers. There is no business model here to sell it for.

Two, both strictly necessary, neither used for tracking: one holds your sign-in session, and one records that an account has not confirmed its email address yet. There are no advertising or analytics cookies, which is why there is no cookie banner — there is nothing to ask you to consent to.

• The email provider. Verification and password-reset emails are sent through a third-party service, which necessarily sees your address and the message.
• The host. The server and database are run on a hosting provider, which holds the data on our behalf and keeps ordinary server logs.
• Nobody else. Site icons and profile pictures are stored by us and served from this domain rather than hot-linked, so the sites we list are not told who is reading about them.

Account settings has a delete button. It removes the account and its personal data, and signing in afterwards does not work. Contributions already published stay listed, with the credit detached — otherwise deleting an account would quietly delete other people’s listings. If you would rather the credit go too, say so and it will.

Questions, corrections, or a request for a copy of what is held about you: anarchyburn@gmail.com.

Couchlist is not aimed at children and accounts are not intended for under-13s. See the terms.