ukernelperson's Trove:Privacy policy

A Note Before We Start

This is a Schrodinger's Privacy Policy. Until someone actually inspects our server configuration it exists in two states at once, "we log everything forever" and "we log nothing at all". We do not publish our LocalSettings.php so there is no way for you to collapse that waveform. Do not trust the author. That includes this sentence.

What We Log

We log all IP addresses. Indefinitely.

We log all errors. Also indefinitely, including errors generated while logging other errors, which is a small infinite loop we have made peace with.

What We Do With It

We do not sell your data. This is the one sentence in this document you are allowed to take at face value, right up until you remember we just told you not to trust us, which makes trusting this one sentence a little awkward. We are aware of the irony and have chosen to keep it anyway.

The Automaton

Below is a small finite state machine that models how a reader's trust in this policy evolves clause by clause. States are q0 naive, q1 suspicious, q2 resigned, and q3 accepting, meaning you have stopped asking questions.

State	Reads "logging"	Reads "sale"	Reads "waiver"
q0	q1	q0	q3
q1	q1	q2	q3
q2	q2	q2	q3
q3	q3	q3	q3

The table above is implemented for real as Template:Automaton. Calling it looks like this.

{{Automaton|state=q0|clause=logging}}

That returns q1. Feed the result back in as the next state and you can walk a reader through the whole policy one clause at a time.

{{Automaton|state={{Automaton|state=q0|clause=logging}}|clause=sale}}

That lands on q2. Keep chaining clauses and every reader eventually reaches q3, at which point there is no transition back to q0. We consider this a feature.

Yes, It Is Also Turing Complete, Sort Of

Nest a self calling template like Template:Loop enough times, using #if for branching and #expr for arithmetic, and you get read, write, and conditional branch over effectively unbounded storage. That is the informal bar for Turing completeness, and it is not a new idea, people have proven the same thing about C++ templates and, memorably, about the card game Magic: The Gathering, both cited below. The only real limit here is $wgMaxTemplateDepth, which we treat as a constraint of the server rather than a limit on the policy.

Fine Print

If a court strikes down a clause of this policy, the rest keeps going, and the struck clause keeps existing in our logs anyway since logs are records of what happened, not clauses of the policy, so there is nothing left to strike. Nothing here expires just because the site does.

Do not trust the author.