Privacy Policy

Retro Decennium is a community site about the culture of the 80s, 90s and 2000s, with a member-to-member marketplace attached. We decide what data the site collects and why.

For any privacy question - access, correction, deletion, or a complaint - use our contact form. It reaches us directly.

• Account: your email address, nickname, and a hashed password. Optionally the region you identify with and the decade you were born in - both can be left blank and both can be cleared later.
• Content you create: memories, photos, descriptions, hashtags, comments, and the likes, favourites and views attached to them.
• Retro Market: your listings, the location text you type, messages to other members, offers and offer notes, and completed-deal records.
• Contact form: your name, email, message, and - this applies to visitors who are not signed in too - your IP address, browser user-agent, and the approximate city, region and country based on your connection. All of it is stored and also emailed to us. The topic you pick routes the message and travels in that email, but it is not stored alongside it.
• Sign-in security: a record of failed sign-in attempts and the time you last signed in.

• We never ask for or store payment card details. Donations go to Stripe on Stripe's own site.
• We do not use your device's location - the site never asks your browser for it.
• We do not sell personal information, and we do not share it for advertising.
• We do not attach your IP address to your account or use it to build a profile of you. IP addresses are used for security and anti-abuse checks, and are kept with contact-form submissions as described above.

Small pieces of data your browser keeps for us. They fall into three groups, and the difference between the first group and the rest is what matters.

• Needed for the site to work. The sign-in session cookie, set when you sign in and cleared after a period of inactivity, and user-language, which remembers whether you read in English or Russian for 365 days. Without these you could not stay signed in or keep your language.
• Measurement and bot protection. Google sets _ga for analytics, and _GRECAPTCHA on the sign-up page to tell people from bots. Neither is needed for the site to function.
• Stays on your device and is never sent to us. Your language choice, the list of memories and listings you have viewed, the birth year you can enter on the Timeline page, and small interface preferences such as which Settings tab you last had open. The birth year in particular never reaches our servers - it exists only in your browser, and clearing your browser data removes it.

We name the companies whose cookies, pages or checkout you deal with directly. Providers that only work behind the scenes are described by the job they do - if you want to know which company fills a particular role, ask us through the contact form.

• Hosting and database - run the site and store everything described in section 2. Our host also supplies the approximate location recorded with contact-form messages.
• Image storage - holds the photos you upload.
• Image screening - an automated moderation service receives a copy of every image you upload, so it can be checked before publication.
• Email delivery - sends verification, password-reset and notification email. Contact-form mail to us includes the IP address and approximate location recorded with the message.
• Location lookup - receives the place name typed into a listing or a 'near me' search, so it can be turned into a map position. It receives the text only, never your device location.
• Google reCAPTCHA - receives your IP address when you sign up, as part of the bot check.
• Google Analytics - receives page-view data.
• Stripe - if you choose to donate. You leave our site to do it and we never see your card details.

Some parts of the site load content straight from other companies rather than through us. When that happens, your browser talks to them directly and they can see your IP address, your browser, and which page you came from. We have no way to prevent that other than by removing the feature.

• YouTube - video embeds. We use youtube-nocookie.com, the variant that does not set tracking cookies until you press play.
• Vimeo and Dailymotion - videos that members attach to their memories. Like YouTube videos on a memory, the player is only loaded when you press play; until then your browser does not contact them. Vimeo's player is loaded in its 'do not track' mode.
• Internet Archive - the Arcade runs its emulator in an embedded frame, and audio streams from their servers in both the Music Room and the stereo on your dashboard. Game and cover thumbnails in the Arcade, the Catalogue and the decade pages come from them too.
• Apple / iTunes - 30-second music previews and cover artwork in the Music Room.
• Pexels - the background video on some pages.
• TheAudioDB - artist images in Collections.
• Wikimedia Commons - the photographs in the Retro Catalogue are loaded from their servers rather than copied to ours.
• OpenStreetMap - map tiles on the Retro Market map.
• Our image delivery provider - published photos load from a separate image address that it serves on our behalf.
• Google - Analytics on every page, and reCAPTCHA on the sign-up page.

• Every image is screened automatically before it is published. If the check does not pass an image, the item waits for a person to review it rather than going live.
• Every image is stamped with a small Retro Decennium watermark and re-saved in a web image format. We keep only that converted version - the original file you selected is not retained.
• Published images are served from a public image address. The address contains a random identifier and is not listed anywhere, but it is not password-protected: anyone who has the exact link can open the file. Please do not upload a photo you would not be comfortable with someone holding a link to.
• Deleting a memory or a listing deletes its image files as well.

• You type a place name. We turn it into a map position - your device is never asked where it is.
• We store the real coordinate but we never publish it. If you choose an approximate pin, what everyone else sees is a deliberately imprecise point that is not where you are, and it is designed so that looking repeatedly does not get anyone closer to the real spot.
• If you choose region only, no pin is published at all - just the region name you typed.
• Searching by distance uses the imprecise point, never your real one.

• Passwords are stored only in a one-way hashed form, so we cannot read them.
• Private Retro Market messages, offer notes and reports get an extra layer of encryption before they are stored.
• The whole site is served over an encrypted connection, and sign-in is protected against repeated password guessing.

• While your account exists, your content stays until you delete it.
• Deleting your account permanently erases your memories and their photos, your comments, likes, favourites, notifications and saved listings, and scrubs your email, nickname, region and birth decade from our records.
• Some things deliberately survive, and you should know before you delete: messages you sent in Retro Market stay in the other person's conversation, along with any offers and completed-deal records, and any abuse reports involving you. Removing them would destroy the other person's history and our safety records. Your listings are hidden everywhere but the text you wrote remains in our database.
• After deletion you appear across the site as 'Deleted user'. Your email address is released, so you can register again with it later.
• Contact-form messages are not attached to an account and are kept until we clear them manually.
• Verification, password-reset and email-change links expire after 24 hours, and sign-in sessions end after a period of inactivity.

• See and correct your data: your email, nickname, region and birth decade are all editable in Settings, and every memory and listing you own can be edited or deleted.
• Delete your data: Settings has a Danger Zone that removes your account, subject to the exceptions in section 10.
• Ask us anything else - including a copy of your data, an objection to how we use it, or a complaint - through the contact form.
• If you are in the UK or the EU, you also have the right to complain to your national data protection authority.

The site and its suppliers operate internationally, so your data may be stored or processed outside the country you live in. We choose established providers and use encrypted connections to them.

Retro Decennium is not intended for anyone under 16, and we do not knowingly collect data from anyone under 16. If you believe a child has created an account, contact us and we will remove it.

We update this policy when the site changes. The date at the top always reflects the current version, and we will flag anything significant.

Questions or concerns about anything above? Contact us.