Pale Moon Privacy Policy

As part of normal operation, the Pale Moon browser connects to several services run by us and (in limited capacity) third parties. These connections include:
  • Program updates (Pale Moon operated).
  • Security list updates like the blocklist for add-ons (Pale Moon operated).
  • Add-on updates (Pale Moon operated).
  • Miscellaneous services like dynamic user-agent updates or (optional) captive portal detection (Pale Moon operated).
  • Geolocation services (provided by IP-API.com).
    This service will only receive your IP address and generic browser data through a normal http request. No local network or location data will be sent to this provider. You have the option to disable this feature and you are in control which websites are allowed to request this information or trigger a geolocation lookup.
  • Secure certificate verification: when you visit a secure website (i.e. "HTTPS"), Pale Moon will validate the website's certificate. This may involve communicating with a third-party status provider (e.g. OCSP) specified by the certificate. Pale Moon sends information identifying the site's certificate to this third-party.
  • Search and search suggestions (provided by your chosen search provider): When you perform a web search from the address bar or search bar, your query and standard web browser information will be sent to the search provider to service your request.
    Search suggestions is a feature to help you to find out common phrases that other people have searched for. These search suggestions are offered by your search engines (such as DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, etc.) and not by Pale Moon. If you enable this feature, and your chosen search engine supports suggestions, Pale Moon may send the terms you type in the address bar or search bar to your chosen search engine provider as you type them, to retrieve suggestions prior to you confirming your search.
    How this data is handled is governed by the applicable Privacy Policy of your chosen search engine provider.
  • Optional: Pale Moon Sync (Pale Moon operated)
    If you choose to use the Pale Moon Sync service, your usage will be governed by that particular service's policies.
You can turn off the above update and verification features, but that may leave you open to security vulnerabilities. Specific instructions for turning off the relevant features can be found on our forum. In case of doubt, feel free to ask any of our user community members.

For performance reasons, any of these connections may also be served through one or more content delivery networks (CDNs) and as such also subject to the Privacy Policies of such CDNs. One notable CDN we use in many locations is CloudFlare.


Pale Moon related sites and services are operated under the following privacy policy:

Last updated: 2023-09-12.

Moonchild Productions privacy policy related to Pale Moon.

Your personal privacy is important to us. This is why we adhere to common sense and best practice principles in the way we operate our sites and services. To clarify these principles, this privacy policy highlights the most important aspects of your visits, your data, and our handling thereof.

How We Collect Data

We collect data about your visit and use of our sites and services in industry-standard ways. Normal operational data is collected in site access logs, and your session data for parts of our sites where you log in (e.g. the forum) will be collected and stored in the relevant databases.
We do not collect any data outside of our controlled services, and we do not track you in any way.

What Data We Collect

As part of your visit, we will collect your IP address, user agent, and any referrers sent by your browser in access logs. We also log the nature of your visit and which parts of the sites and/or services you have accessed.
In addition, for account-relative actions (that require you to set up an account and log in, e.g. the forum), we collect personal information like your chosen (user)name, a password and e-mail address. Only those items of personal information necessary to operate the accounts or provide services will be required. Any other volunteered information is at your own discretion.
We do not collect telemetry on your browser use or extension use.
Occasionally, we may collect data on specific software update requests over a short period of time to measure the approximate size of our user base. This data will be stored temporarily only for the purpose of this measurement.

Data Protection

We protect your data by:
  • Limiting administrative access to our servers to required staff only.
  • Keeping various collection stores separated and properly secured against public access.
  • Offering SSL encryption where it is prudent or expected.
  • Encrypting passwords (and potentially other credentials) that are stored in our databases in a non-reversible way.
  • Occasionally pruning our stored data (see Data Retention)

Data Retention

In principle we store data only for as long as is reasonably necessary/commonly practiced to operate our sites and services.

Site access logs are cycled regularly, at which point old entries will be discarded. This site access log retention is in principle 30 days or less. If necessary, this retention period may temporarily be extended as-needed to a maximum of 90 days to address important issues requiring long-term investigation. This log retention period of time balances privacy concerns with the need to ensure that log processing systems have time to operate, that operators have time to monitor and fix technical, security and performance problems, that any abuse reports can be handled properly and supplied with relevant data to authorities, and that data aggregation systems (i.e.: administration graphs of server load and usage, needed to adjust resources based on our usership) have time to operate. These logs will not be used for any other purposes, nor will they be archived or stored in any way past their retention period.

Forum accounts are pruned occasionally to prevent unnecessary storage of personal information in our database (based on last-logged-in data). Forum accounts will be purged in manually-initiated pre-announced purges by forum staff.

Pale Moon Sync accounts are automatically purged if unused, in regular (weekly) maintenance windows, using the retention period as outlined in the Pale Moon Sync terms.

Data disclosure to third parties

Data about your visits is not transmitted to any third parties. Any backup and inspection of such data will be restricted to transfer over encrypted connections to prevent eavesdropping, and copies will be deleted as soon as their purpose has been fulfilled.

In principle, we never disclose visitor data to third parties, including our partners. An exception to this non-disclosure principle is if your visit or behavior is either suspect of abuse or criminal activity (i.e.: if you perform misconduct, we may report you to the relevant authorities), or if such disclosure is mandated by a court order that is valid in the country where either the domain owner or the hosting server resides (i.e.: we will not obstruct justice, but will not volunteer this information unless legally required to do so).
We may also disclose this information in order to establish, exercise or defend our legal rights (including providing information to third parties to prevent fraud).

User Trust and Disclaimer

By using our sites and services, you indicate, as a user, that you trust our integrity and handling of your data. If you cannot, for any reason, place this kind of trust in us, then you should refrain from using our sites and services.

Additionally, although we will do our best to provide full transparency of our operations and privacy of your personal information, we cannot 100% guarantee your data's safety due to the distributed nature of our sites and global distribution of assets, and reliance of our sites and services on third party providers. We cannot be held liable for any losses, monetary or otherwise, resulting from your visits, the use of (or inability to use) our sites and services, or the personal information collected on/by them as part of their operation.

Amendments

This privacy policy may be updated from time to time by publishing a new version on our website.
You should check this page occasionally to ensure you are still in agreement with this policy and are happy with any changes to it.

Your rights

You may instruct us to provide you with any personal information we hold about you. Providing said information will be subject to (in that order):
  1. The payment of a non-refundable fee (fixed at €10).
  2. Submission of sufficient information for us to contact you for verification.
  3. Verification of your identity to ensure no personal information is disclosed to unauthorized parties.
You may also request for us to remove any personal information linked to your visits, insofar this personal information is easily accessible (e.g. a forum account). You must provide us with sufficient information to verify the validity of your request. We will follow up on your request for such within a reasonable amount of time.

To initiate such a request, please contact Moonchild Productions Legal & Licensing at legal@palemoon.org -- all communication will be handled via e-mail. if you require a postal mailing address, kindly request this via e-mail as well at the aforementioned address.
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Pale Moon is subject to the following licensing.
Policies: Cookies - User Content - Privacy.