If you're just browsing the website, we collect the same basic information that most websites collect. We use common internet technologies, such as cookies and web server logs. This is stuff we collect from everybody, whether they have an account or not.
The information we collect about all visitors to our website includes the visitor’s browser type, language preference, referring site, additional websites requested, and the date and time of each visitor request. We also collect potentially personally-identifying information like Internet Protocol (IP) addresses.
We collect this information to better understand how our website visitors use our properties, and to monitor and protect the security of the website.
If you create an account, we require some basic information at the time of account creation. You will create your own user name and password, and we will ask you for a valid email address. You also have the option to give us more information if you want to, and this may include "User Personal Information."
"User Personal Information" is any information about one of our users which could, alone or together with other information, personally identify him or her. Information such as a user name and password, an email address, a real name, and a photograph are examples of “User Personal Information.” User Personal Information includes Personal Data as defined in the General Data Protection Regulation.
User Personal Information does not include aggregated, non-personally identifying information. We may use aggregated, non-personally identifying information to operate, improve, and optimize our website and service.
Why we collect this information
We limit our use of your User Personal Information to the purposes listed in this Privacy Statement. If we need to use your User Personal Information for other purposes, we will ask your permission first. You can always see what information we have, how we're using it, and what permissions you have given us in your user profile.
Under certain international laws (including GDPR), our properties are required to notify you about the legal basis on which we process User Personal Information. Our properties process User Personal Information on the following legal bases:
We do not intentionally collect sensitive personal information, such as social security numbers, genetic data, health information, or religious information. Although we do not request or intentionally collect any sensitive personal information, we realize that you might store this kind of information in your account, such as in your public profile. If you store any sensitive personal information on our servers, you are responsible for complying with any regulatory controls regarding that data.
If you're a child under the age of 13, you may not have an account with us. We do not knowingly collect information from or direct any of our content specifically to children under 13. If we learn or have reason to suspect that you are a user who is under the age of 13, we will unfortunately have to close your account. We don't want to discourage you from learning to code, but those are the rules. Please see our Terms of Service for information about account termination. Other countries may have different minimum age limits, and if you are below the minimum age for providing consent for data collection in your country, you may not use our properties without obtaining your parents' or legal guardians' consent.
We do share User Personal Information with your permission, so we can perform services you have requested or communicate on your behalf. Additionally, you may indicate, through your actions on our properties, that you are willing to share your User Personal Information. We will respect your choices.
We do not share, sell, rent, or trade User Personal Information with third parties for their commercial purposes, except where you have specifically told us to.
Advertising technology may include additional tracking by third parties, utilizing cookies, localstorage, or other similar technologies.
We do share certain aggregated, non-personally identifying information with others about how our users, collectively, use our properties, or how our users respond to our other offerings.
We do share User Personal Information with a limited number of third party vendors who process it on our behalf to provide or improve our service. Our vendors perform services such as payment processing, customer support ticketing, network data transmission, and other similar services. While we process User Personal Information in the United States, our third party vendors may process data outside of the United States.
We do share aggregated, non-personally identifying information with third parties.
We may share User Personal Information if we are involved in a merger, sale, or acquisition. If any such change of ownership happens, we will ensure that it is under terms that preserve the confidentiality of User Personal Information, and we will notify you on our website or by email before any transfer of your User Personal Information. The organization receiving any User Personal Information will have to honor any promises we have made in our Privacy Statement or in our Terms of Service.
Much of our properties are public-facing. If your content is public-facing, third parties may access and use it in compliance with our Terms of Service, such as by viewing your profile or repositories or pulling data via our API. Other third parties, such as data brokers, have been known to scrape our properties and compile data as well, including sometimes not in compliance with our Terms of Service.
Your Personal Information, associated with your content, could be gathered by third parties in these compilations of data. If you do not want your Personal Information to appear in third parties’ compilations of data, please do not make your Personal Information publicly available and be sure to configure your email address to be private in your user profile.
