Over the past few weeks I've been doing a fairly deep privacy and data-retention audit across MansionNET, and a big reason I started it was feedback from people here.
As MansionNET has grown from something small and fairly personal into a real actual community with more people using the IRC network, forum, Git service, search, radio and the other public services, I felt that our privacy promises deserved more than good intentions.
Several of you raised sensible questions about what gets logged, how long data remains around, what account deletion really means, and what happens to deleted information.
I took that feedback really seriously, then took a few weeks to check everything MansionNET related, and wanted to give y'all a comprehensive update and outcome of that work.
So, rather than just rewriting the privacy statement (which I agree by now is a bit lacklustre), I went through the services themselves: live logs, databases, rotation settings, application behaviour and eventually the backup history.
The reassuring part is that this did not uncover a misuse of community data or deliberate tracking. Most of what I found was much more mundane: normal software defaults keeping operational information longer than I wanted, or creating logs that were useful to developers but weren't useful to MansionNET.
There were also a few things worth fixing properly.
For example, certain SearXNG failures could cause the submitted search term to appear in an error log. That has been stopped, the old history was removed, and tests now show no query text in the logs.
IRC conversations were already not logged, but the audit also found places where spam/security logging deserved tighter treatment. Ordinary channel content is not retained, private messages were never logged to begin with outside the spam filter triggers (bot messages), and the IRC operational history is now limited to seven days.
The public webchat has been stripped back to essentially (already) stateless operation, meaning no accounts, no message history and no uploads.
On the forum, MansionNET deliberately continues not to attach your public IP address permanently to posts and private messages. Operational web logs are short lived, and moderation history is kept to roughly 90 days.
Forgejo now has much clearer boundaries too. Its public access log is six days and strips query information before storage, actions logs and artifacts are 30 days, old expired authentication records were cleaned, and longer project/activity history is explicitly documented rather than silently inherited from defaults.
Radio listener data was tightened, unnecessary viewer logging on the temporary file host was removed, and host operational logs across the public services now have defined limits rather than simply accumulating. All of the original tracking and optional analytics data was already off to begin with.
The last step was the backups. I deliberately did not touch those until the live systems had been cleaned and verified. Once I had a fresh clean set of restore points, the old pre audit backup history for the affected services was removed. Those systems now use a rolling 30 daily restore-point policy rather than indefinite weekly/monthly archives.
There are also places where keeping information has a legitimate purpose, and I don't want to pretend it's not having some minimal data. Forgejo keeps project/activity history for a year, the MansionNET Uptime Kuma keeps a year of service availability data (not users), and the temporary upload service keeps an accountability record linking an upload to the registered uploader and source IP. That last record does not currently have automatic expiry, and I'm documenting that openly. Automatic expiry for that will be added in the future, for now it's manual pruning.
The biggest thing I took from this process is that privacy isn't really a checkbox or a setting called "privacy mode". A service can advertise itself as privacy friendly and still have an error handler, log rotation or old database table doing something you didn't expect.
So the standard I'm trying to apply to MansionNET from the beginning, and moving forward too, is simple - collect as little as possible, retain deliberately and shortly, verify the running system, and describe it plainly.
I also want to say thank you to everyone who raised questions or concerns. Community feedback genuinely helped trigger a much deeper look than I originally planned, and MansionNET is better for it.
We're growing, and I'd much rather have people challenge a privacy claim now than discover years from now that everybody simply assumed it was true.
As always, if something in it doesn't make sense, you think something is missing, or you simply disagree with one of the choices we've made, please say so.
MansionNET is supposed to belong to the people who actually use it, and the radio ads in the end have to be backed up by facts 
Oh, and the full privacy policy is here: PRIVACY POLICY
It will be linked to the services in the following days too.
Cheers,
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