What information is collected by Yioop

This privacy policy covers the website yioop.com hereafter known as Yioop. Yioop collects information from users when they register an account, perform account activities, create groups, post messages to groups, edit wiki pages, or perform searches.

The Yioop software is freely available for download at SeekQuarry and can be used to understand in detail exactly what information is stored by the Yioop web app. One can verify from this source code that a default install of the software itself does not transmit data to third parties. Yioop makes use of Stripe.com for payment processing of credit card transactions and provides Stripe.com with enough information to complete such transactions. For registration, account purposes, and to maintain the integrity of the Yioop site, Yioop does keep track of a user IP addresses and may store email and other personal information such as Full Name. Data posted to Yioop groups or written to the wiki and read by more than one person might become public knowledge. Encrypted groups are stored encrypted on Yioop's server, but still can be joined and viewed by administrators of Yioop. Owners of Yioop groups also can view statistics about viewership of their groups. Yioop keeps track of the number of times users click on keyword advertisements and provides statistics of this to ad purchasers. To turn away scrapers and to limit searches from visitors without cookies, Yioop keeps short-lived counts of requests by IP address and by page. Yioop.com also runs Yioop's mail service. It stores the email users send and receive through it, and it keeps a mail log (mail.log) recording each exchange with other mail servers, including the addresses involved, the time, and whether delivery succeeded.

The Yioop.com website is served by Yioop's own web server; no other web server software is used. The web server writes a log line for each request it answers, and a line when an error occurs. As an example of the format of a request log line, consider:

[1523 Mon, 26 Oct 2026 14:00:00 -0700] 99.88.77.66 alice
   /?q=secrets&limit=80 h2:443 200 34940B 85ms fibers=2 worker=3

Such a line has the date, the IP address the request came from, the user name when the person is signed in, the address requested with its query, the protocol and port, the status, the size of the reply, how long the reply took, and which web server worker answered. From the IP address one can determine the approximate location of the person making the query. All of the above information could in theory be correlated across multiple requests to the website. Thus, your queries made to Yioop could potentially be revealing.

In addition to Web Server logs, a computer as part of its daily operations stores temporary and less temporary files which may contain some of the information related to the web server's operation, and so might also contain information about requests made by a user on Yioop!.

Finally, Yioop!, since it is a search engine, has a crawler component. This component downloads pages from various web sites. You may be the owner of such a site, and despite the best efforts on the Yioop team's part to make sure that Yioop! only crawls sites it is allowed to, it might have inadvertently downloaded some content you would prefer it didn't.

How information collected by Yioop is used

The purpose of this site is to demonstrate the Yioop software. Queries performed on Yioop are not sold to third parties beyond keyword ad click information. Nor is user registration data sold or group posts or wiki files of private (No One or By Request registration) groups data mined. We reserve the right to index and mine public group data. Aggregated statistics of queries are generated to help make future versions of Yioop! better. Internal to Yioop aggregated statistics are retained as per the default source code of the software available on seekquarry.com. Web server access and error log information are cleared on a semi-regular basis. If we need to investigate a website intrusion, or are required by law enforcement, we reserve the right to retain these records and any other collected data longer. Information about the behavior of non-human users of Yioop (spiders and bots) might be discussed on public forums.

If you are a content provider, and find that there is data in the search results or in public groups or wikis for which you are the copyright holder that you would not like available through Yioop, you can contact chris@pollett.org to ask that your data be blocked from search results or taken down from the groups or wikis in question.

Previous versions of this privacy policy can be found by looking at the wiki history of this privacy page.