|  | Compiler Explorer and Privacy | 
|  | ----------------------------- | 
|  |  | 
|  | The main Compiler Explorer site (at https://godbolt.org/) has a cookie and privacy policy, and it's expected that any | 
|  | changes to the code are in compliance with those policies. It's worth taking a look at them if you're touching any area | 
|  | of the code relating to storing or logging user data. | 
|  |  | 
|  | Specifically, we must remain compliant with the EU's GDPR law, which applies to EU residents wherever they are in the | 
|  | world. The main way to think about the GDPR, and privacy in general, is the user should be in control of their data. As | 
|  | such we go to great pains to explain what we do with their data, and that we don't store any user-identifying | 
|  | information. Of course, we _do_ (at least temporarily) store their source code, which may be precious and sensitive. We | 
|  | are transparent with what we do with their data. When making short links, we send an encoding of their source code for | 
|  | storage, and again we must be clear how that process works. When compiling with some Microsoft compilers we send data to | 
|  | the sister site www.godbolt.ms and that data is covered by | 
|  | [Microsoft's Privacy Policy](https://privacy.microsoft.com/en-US/). | 
|  |  | 
|  | Users have rights over the data they create: so in theory they could ask for any data stored on them to be removed. We | 
|  | have no way of tracking data (a short link, perhaps) back to an individual user, and when I asked some experts on this | 
|  | the general consensus was that we're OK not to supply this. If, however, we ever have user attribution (e.g. we start | 
|  | having accounts), we need to support the user being able to close their account, and/or delete any data they created | 
|  | (e.g. short links). All this makes perfect sense and would probably be done anyway, as it seems useful! | 
|  |  | 
|  | We anonymise IP addresses so there's no exact mapping back to an individual using an IP. Not that it's trivial to map an | 
|  | IP to a user anyway. | 
|  |  | 
|  | We shouldn't store data forever: our web logs are set to delete after a few months. | 
|  |  | 
|  | Short URLs do turn up in the web logs: from the short URL of course one can easily extract the source code embedded in | 
|  | that short URL. Users are notified of this in the privacy policy. The ultimate recourse for users concerned about this | 
|  | is to not use the main Compiler Explorer but instead run their own local service, which is relatively straightforward. | 
|  |  | 
|  | ### Admins | 
|  |  | 
|  | A very small group of people have administrator rights on the public Compiler Explorer. Those individuals can: | 
|  |  | 
|  | * Read the logs | 
|  | * Log in to the running Compiler Explorer compilation nodes | 
|  | * Access the S3 storage where caches and stored information may be kept | 
|  | * Access and modify the EFS storage where compilers are stored | 
|  |  | 
|  | In short, administrators can see everything that goes on. It is expected that administrators keep this deep | 
|  | responsibility in mind when performing actions on Compiler Explorer, and that they keep users' privacy at the forefront | 
|  | of their minds when using their administration privileges. |