Privacy notice

• You can read the whole public record without an account and without being tracked.
• There is no advertising, no analytics and no third-party tracking on this site.
• The exact position in a report is seen only by you and the moderators. The public record shows a rounded position.
• Your name, email address and account are never shown on the public record.
• We do not sell personal data, and we share it only as described below.

Yakhnama is run by Kashan Ghori, an individual in Pakistan, who decides how personal data is used on this site. Write to contact@yakhnama.com about anything in this notice.

Accounts are handled by a sign-in service on our own server. It keeps:

• your email address and a username;
• your password, stored as a one-way hash, if you sign up with a password;
• whether your email address has been verified.

If you sign in with Google or Facebook, that company tells the sign-in service your email address and name. The sign-in service keeps the address and drops the name. The company also learns that you used it to sign in to Yakhnama; its own privacy policy applies to that.

Yakhnama's database does not hold your email address. It keeps an internal identifier for your account, your role (for example, moderator), a display name if you set one, and when you were last active.

The sign-in service emails you only to verify your address or to reset your password.

A report holds what you tell us: the hazard, when you saw it, where (the position you choose on the map or take from your phone, and how accurate it is), a description, the language you wrote in, and any photos.

• The exact position is seen only by you, on your own report pages, and by moderators. Everywhere else, including the public record, positions are rounded to two decimal places of latitude and longitude, which moves them by up to about a kilometre.
• Your identity is not shown to the public. Moderators see the report, not who sent it.
• Corrections are made as revisions; earlier versions are kept for the record.
• Withdrawing a report keeps it on record, marked as withdrawn, and it is never published.

While you fill in the report form, a draft is kept on your device so you do not lose your work. It is encrypted with a key tied to your account, holds no photos, and is deleted when you send or discard the report, when you sign out, or after 72 hours.

• Photos go straight from your device to our file storage and are checked for malware.
• The original photo is kept privately with its hidden data (such as the time and place your camera recorded), as evidence for moderators. Only you and the moderators can see it.
• Before a photo is published, a new copy is made from the image alone: location, time, camera details and other hidden data are removed.
• A moderator decides whether each photo is published. Photos marked sensitive, for example showing injured or dead people or people who can be recognised, are never published.

You can send a report without an account. We do not ask for your name or any contact details. To keep out automated spam, your browser first solves a small puzzle; no outside service is involved.

A cookie lets your browser finish the report you started, and expires within a few hours. Reports that are started but never sent are deleted about a day after their time runs out. Once sent, a guest report cannot be changed or withdrawn by its author; if something is wrong, write to us with the reference on your receipt.

Trusted reporters, organisation members and moderators can send a report for someone without an account, with that person's consent. We record how consent was given (spoken or written) and which version of the consent statement was read. We do not record the person's name or phone number. The person who entered the report may add a private note; only they and the moderators can see it.

This site uses only the cookies it needs to work. None of them track you, and none come from other companies.

• Language (NEXT_LOCALE): remembers the language you chose, for a year.
• Session (yk_session): keeps you signed in. It is encrypted, scripts on the page cannot read it, and it ends when your sign-in ends.
• Sign-in (yk_auth): protects the sign-in step itself, for ten minutes.
• Report without an account (yk_guest): lets you finish a guest report, for a few hours at most.

The sign-in service sets its own cookies at its own address while you sign in. Report drafts are kept in your browser's storage, as described above. Signing out clears this site's storage on your device.

Like any website, our server records requests to keep the service running and secure: your device's IP address, the page requested, the time and your browser type. These logs do not contain what you write in a report, your position or your password. Web server logs are kept for about two weeks, other technical logs for a month at most. IP addresses are also used to limit how many requests one device can make in a short time.

• Everyone can see published, verified events: the hazard, the date, the rounded place, the impacts and their sources. This never includes who reported it.
• Moderators, who review reports, can see reports in full, including exact positions and original photos.
• The operator can reach the server and its backups to run and repair the service.
• Nobody else. We do not sell personal data or give it to advertisers. We would hand data to an authority only if the law requires it.

Everything is kept on a server we run ourselves: the website, the database, the sign-in service, file storage and the malware scanner. No analytics, advertising or cloud storage company receives your data. Connections to the site are encrypted.

Yakhnama is meant to be a long-term public archive, so reports and the events built from them are kept indefinitely. The personal data around them is kept only as long as it is needed:

• report drafts on your device: 72 hours at most;
• guest reports that were never sent: about a day;
• web server logs: about two weeks;
• backups: for a limited period, then replaced.

Some periods, such as for accounts that are no longer used, are still being decided. This notice will give them when they are.

• See your reports. When you are signed in, your reports lists what you sent, with the exact positions.
• Correct a report by revising it, or ask us to correct anything else we hold.
• Withdraw a report you sent with your account. It stays on record, marked as withdrawn, and is never published.
• Close your account. There is no button for this yet. Write to us and we will delete your sign-in account and clear your display name. Your reports stay in the archive, with nothing that identifies you publicly.
• Ask what personal data we hold about you, or for a copy of it.

Write to contact@yakhnama.com. We may ask you to confirm the request from your account's email address.

Yakhnama is not designed for children. If you are a child, ask a parent or another adult you trust before you create an account or send a report. Please do not send photos in which children can be recognised.

When this notice changes, the date at the top changes too. If a change affects data you have already given us, we will say so on this site before it takes effect.

Write to contact@yakhnama.com about privacy or your data. Other ways to reach us are on the contact page.