Privacy Policy

Depending on how you access this website, Encyclia.pub, we may access and process some of your personal information. This document is intended to explain how and why we do that and what options you have to access, correct, or delete the information we have stored about you.

If you have any questions not answered here, feel free to contact us via email to mail@encyclia.pub or on the Fediverse at @encyclia@fietkau.social. For legal inquiries, see the legal notice.

Generally speaking: wherever we access and process your information, it is in order to provide you with a technical function you have requested and fulfilling that function requires handling or storing your information, or it is to aid the detection of issues and the continued operation of this website on a technical level. In the following sections, this document will describe these reasons and processes depending on how you access Encyclia.pub.

This website is hosted in Germany. The handling of all information named in the following sections occurs on infrastructure commercially provided by Hetzner Online GmbH. Inquiries regarding Encyclia.pub and its handling of your personal information should be addressed to us using the contact details on this page. Hetzner Online GmbH is not responsible for how Encyclia.pub processes your information.

When Browsing Encyclia.pub on the Web

You can access Encyclia.pub as a website through any modern web browser. As you do so, we may detect the following information:

• Your IP address
• Your user agent identifier (that is, which browser and operating system you are using)
• If you come from a link on another website, we may receive information on what website it was

This information is logged anonymously and retained for up to 14 days. We routinely use it for the automated detection of irregular and hostile patterns of access. To guarantee that this website can operate publicly, we need to be able to detect when someone is using up a disproportionate amount of server resources or trying to attack our systems directly. Unless you know what things like “SSH” and “DDoS” mean, this will probably never affect you.

Encyclia.pub does not embed any third-party web content. It does not run online advertisements and does not forward your IP address to any external parties.

If you use the “Sign in with ORCID” function, this website will attempt to install a transient session cookie on your device. This is a technical necessity in order to provide you with the ability to log in. If your browser blocks our attempt to set a cookie, we will try our best to provide the same functionality without it, but it will work much less reliably. The session cookie expires automatically after 24 hours.

You are free to delete any data stored by this website on your device at any time and will retain full functionality. This website may use client-side preference configuration, such as dark mode detection, for a personalized usage experience.

We do not routinely connect your IP address to your ORCID record or the personal information contained therein. However, during the above-mentioned timeframe following your access of this website, while the corresponding log files are still in our possession, we could in theory be compelled to, e.g. via court order.

When Accessing Encyclia.pub via ActivityPub

You can use an ActivityPub server such as Mastodon to access Encyclia.pub. If you do, your interactions will result in some information about your ActivityPub account being stored in our systems. We will generally not divulge any information about your ActivityPub account to anyone, but your interactions may be visible in public statistics (e.g. like or follow counts) or as part of an anonymized account summary visible only to the corresponding ORCID record holder.

For any activity sent to Encyclia.pub from your ActivityPub server on your behalf, we store your account's ID, your inbox URI, and (if present) your shared inbox URI. This information is retained for as long as we have any interactions made by your account stored in our systems, or for up to 30 days after the last interaction has been undone. It will be deleted promptly if your ActivityPub server signals the permanent deletion of your account.

If you like or share Encyclia.pub content, or if you follow or block an Encyclia.pub account, we store a connection between your ActivityPub account, the content/account you interacted with, and the date and time the specific interaction took place. We store this information until you undo your prior interaction or your ActivityPub server signals the permanent deletion of your account.

If you send free-form text through ActivityPub (e.g. via a reply or a mention) addressed to an Encyclia.pub account that corresponds to an ORCID record, it is quietly deleted and not stored in our systems.

If you interact with the Encyclia project account, your interactions will be treated as they would on any ActivityPub social platform. That means in addition to the above-mentioned information, we may access and store your account name, display name, avatar, and other information from your public profile, and we may store and publicly display any of your relevant interactions, including free-form replies, until you undo/delete them or your ActivityPub server signals the permanent deletion of your account.

Note that Encyclia.pub may add other types of accounts in the future that have different specific policies about storing or displaying your interactions. If we do, this policy will be updated accordingly.

As an ORCID Record Holder

If you have an ORCID iD and a corresponding record at orcid.org, we may access the public data in it through ORCID's public API. Encyclia.pub may, if requested by someone, share your public information on this website or via ActivityPub. See ORCID's terms of use to learn more on the legal basis by which the public information in your ORCID record is accessed by us and may proliferate through open social networks. See ORCID's documentation on how you can change the privacy level for the information in your ORCID record. We will only ever access information that is marked as “public” and will take all measures at our disposal to ensure the information from your ORCID record that we have stored is up to date, including removing information from our systems that is no longer publicly visible on your ORCID record. Note that ORCID record data is updated based on a rotating queue, so updates may not be instant. If your data has not been updated after 24 hours, there may be a technical issue and we would appreciate if you contacted us about it.

Using the “Sign in with ORCID” function will give you the option to save certain preferences around the Encyclia account corresponding to your ORCID record. Your preferences will be stored by us and made available only to you when you sign in via ORCID. They influence the way your ORCID record is displayed on Encyclia.pub. On your preferences page, you can also find a function to download an export of all the information attached to your Encyclia.pub account, which includes a full list of all the information from your ORCID record that we have stored.

If you object to Encyclia.pub showing your ORCID record data at all, you can use the “Sign in with ORCID” function to access a full opt-out function. If activated, this will remove all your personal information from our systems. If your ORCID record has any ActivityPub followers through Encyclia, we will promptly notify their servers about the deletion of your information. Note that we cannot guarantee how external servers will react to this notice nor how long it will take them.

Using the “Sign in with ORCID” function, you have access to a function to permanently and irrevocably delete your Encyclia.pub account. If you use this function, all we will retain is a copy of your numerical ORCID iD and a flag noting that you wish to not have an account here. The reason that this process is irrevocable is that, once deleted, an ActivityPub account cannot be recreated under the exact same ID. Attempting to do so would result in unknown behavior, most commonly broken interactions with other ActivityPub servers. If you are considering a full account deletion, please think very carefully about whether the opt-out function would fulfill your goals instead. It also deletes all your personal information from our systems, but retains the empty scaffold of your account in case you change your mind later.