1. Who we are

Gnorium is a website used by people around the world. It is operated by Madhavik Dogra, an individual who lives in India, who decides how the personal data described here is used (the “controller”, in the language of data protection law). “We” means the operator. You can reach us at info@gnorium.com.

This policy applies to everyone, wherever you live. It explains the rights that the EU and UK General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), California's privacy laws (CCPA, as amended by the CPRA) and similar laws give you, and we honor those rights for every user.

2. In short

• You can read Gnorium without an account, and without being tracked: there are no analytics, advertising or tracking cookies. We count visitors a week at a time, without cookies, and keep only the totals.
• If you register, we keep what we need to run your account. Your username, and the name you give, are public; your email address is not.
• What you contribute is public, credited to your username, and licensed to everyone under CC BY-SA 4.0.
• Source material you submit is sent to AI providers, OpenRouter and Alibaba Cloud, to be processed, and so is a committed object's discussion, with each author's username. Your email address is not.
• We don't sell your personal information, and we don't share it for advertising.

3. What we collect

When you read Gnorium:

• Our web server records each request in its access log: your IP address with its last part removed (203.0.113.7 is logged as 203.0.113.0), the time, the address requested without anything after “?” in it, the result, the page that linked to it (also without anything after “?”), and your browser's user-agent string. Our hosting provider's content delivery network and firewall also process each request.
• Your browser keeps a few settings, a cookie holding only its time-zone name if you filter by date or time, and a cookie if you sign in, as the Cookie Policy lists.

• Visitor estimates and page views: we count eligible page requests each week, Monday to Sunday (UTC), without analytics cookies or a script in your browser. A counted visitor means one combination of IP address and browser user-agent string during that week, not a verified person or account. The first week after counting starts or is reset covers only the time since that start.

  Repeat page loads with the same address and user-agent add page views but do not add another visitor that week. A different browser, device, browser update, VPN or network can change that combination and count the same person again. Conversely, people sharing an address and the same user-agent can count as one. Different browsers are not inherently different people; this is a limitation of the estimate. Using the address alone would combine still more people on shared networks. We do not try to identify the person behind a visit or link visits across devices.

  A page view is a GET request that our server answers successfully (HTTP 200) as HTML. Images, fonts, style sheets, scripts, API responses, health checks, errors, redirects and administration-console pages do not count. Mission Control and visits by signed-in users, including our own visits, do count. Where the browser supplies navigation and prefetch headers, we exclude background fetches, prefetches and prerenders. A reload counts as another page view. A page restored from browser cache without contacting our server is not counted.

  We exclude requests whose user-agent identifies a robot, crawler, preview service, monitor, headless browser or HTTP tool, and requests without a browser-shaped user-agent. This is not proof that a visitor is human: bots can imitate browsers and be included, and some unusual browsers can be excluded. CloudFront forwards the viewer headers, and public HTTP access to the origin is restricted to CloudFront so direct-origin requests cannot bypass that path.

  For each eligible request, our server makes a keyed one-way hash of the address and user-agent using a randomly generated weekly secret. The analytics tables keep that hash, not the raw address or user-agent, and do not associate it with your account. Without an address, we count the page view but not a visitor. When the week ends, the hashes and secret are deleted by the next week's counting or the scheduled retention sweep; only aggregate visitor and page-view totals remain. The secret changes each week, so these hashes cannot link a visitor between weeks. Separate server access logs are described above and have their own retention period below.

  Registrations count completed accounts after email ownership has been verified, grouped by the week they were created, Monday to Sunday (UTC). They include registration through the Register form and supported sign-in providers, and exclude new accounts provisioned administratively. Verified accounts retained before registration tracking began are included in their original creation week. Counts describe accounts, not distinct people. These public figures and the 52-week charts contain totals only, with no usernames, email addresses or other account identifiers. Registration is not proof that someone is human: automated accounts can also verify an email address. Unavailable history is shown as unknown rather than zero.

