What Collr will never do with your data

Collr will never sell your data, never advertise to you, never show who's going to an event, and never put your profile in a search engine. This post sets out every one of those promises and the reason behind it.

For most websites, a privacy policy is a legal formality. For a site about kink, it's the whole deal. The things you put on Collr — the parts of the scene you're into, who your handler is, which nights you're going to — are things plenty of people in the scene keep separate from work, family, or just the rest of the internet. Some can't afford for them to leak at all.

So I made a set of decisions early, before there was much to protect, about what Collr would never do. Here they are in plain English. The legal version is the privacy policy; this is the why.

The nevers

We will never sell or share your data

Not to advertisers, not to data brokers, not to anyone. Collr makes its money from optional subscriptions for people who want more from their own page. That's the whole business model, and it means you're the customer rather than the product.

We will never advertise to you or track you

There are no advertising cookies and no third-party trackers on Collr. The only cookies are the one that keeps you signed in and a security token that protects forms. The profile analytics you see are simple counts of views and clicks on your own page — they don't follow you around the web.

We will never put your profile in a search engine

Every member profile carries a no-index instruction, and none appears in a sitemap. Your page is something you hand to people, not something that turns up when a colleague googles your name. The community directory is opt-in, and it isn't indexed either.

We will never show who's going

Events show how many people are going, never who — unless you choose to be named. Nobody can work out where you were last Saturday by reading an attendance list.

We will never treat your kinks as a statement about your sex life

Being a pup, wearing leather or calling someone your handler isn't a statement about your sex life, and Collr never treats it as one. There's even a non-sexual account setting so you can say so outright. We never ask about your sexual orientation or your health.

That said, UK law cares about what information could reveal, not just what you meant by it. So everything sensitive gets the extra care the law asks for: the roles and scene tags you pick, the people you link as partner, handler or pup, the events you're going to, and the "Tests regularly" badge if you show it. We only hold it because you added it, and you can remove any of it from your dashboard at any time.

We will never host explicit photos

Collr doesn't allow explicit images on the site, full stop. Under UK rules, a site that hosts explicit images has to run proper age checks — in practice, asking members for photo ID or a face scan.

We don't want to hold that. A copy of your passport or driving licence, sitting next to your kink profile, is about the most sensitive pairing of data there is. The safest way to protect it is never to collect it. So Collr stays gear, people and events, and nobody has to hand over ID to make a page.

We will never link your accounts publicly

If you have more than one account, nothing public connects them. Only Collr staff can see that link, and only so one person can't hold more accounts than the rules allow.

We will never give you a feed or an inbox

Collr isn't somewhere to scroll and it isn't somewhere strangers can message you. People reach you through whichever links you chose to put on your page. That's a design decision as much as a privacy one: no inbox means no unsolicited messages to moderate, leak or regret.

We will never touch your money

Collr sells no tickets and never holds an organiser's takings. Subscriptions go through Stripe, so Collr never sees or stores your card details.

We will never quietly bring in another company

Your data lives on a server in the Netherlands that I run myself. Collr's email runs on our own mail server too. Even the spam check on the sign-up form runs on our own servers, so visiting it doesn't introduce you to a company you didn't come here for. The handful of outside services we do use are all named in the privacy policy, with what each one sees.

What we do keep, and where

Never is only half the story. Here's what Collr actually holds:

• Your account: email address, display name and handle
• Your page: whatever you add — bio, avatar, cover image, theme, links
• The basics of running a site: sign-in times, and view and click counts for your own page

All of it is stored in the EU, on Collr's server in the Netherlands, whatever country you're in.

Taking it with you, or deleting it

You can delete your account yourself from Settings → Danger zone. Your profile is hidden straight away, and you get 30 days to change your mind by signing back in. After that, your data is removed or anonymised and your handle is released.

There's one honest exception. If an account is banned for breaking the community guidelines, we keep a minimal record — the email, the handle and the reason — so the ban can't be dodged by signing up again. A ban you can erase isn't a ban, and the people it protects are other members. The profile itself stops being visible to anyone.

Hold us to it

Promises are easy to write. What makes them worth anything is being able to check.

So: the privacy policy is dated, and when it changes, it says what changed and why — including the time it named a service we never actually switched on, and we took it out. Every update to the site has release notes. And if you think we've got something wrong, tell us. You can also complain to the Information Commissioner's Office if you think we haven't put it right.

Collr exists to make the scene easier to find. It should never make you easier to find than you want to be.

— Lyall Pup