Privacy

common-lisp.net is held by the Stichting Common Lisp Foundation, a non-profit registered in the Netherlands, which is responsible for what is described here. Write to clf@cl-foundation.org about anything on this page, including the requests at the end of it. The Foundation's own site, cl-foundation.org, is served by the same program and keeps nothing this page does not say.

The short version: no advertising, no third-party analytics, no tracking cookies, and nothing sold or shared beyond what a payment needs. The program that does all of this is public, so every sentence below can be checked against it.

Reading the site

Visitor counts. The numbers at the foot of each page are counted on the server as pages go out. A visitor is told apart by a digest of their address and browser name, taken with a secret that is made fresh every day and thrown away at the end of it, along with the digests. What is written down is only how many pages were shown and to how many visitors, per page and per day. No address is ever written down.

Server logs. Like any web server, the site's own and the proxy in front of it keep ordinary access logs (the address, the time, the page asked for, the browser's name) for running the site and protecting it from abuse. They are not used for anything else and are rotated away.

Your browser. Your choice of light or dark theme and of skin is kept in your own browser's storage, not sent to the site. The image lab keeps the identifier of your conversation with its agent in the tab's session storage, which goes when the tab closes. The site sets no cookies of its own.

Custom images

What you type to the agent is sent to the language model that answers it (Anthropic's Claude, through the site's own account) and is kept with the kit it led to, so the service can be improved. It is not kept with your address. Please do not put personal details in a prompt.

Limits. To keep one visitor from spending the community pot, the site counts prompts and builds per address. Those counts are held in memory only, for an hour (prompts) or a day (builds), and are never written down.

Kits and builds. A kit and the image built from it are public: the kit is an address anyone can read, and a hosted build is a public project and image in the custom-images group. Hosted builds are deleted after 30 days.

Paying

Top-ups to the community pot and gifts to the general fund are taken by Stripe, the site's payment processor. Stripe's script is loaded only when you choose to pay. Your card details, and the email address for a receipt if you give one, go to Stripe and are not kept here. The site keeps the amount, the currency, the time and Stripe's reference for the payment, and the admins are told the amount. Stripe keeps its own records of the payment, as the law requires of it.

Posting a meeting

A meeting posted on the calendar is public as soon as it is posted: its name, time, place, the address to join it, its description and the organizer's name, as they were typed, on the page and in the calendar feed. The organizer's email address is not shown; it is kept with the meeting, with the address the form was sent from, for the admins, to ask about the meeting or to deal with abuse. The site counts the meetings posted from each address for an hour, in memory only. A meeting taken down stays in the site's record, not on the page; write to the address at the top of this page to have it deleted.

The meeting room

The commons and the other rooms of meet.common-lisp.net run on the site's own meeting server. Its page and script are fetched from that server only when you press the button to enter. Sound and video pass through the server to the others in the room and are not recorded by it unless a recording is asked for (below); anyone in a room can, of course, record what their own screen shows. The name you type on the way in is shown to the room and kept nowhere.

Pictures of the commons. The commons is open to anyone, so somebody has to be able to see what happened there when a problem is reported. An automated participant, shown in the room as the room keeper, keeps one small still picture of the room each minute while anyone is in it: what the room's tiles show, cameras included, at 640 pixels across. No sound is kept. The pictures are held on the site's own server, can be seen only by its admins, are used only to judge a report of abuse, and are deleted after 24 hours. The basis is the Foundation's legitimate interest in keeping an open room safe to walk into. Rooms other than the commons have no keeper and no pictures.

The meeting recording service. A meeting is recorded, sound and picture, only when someone in it asks: a moderator with the meeting server's Record button, or in the commons anyone, through the room keeper. The server then shows everyone in the room that it is being recorded and says so aloud. The recording is a video file on the site's own server, at a page whose address only the room's chat and the admins are given. Whoever has that address can download it. It is deleted after 24 hours, unless someone pays from the community pot to keep it longer, and then at the end of what was paid for. If you are in a recording and want it deleted sooner, write to the address at the top of this page.

The watch. The server's watch writes down when a room opens and closes and how many are in it, with an anonymous number for each arrival that means nothing outside that visit, and tells the admins when people come into the commons.

The other services

GitLab and the mailing lists are separate programs on common-lisp.net, each with its own accounts. What you put into them (your profile, your commits, your messages to a list) is kept by them, and the list archives and public projects are public by design.

Your rights

You may ask what the site holds about you, have it corrected or deleted, or object to how it is used. Under the GDPR you may also complain to a data protection authority: in the Netherlands, the Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens. Most of what the site keeps cannot be tied to a person at all, which is the point of keeping it that way; if you want a prompt or a kit removed, say roughly when you made it and what it said.

This page changes when the site starts or stops keeping something. Its history is in the site's repository.