Last updated 2026-07-04

Privacy policy

OptOut.wiki has no accounts, no analytics, no ads, and no cookies. This page describes the small amount of data the contribution form does handle, and exactly how it's used.

Reading the site

Guides, blog posts, and the software directory are static pages. Loading them doesn't set a cookie, load a tracker, or send your activity anywhere we can see. The dark/light theme toggle saves your preference in your browser's local storage only — it never reaches our servers.

Submitting a guide

The contribute form collects the fields you fill in: title, category, level, body text, source links, and an optional contributor name (skipped entirely if you submit anonymously). That's stored in our database as a pending submission for a moderator to review. We don't ask for an email or any account to submit.

Anti-abuse checks, and what they don't do

Two checks run before a submission is accepted, and neither stores anything that identifies you:

• Rate limit. To stop spam, we cap submissions per hour. That check needs some way to recognize repeat requests, so it takes your IP address and turns it into a one-way salted hash (SHA-256, salted with a private key only our server holds). Only that hash is stored — never the IP itself — in a separate table used solely for rate limiting, and it's automatically deleted well within a day. The hash is never attached to your submission's content, so nothing links a guide back to where it came from.
• Proof-of-work challenge. Instead of a third-party CAPTCHA that fingerprints your browser or phones home to another company, we use ALTCHA, a self-hosted proof-of-work check. It asks your browser to do a small math puzzle before submitting — no tracking, no external network calls, no data collected about you.

Moderation and publishing

Every submission sits as pending until a moderator reviews it through an access-controlled admin page. Approved guides become public, static pages on the site. Rejected submissions are kept for a record of that decision; obvious spam is deleted outright. Because submissions carry no identifying information, we have no way to find "your" submission after the fact if you didn't keep a copy of what you sent — including to delete it early. If that's a problem for a specific submission, use the source you cited in it to reach us, or see Contact below.

Published content license

Guide and blog content is published under CC BY-SA 4.0 — free to share and adapt with attribution. The site's code is separately open source.

Hosting

OptOut.wiki runs on Cloudflare Pages, Workers, and D1. Cloudflare, as our hosting provider, handles standard network-level request routing to operate its service; that layer is governed by Cloudflare's own privacy policy, not ours. We do not use Cloudflare's analytics products on this site.

Children's privacy

OptOut.wiki isn't directed at children under 13, and we don't knowingly collect information from them — in practice, we don't collect identifying information from anyone.

Changes to this policy

This page is part of the site's public git history, like everything else here. If it changes, the date at the top changes with it.

Contact

Questions about this policy or how the site handles data: open an issue on the project's GitHub.