When you register and sign in:

• Account details: your username, email address, full name, whether your email address is verified, your role (for example moderator), when the account was created, when you last signed in and were last active, and any suspension on it.
• Your password, kept only as a one-way hash (Argon2id). We can't read your password.
• If you continue with Google: Google tells us your Google account identifier, email address, first and last name, and whether Google has verified the address. We store these. Google also issues sign-in tokens to us; we check that Google signed them for Gnorium, use them once to learn who signed in, and don’t keep them. We don't store your Google profile picture.
• A record of each sign-in session: a session identifier, a keyed one-way hash of the session's secret token (the token itself is kept only in your browser's cookie), when it expires and when it was last used, your browser's user-agent string, and a keyed one-way hash of your IP address (made with a secret key, so the address can't be worked out from it).
• Single-use links: an email verification link valid for 24 hours, and a password reset link valid for one hour. We store each only as a hash, and each works once. When you change your email address, we keep the new address beside your current one until you open the link we send to it.
• For editors who set up two-step verification: the authenticator secret, stored encrypted, and hashed recovery codes.
• If you add an avatar: the picture, resized and stripped of its metadata, stored on Amazon S3 and checked for unsafe content by Amazon Rekognition before it is shown; you can remove it from your profile at any time, which deletes the stored picture, and deleting your account deletes it too.

When you contribute:

• Everything you submit (folksongs, revisions, amendments, locutions and reactions), with your username and the date and time. When you edit a locution, earlier wording is kept. When you delete one, it disappears from Gnorium but stays in our database.
• For security and accountability, a log of certain acts, such as changing or resetting a password, deleting an account, hiding or showing a locution, and editorial decisions in Mission Control. Each entry records the account, the act, the time, a keyed one-way hash of your IP address and your browser's user-agent string.

We don't collect payment details, precise location, or special categories of data such as health or beliefs. Please don't put personal information about yourself or others into your contributions.

4. What is public

• Your profile page shows your username, your name, your role, whether your email address is verified, and when you joined. It never shows your email address.
• Your contributions show your username and when you made them. Reactions show who reacted and when.
• The contributors list in Mission Control shows each contributor's username, how many contributions they have made, and when they were last active.

5. Why we use it, and our legal bases

Where the GDPR applies, each use has a legal basis:

• To run your account, sign you in, verify your email address, reset your password, email you when your account's security changes (its password, its email address, two-step verification, recovery codes, a Google sign-in linked to it, or its deletion) and publish your contributions with credit: because it is necessary to provide the service you asked for under our Terms of Service (contract).
• To process source material with AI models, which is how Gnorium drafts its records: contract, since this is the service, and our legitimate interest in producing records.
• To count visitors and page views each week: our legitimate interest in knowing how much Gnorium is read. Only the weekly totals are kept.
• To keep Gnorium secure, prevent abuse, moderate content and keep an accountable record of editorial decisions (access logs, session records, the log of acts): our legitimate interests in security and in a trustworthy public record. You can object to these, as section 10 explains.
• To answer complaints and requests, and to comply with the law or a valid order: legal obligation, or our legitimate interests where no specific law applies.

We don't make decisions about you by automated means. AI models draft records from sources; people decide what is published and how Gnorium is moderated.

6. Who else receives it

We use these service providers. They handle personal data only to provide their service to Gnorium.

• Amazon Web Services, in the United States (US East, N. Virginia region): hosting, the database, the content delivery network and firewall in front of Gnorium, sending account emails (Amazon SES), storing our own credentials, and a text explication tool (Amazon Textract) that editors can run on source page images. All the personal data in section 3 is stored here.
• Google, only if you choose to continue with Google: Google knows you signed in to Gnorium, and it sends us the details in section 3.
• OpenRouter, in the United States, which passes Gnorium's requests to AI models, and Alibaba Cloud's international service, which runs the Qwen models OpenRouter sends them to: the material Gnorium's machines work on, which is what people submit (resemblances, markup, bibliographic details, passages and definitions) and, when an object is committed to a machine, the locutions in its thread, each with its author's username and the date and time. A hidden or deleted locution is not sent. We don't send them your email address or any other account detail. Don't include personal information in locutions or anything else the machines read.
• cdnjs (run by Cloudflare) and jsDelivr: your browser loads code libraries from these content delivery networks, so they receive your IP address and browser details, as for any web request.
• The libraries and archives that hold a testament's page images: when a page shows them, your browser loads them from that institution's server, so it receives your IP address and browser details, as for any web request. The list of a testament's pages (its IIIF manifest) is read by Gnorium's server, not by your browser.

To attribute sources, Gnorium's machines also search public catalogs and reference sites (such as Wikimedia projects, the Internet Archive, HathiTrust, Open Library, Google Books and national library catalogs), and they fetch the web addresses given in evidence. These searches carry details of the source, not of you. Lexico-record pages ask Google Books Ngram about the word shown.

We may disclose personal data if the law requires it, to answer a valid order of a court or authority, or to protect people's safety or rights. We don't sell personal information, and we don't “share” it for cross-context behavioral advertising, as California law defines those terms.

