Privacy
What we collect
| Data | When | Why |
|---|---|---|
| First and last name | At sign-up | Account records and marketing |
| Email address | At sign-up | Confirming your address, service messages, and marketing if you opted in |
| Age | At sign-up | Confirming you are over 18, and shown on your posts |
| Posts and replies | As you write them | Running the board |
| IP address | On certain actions | Detecting abuse and automated sign-ups |
| A Google account identifier | Only if you sign in with Google | Recognising you next time you use that button |
Your phone number
We never ask for it. There is no phone or SMS verification on this site and no field anywhere that collects a number, so there is nothing to keep, nothing to disclose if we are compelled to, and nothing to lose if this database is stolen.
Posts containing a phone number are rejected automatically, which is about protecting the person writing it: replies already reach you through a relay address, and contact details on a public board are visible to everyone who reads it.
Marketing
We send marketing email only to members who ticked the optional box at sign-up. It is unticked by default, it is not required to create an account, and leaving it alone changes nothing about what you can do here. Marketing is by email only — we have no phone number to message.
You can switch it off yourself, in one click, on your data page once you are signed in. No form to fill in and nobody to ask — withdrawing has to be as easy as giving, and giving was a tickbox. Withdrawal stops marketing only; service messages about your own account continue.
Signing in with Google
Using that button means Google knows you have an account here. We cannot change that, and on a site like this one it is the part worth thinking about before you click. Google keeps its own record of which sites you sign in to; that record is theirs, governed by their privacy policy, and is outside anything we control or can delete for you. If you would rather Google did not hold that, sign up with an email address and a password instead — it is the first form on the page, and nothing on FlingList works better one way than the other.
What we receive from Google is your email address, the fact that Google has confirmed it, your first and last name, and an identifier for your Google account. Nothing else — not your contacts, not your calendar, not your photos, and nothing that would let us post or read anything as you. We do not keep the access token Google issues, because we never call Google again once you are signed in. We never tell Google anything about what you do here.
Google cannot tell us your age, so we ask you for it before the account is created. Nothing is saved until you answer.
If you signed up with a password first and then use the Google button on the same address, you land in your existing account rather than a second one. Where we had never confirmed that address, signing in with Google clears the old password — a deliberate precaution, because otherwise somebody who had signed up using your address before you did would still be holding a password to the account you just walked into. You can set a new one through password reset.
To unlink Google from your account, ask us. There is no button for it yet, and we would rather say so than show you one that does not work: an account created through Google has no password, and unlinking it without setting one first would lock you out.
Cookies, and Google Analytics
We set a session cookie when you sign in, and one that remembers whether you chose the dark or light theme. Neither is optional and neither tracks you across other sites.
We also use Google Analytics to count visits, which sets cookies of its own in your browser and tells Google that someone visited this site. Two things about how we have set it up:
- We do not send Google the text of anything. Google receives the address of the page you are on — a city, or a numbered post — and a label we wrote ourselves, such as "Region feed". It never receives a post's title or body, a username, an email address, or anything typed into a search or a form. Pages whose address contains something private, such as a password-reset link, are not measured at all.
- We have switched off Google Signals and ad personalisation. Those features would let Google tie your visits here to the Google account you are signed in to, across your devices, and feed them into advertising profiles. We have turned them off, so what Google gets is a count of visits rather than a record of you.
If your browser sends Global Privacy Control or Do Not Track, we skip analytics entirely: nothing loads and no analytics cookie is set. Both are a setting in most browsers, and some privacy extensions send them for you. That is the opt-out, and it works without an account.
Google describes what it does with the data at How Google uses information from sites that use its services, and offers a browser add-on that opts you out of Analytics everywhere.
What other members see
Your age, roughly how long you have been a member, and what you write. Never your name, your email address or your phone number. Replies travel through a relay address generated for each conversation, so neither side learns the other's address.
Where your data is held
On servers in the United States (AWS, Northern Virginia), regardless of where you are. If you are in a country that restricts transferring personal data abroad, that transfer is happening, and you should take it into account before signing up.
How long we keep it
- Account details — your name, email address and age: until you ask us to delete the account.
- Phone hashes, where a number was verified: until you ask us to delete the account. The number itself was never stored.
- Relay addresses: 30 days after the conversation they belong to.
- Abuse records, including IP addresses: 90 days.
- Records of bans: kept indefinitely, because a ban that expires with its own evidence is not a ban. These can include an IP address.
- Analytics: held by Google, not by us, for 14 months by default. We cannot delete it on your behalf — opt out before it is collected, as above.
What we do not do
We do not sell your personal data or pass it to third parties for their own marketing. We do not accept photo uploads. We do not ask for or store payment details.
Your rights
Two of these you can do yourself, right now, on your data page, once you are signed in: withdraw marketing consent, and download a copy of what we hold about you.
Correcting your details and deleting your account still go through us, and we would rather say so than present a page where some buttons are buttons and others are a person. Deleting a post removes it from the site; moderation records and records of bans are kept separately, as described above.
The copy you can download leaves out two things on purpose: anyone else's identity, including who replied to your posts or who reported them, and the internal detail of how our automated checks decided something — that detail is a guide to getting around them. Ask us if you need the reasoning behind a specific decision.
A note on risk
FlingList lists cities in countries where the conduct some members are seeking is a criminal offence. We hold your name, email address and age, and no amount of encryption changes the fact that we could be compelled to disclose them. We never collect a phone number at all, so that is one thing we cannot be made to hand over. If you signed in with Google, Google holds a record of that as well, and it can be compelled separately from us and without our knowing. Please decide what you are comfortable giving us — and which way of signing in you use — with that in mind.