PRIVACY

The waitlist

Your email address, and nothing else. It is stored with Kit, the email service that sends the alerts, and in a database on Cloudflare as a backup record. It is used for exactly two things: letting you know when the archive opens, and emailing you when a new declassified release drops. Unsubscribe anytime — every email carries an unsubscribe link, and unsubscribing removes you from the list.

Sightings and photos you submit

Whatever you type into the submission form: a title, your story, when it happened, and where — in your own words. Your name and email are optional. If you leave an email, it is used only to tell you whether your submission was accepted. Your photo’s location data is stripped before anything is stored: the form re-encodes the photo in your browser, and the server rebuilds it a second time, dropping every piece of location and camera metadata. The location we keep is only the place you typed, never anything taken from the file. Submissions sit in a private review queue until a person approves them. Nothing is published without approval.

The forum

The forum lives on a separate service — Discourse, at beyondbluebook.discourse.group — and it is behind login. What you post there is governed by Discourse’s own privacy policy and by the forum’s rules. This site does not see or store forum passwords: sign-in is handled by Discourse itself.

In your own browser

Your reading list and your sound setting are stored in your own browser, on your own device. They are never sent to us, and clearing your browser data clears them.

• No analytics. This site runs no analytics and no advertising trackers. We do not count your visits or follow you across the web.
• No photo locations. Location is never taken from a photo’s metadata, and it is never stored separately from what you chose to type.
• No selling, no sharing. Your email address is never sold, rented, or shared with anyone. It is used only for the list you joined.
• No auto-posting. Nothing you submit is ever published automatically, and no new release is ever posted to the forum or the newsletter on its own.

Two honest exceptions. Cloudflare, which hosts this site, may keep basic server logs as part of running the service — its own privacy policy applies to those. And opening the case map loads map tiles from Carto, a third-party tile provider, because the map cannot draw itself without them. That is the only third-party request the site makes.

Write to [email protected] and you can:

• Ask what we hold about you — a waitlist entry, a submission, or both.
• Ask for it to be corrected or deleted. A deleted submission’s photo is deleted with it.
• Ask to be taken off the waitlist — or use the unsubscribe link in any email, which does the same thing immediately.

We will answer from the same address. We will not ask you for anything we do not need to find your record — an email address is enough.

Privacy questions, corrections, and deletion requests: [email protected].

See also: Terms  •  Back to the homepage