If you would like to compile data from our properties, you must comply with our Terms of Service regarding scraping and privacy, and you may only use any public-facing Personal Information you gather for the purpose for which our user has authorized it. For example, where a user has made an email address public-facing for the purpose of identification and attribution, do not use that email address for commercial advertising. We expect you to reasonably secure any Personal Information you have gathered from us, and to respond promptly to complaints, removal requests, and "do not contact" requests from us or our users.
Similarly, projects on posts may include publicly available Personal Information collected as part of the collaborative process. In the event that a post contains publicly available Personal Information that does not belong to our users, we will only use that Personal Information for the limited purpose for which it was collected, and we will secure that Personal Information as we would secure any User Personal Information. If you have a complaint about any Personal Information on our properties, please see our section on resolving complaints.
On some of our properties, you have the option of enabling or adding third party applications, known as "Developer Products," to your account. These Developer Products are not necessary for your use of our properties. We will share your User Personal Information to third parties when you ask us to; however, you are responsible for your use of the third party Developer Product and for the amount of User Personal Information you choose to share with it
If you're already a user, you may access, update, alter, or delete your basic user profile information by editing your user profile or contacting us. You can control the information we collect about you by limiting what information is in your profile, by updating out of date information, or by contacting us.
As a User, you can always take your data with you. You can contact us to download all of the data we have about you.
Generally, we will retain User Personal Information for as long as your account is active or as needed to provide you services.
We may retain certain User Personal Information indefinitely, unless you delete it or request its deletion. For example, we don’t automatically delete inactive user accounts, so unless you choose to delete your account, we will retain your account information indefinitely.
If you would like to cancel your account or delete your User Personal Information, you may do so in your user profile. We will retain and use your information as necessary to comply with our legal obligations, resolve disputes, and enforce our agreements, but barring legal requirements, we will delete your full profile (within reason) within 90 days. You may contact us to request the erasure of the data we process on the basis of consent within 30 days.
After an account has been deleted, certain data, such as contributions to others' repositories and comments in others' issues, will remain. However, we will delete or deidentify your personal information, including your user name and email address by associating them with the ghost user.
We use cookies to make interactions with our service easy and meaningful. We use cookies (and similar technologies, like HTML5 localStorage) to keep you logged in, remember your preferences, and provide information for future development of our properties. We also use cookies to identify a device, for security reasons. By using our website, you agree that we can place these types of cookies on your computer or device. If you disable your browser or device’s ability to accept cookies, you will not be able to log in or use our properties.
We provide a web page on cookies and tracking that describes the cookies we set, the needs we have for those cookies, and the types of cookies they are (temporary or permanent). It also lists our third party analytics and service providers and details exactly which parts of our website we permit them to track.
We use a number of third party analytics and service providers to help us evaluate our users' use of our properties; compile statistical reports on activity; and improve our content and website performance. We only use these third party analytics providers on certain areas of our website, and all of them have signed data protection agreements with us that limit the type of personal information they can collect and the purpose for which they can process the information. In addition, we use our own internal analytics software to provide features and improve our content and performance.
We do not currently respond to your browser's Do Not Track signal, and we do not permit third parties other than our analytics and service providers to track users' activity over time on on our properties. We do not track your online browsing activity on other online services over time.
We take measures reasonably necessary to protect User Personal Information from unauthorized access, alteration, or destruction; maintain data accuracy; and help ensure the appropriate use of User Personal Information.
In the event of a data breach that affects your User Personal Information, we will act promptly to mitigate the impact of a breach and notify any affected users without undue delay.
Transmission of data on is often but not always encrypted using SSH, HTTPS, and SSL/TLS. No method of transmission, or method of electronic storage, is 100% secure. Therefore, we cannot guarantee its absolute security.
Although most changes are likely to be minor, we may change our Privacy Statement from time to time. We will provide notification to Users of material changes to this Privacy Statement through our Website at least 30 days prior to the change taking effect by posting a notice on our home page or sending email to the primary email address specified in your account. We will also update our Site Policy repository, which tracks all changes to this policy. For changes to this Privacy Statement that do not affect your rights, we encourage visitors to check our Site Policy repository frequently.