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 our host derives from 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: failed sign-in counts, lockout timestamps, 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 browser geolocation permission is switched off site-wide by our security headers, so the site cannot ask for it even if it wanted to.
• 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 expiring after 2 hours, 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. rd_vid, a random identifier with no name or email attached, and rd_viewed_posts / rd_viewed_listings, short lists of what you have already opened so a second visit is not counted twice - all kept 365 days. Google also sets _ga for analytics, and _GRECAPTCHA on the sign-up page to tell people from bots. None of these are needed for the site to function.
• Stays on your device and is never sent to us. Your language choice, the list of memories 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.

• Neon (PostgreSQL hosting) - stores everything described in section 2.
• Cloudflare R2 - stores your uploaded images.
• Sightengine - receives a full copy of every image you upload, so it can be screened before publication.
• Mailjet - delivers verification, password-reset and notification email. Contact-form mail to us includes the IP address and approximate location recorded with the message.
• Google reCAPTCHA - receives your IP address when you sign up, as part of the bot check.
• Google Analytics - receives page-view data on production.
• LocationIQ or OpenStreetMap Nominatim - receives the location text typed into a listing or a 'near me' search, so it can be turned into coordinates. It receives the text only, never your device location.
• Stripe - if you choose to donate. You leave our site to do it and we never see your card details.
• Vercel - hosts the site and provides the approximate location shown on contact-form submissions.

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.
• 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.
• Cloudflare - your browser fetches uploaded photos from our image domain.
• Google - Analytics on every production 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 converted to WebP. 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 convert it to coordinates on our server - 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.
• Distance search runs on our server and offers a fixed set of distances, so it works on the imprecise point rather than on your real one.

• Passwords are hashed with Argon2id. We cannot read them, and a database leak would not reveal them.
• Retro Market message bodies, offer notes and report details are encrypted before they are stored, so they are unreadable in a raw database copy.
• Being straight about the limits: not everything is encrypted this way. Content that the site has to display back to you or to other members is stored in readable form, as is your email address, which has to be readable for us to email you at all.
• The whole site is served over HTTPS and sign-in is protected by rate limits and temporary lockout after repeated failed attempts.

• 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. Sign-in sessions expire after 2 hours.

• 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.