privacy policy
knoxville.plus has and intends to keep a strict operating budget. there may be times the service is inaccessible, due to quirks in magic, internet routers, holding your mouth that way, or just too many requests to cheap servers.
we don't have a grand budget, so we run a tight ship. one of the nice consequences of keeping our bill small is that we don't need to sell your personal preferences or usage history under the table to eat.
/search: we see your search long enough to answer it, but we don't save the search text or build a history of what you search for.
we're interested in the general idea of what Knoxville is looking for – if it can be determined without stepping on anyone's privacy. it can. the strategy we found is the core idea from differential privacy: before a search is resolved and returned to you, it is matched to the closest topic in the search list to reduce specificity (the list is at the end of the next paragraph). this match is then randomized so that no individual submission can be taken as a statement of what was searched for.
the point is to not collect anything certain, and to not collect individual search histories. we can gain insights without profiling people, their searches, or their sequences of searches and site activity. we rely on statistics to allow the set of responses to tell the story as a whole. we want to find big picture trends like “people seem to be looking for laundromats more these days” while making it impossible for our statistics alone to tell us “people are looking for pistachio ice cream after watching pinocchio memes while visiting this particular office complex.” you can see the complete list of topics a query can be matched with and a visual explaination of how it works here.
/sports is a different animal. it stores an identifier in a cookie so you can keep a score streak and be recognized by your handle when making submissions. on the server, that identifier is attached only to your voting choices, game submissions, first and most recent dates active, current and previous handles, and when any of that occurred. it is not attached to your searches or other knoxville.plus activity.