7. International transfers

Gnorium is operated from India, its data is stored in the United States, and material for the machines is sent to OpenRouter in the United States and on to Alibaba Cloud's international service, which may process it in other countries. So your personal data is handled outside the country you live in, including in countries whose data protection laws may differ from yours. Where the GDPR or UK GDPR applies to a transfer, we rely on our providers' data protection terms, including the standard contractual clauses they offer. The only personal data they receive is the usernames on a committed object's locutions and whatever people put into submitted material, which is why we ask you not to include any.

8. How long we keep it

• Account details: for as long as your account exists. When it is deleted, they are erased at once, as section 10 describes.
• Contributions: permanently, as part of the public record and its history. They are licensed to the public and can't be withdrawn.
• Session records: until you sign out, or, if you don't, deleted within an hour of the session ending (30 days after you sign in at most). Changing or resetting your password ends your other sessions and deletes their records.
• Password reset links (valid for one hour) and email verification links (valid for 24 hours): stored as a hash, and deleted within an hour of being used or expiring. A new email address waiting for its link is erased with the last link to it.
• A sign-in with Google in progress: kept only in your browser, encrypted, for at most 10 minutes, and 15 minutes while you choose a username; see the Cookie Policy.
• The log of acts: kept without a fixed end, because it is the record of who did what to the public record, and of security events. The hash of your IP address and your browser's user-agent string are removed from each entry after 30 days.
• The weekly visitor count's hashes and that week's secret: deleted when the week ends (within an hour of midnight UTC between Sunday and Monday). The week's two totals, visitors and page views, are kept; they hold nothing about any one person.
• Web server logs: kept for 14 days, with IP addresses shortened and without anything after “?” in addresses.
• Database backups: kept by our hosting provider for one day.

Nothing else is deleted on a schedule. In particular, the record of how Gnorium's machines produced each draft (the requests to AI models, their answers, and who asked for the work) is the provenance of the public record, and is kept with it, as contributions are. It holds no email address, IP address or other account detail.

9. Security

Connections to Gnorium use HTTPS, and the cookie that keeps you signed in is sent only over HTTPS and can't be read by scripts. Passwords are hashed with Argon2id; emailed links and sign-in session tokens are stored only as hashes; two-step verification secrets are encrypted; IP addresses are stored only as keyed hashes, and the weekly visitor count's hashes only until the week ends. The database is encrypted at rest and not reachable from the internet. The administration console requires two-step verification. No system is perfectly secure, so use a password you don't use anywhere else. If a breach puts your personal data at risk, we will tell you and the authorities as the law requires.

10. Your rights

Wherever you live, you can ask us to:

• tell you what personal data we hold about you, and give you a copy (access);
• correct data that is wrong or incomplete (correction);
• delete your personal data (deletion), as described below;
• give you your account details and a list of your contributions in a machine-readable format (portability);
• stop using your data for a purpose based on our legitimate interests, unless we have compelling reasons to continue (objection), or limit how we use it while a request is considered (restriction).

Deletion: you can delete your account yourself, from Delete Account in your account menu (it asks for your password, or a fresh sign-in with Google), or we can do it for you on request. We can't delete public contributions, because they are part of the record's history and are licensed to the public; they stay credited to your username, which nobody can register again. Deleting your account closes it, so it can never sign in again, and erases at once your email address (and any new one waiting for its link), name, profile text, avatar, password hash, two-step verification secret and recovery codes, sign-in sessions, emailed links, notifications and any link to your Google account, and removes the hash of your IP address and your browser from every entry in the log of acts. One last email, to the address the account had, confirms the deletion; the address isn't kept for it. The entries themselves, and anything the law requires, are kept.

To exercise a right, write to info@gnorium.com from the email address on your account, or tell us your username. We may ask you to confirm that the account is yours. We answer within one month, free of charge. In California, you can use an authorized agent, and you won't be treated differently for using your rights.

If you are unhappy with our answer, you can complain to the data protection authority where you live or work. We'd appreciate the chance to put it right first.

Nothing in this policy limits rights you have under the mandatory law of the country you live in.

11. Children

You must be at least 18 years old to create an account. Reading Gnorium needs no account. We don't knowingly collect personal data from children; if we learn that someone under 18 has an account, we close it and delete their personal data as section 10 describes.

12. Changes to this policy

When Gnorium's handling of personal data changes, we update this policy and the date at the top of the page. If a change is significant, we tell account holders by email before it takes effect.

13. Contact

For anything about your personal data, write to info@gnorium.com. Complaints are acknowledged within 24 hours and resolved within 15 days, as the Terms of Service describe.