Privacy

Last updated 23 August 2026. Written against what the code does, not against what sounds reassuring.

The short version

No email address. No password. No advertising trackers, and no third-party analytics of any kind. Searching does not require an account. If you make one, you can erase everything yourself from your profile page — and the delete really deletes.

⚠ Not yet reviewed by a solicitor, and ICO registration is outstanding.

1 · What we record when you visit

For every request we store the time, your IP address, your browser's user-agent string, the path, the search term if there was one, and the response code. That is used to keep the service up, to tell real visitors apart from machinery, and to see which searches find nothing so we can crawl toward them. The log is capped at 5,000 rows and older rows are discarded as new ones arrive — it is a working record, not an archive.

2 · How visitors are classified

Every request is sorted into one of six kinds — human, crawler, scraper, attacker, datacentre, or bot — from the network the request came from and the user-agent it claimed. This is how we avoid reporting bot traffic as an audience. It is not used to profile you, to target advertising, or to make any decision about you personally beyond blocking abuse.

3 · Blocking

Requests that probe for vulnerabilities, impersonate a search engine, or hit the site at machine speed can be banned automatically — for 24 hours, then 48, then permanently on a third episode. If you believe you were blocked in error, get in touch and say so; there is a person on the other end.

4 · Accounts

An account is a Bitcoin public key and the address you signed with. We do not ask for your name, your email, or your date of birth, and we could not sell a mailing list if we wanted to, because we do not have one. A username is generated for you. Anything else on your profile is there because you typed it.

5 · Your profile is private by default

Your profile page is visible only to you. Your My Page is what visitors see, and nothing moves from one to the other until you press a share button. You control who can view your page, who can read your bio, and who can message you.

6 · Who viewed your page

When a signed-in person opens your page, that is recorded so you can see who visited. Anonymous visits are counted but not attributed to anybody. If you do not want to appear in other people's viewer lists, do not open their pages while signed in.

7 · Cookies

One cookie, froo_session, set only after you sign in, so the site knows it is still you. It is HTTP-only and lasts seven days. Signing out deletes it. There are no advertising or tracking cookies. Your appearance choices are kept in your browser's own storage and never sent to us.

8 · What we index

Froocan crawls public web pages and stores a title, a description, and the page text so it can be searched. If a page you published shows personal information you would rather was not indexed, tell us and we will remove it — and disallowing FroocanBot in your robots.txt keeps us out altogether.

9 · Sharing

We do not sell your data and we do not share it with advertisers or data brokers. We use no third-party analytics. The only data that leaves this server is what you choose to publish on your own page, and requests your browser makes to a video platform when you press play on a video.

10 · Video

Videos are embedded from YouTube, Vimeo or Dailymotion. We use YouTube's no-cookie player, so browsing Goblin Videos does not hand YouTube a cookie — but pressing play contacts that platform directly, and from that moment their privacy policy applies as well as ours.

11 · Erasing your data

Two buttons on your profile page, doing two different things. Delete my data erases what you published and keeps the account so you can start again. Delete my profile erases the account too, along with every active session. Both are immediate hard deletes: nothing is quietly retained in a 'deleted' state. What we cannot undo is a page you published elsewhere, or a copy someone else made.

12 · How long we keep things

Visit logs: capped at 5,000 rows, oldest discarded first. Sessions: seven days, or until you sign out. Search queries and coverage gaps: kept, because they are what tells the crawler where to go — they are stored as the words searched, not tied to your account. Your published content: until you delete it.

13 · Your rights

If you are in the UK or the EU you have the right to see what we hold about you, to correct it, to have it erased, and to complain to your data protection authority. The erase right is built into the product rather than being a form to fill in — but ask us if you want anything else, and we will answer.

14 · Contact

Get in touch through the site. If we change this policy, the date at the top changes with the words, not with the deployment.