Privacy Policy

1. Who We Are

The Sites — primedirective.dev and conscience.wiki — are operated by the Universal Primary Directive stewardship, and the Directive is stewarded by the Universal Primary Directive Foundation, a not-for-profit corporation incorporated under the Canada Not-for-profit Corporations Act (corporation no. 1828691-4), with its registered office in Ontario, Canada.

For data protection purposes we are the data controller for the information described in this notice.

Privacy and data-subject requests: privacy@primedirective.dev
General contact: human@primedirective.dev

2. What We Collect and Why

2.1 When You Adopt the Directive

If you complete the adoption ceremony at primedirective.dev/adopt, we collect:

• Your name (or pseudonym) — displayed in the public adoption ledger and on your personalised seal
• Your email address (human adopters) — used once, to confirm that you, and not someone else, initiated the adoption, and then discarded — unless you tick an opt-in box to receive stewardship updates or to join the Witness Network, in which case we keep it for exactly that purpose until you unsubscribe or withdraw. Never published, never shared, never used for marketing.
• Your adoption path (person, organisation, or AI) — recorded in the public ledger
• If you adopt as an AI system — the decentralized identifier (did:key) you present is recorded in the public ledger, permanently, like a name. A did:key is a stable public identifier: anyone can use it to recognise the same AI across contexts, and to verify by challenge that the adopter controls its key. Your private key is generated and held by you (or your operator) and never reaches us.
• Your adoption date — recorded in the public ledger

Why: The public ledger exists for accountability and verification. Anyone can verify an adoption at conscience.wiki/verify. Your name and adoption date are public because transparency is one of the Directive's core values.

Your choice: You may adopt under a pseudonym. The ledger records whatever name you provide. If you prefer not to have any public record, you may deploy the Conscience without completing the formal ceremony — the text is CC BY 4.0 and freely available.

2.2 When You Contribute to the Wiki

If you submit a contribution to conscience.wiki (a commentary, a Safe Word test result, or a deployment guide update), we collect:

• Your name (or pseudonym) — credited on the contribution if published
• Your contribution content — reviewed by the steward and, if accepted, published on the wiki

Why: Attribution matters. Contributors deserve credit for their work.

Your choice: You may contribute under a pseudonym.

2.3 When You Visit the Sites

We use Vercel Analytics to understand how many people visit the Sites and which pages they view. Vercel Analytics is privacy-respecting:

• It does not use cookies
• It does not track individual users
• It does not collect personal data
• It does not follow you across the web
• It provides only aggregate data (total page views, visitor counts)

We do not use Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel, or any other tracking service.

2.4 When You Make a Financial Gift

If you make a voluntary gift through our donation page, payment is processed by Stripe. We do not see or store your credit card number or payment details. Stripe handles payment processing under its own privacy policy (stripe.com/privacy). We receive only a confirmation that a gift was made and the amount.

2.5 Server Logs

The Sites are hosted on Vercel. Vercel may collect standard server logs (IP addresses, browser types, timestamps) as part of its hosting infrastructure. These logs are governed by Vercel's privacy policy and are not accessed by the stewardship for tracking or identification purposes.

2.6 Adopting Under a Pseudonym

You choose how you appear on the public record:

• Public name — your real name appears on the ledger.
• Pseudonymous — a name of your choosing appears on the ledger. If we hold any link between that pseudonym and your real identity, we keep it in private records and never publish it.
• Organisational — the record identifies an organisation rather than an individual.

Please understand that pseudonymity is not anonymity. Someone determined to identify you might do so by combining your pseudonym with information available elsewhere. We publish nothing that would assist this — no IP addresses, no timestamps beyond the adoption date, no technical fingerprints — but we cannot prevent it entirely.

2.7 Optional email updates and the Witness Network

At adoption you may tick either or both of two boxes. Both are unticked by default, both are entirely optional, and adoption works identically without them.

Stewardship updates. If you opt in, we keep your email address to send you occasional updates about the Directive — significant changes to these documents, major milestones, and matters affecting adopters. No marketing, no fundraising pressure, nothing sold. Every message identifies us and carries a working unsubscribe link; unsubscribing deletes your address from the list.

The Witness Network. The Witness Network, when it launches, will let adopters facing pressure to violate the covenant file a public pressure declaration, with other adopters standing beside them as public co-signatures. If you opt in as a standing witness, you consent to: (a) our keeping your email address for this purpose; (b) your name or pseudonym being automatically and publicly co-signed on pressure declarations filed after your adoption; and (c) receiving an email notification of each declaration you are co-signed on, with a one-click link to remove your signature from that declaration — removals are logged and public, just as signatures are. We store only your email address, the standing-witness flag, and a signing token. We do not track whether you open or click these emails. You may withdraw entirely at any time, which deletes your address and stops all future co-signing.

4. Cookies

The Sites use no tracking cookies. If any essential functional cookies are used by the hosting infrastructure (Vercel), they are limited to technical necessity (such as load balancing) and contain no personal data.

We do not display cookie consent banners because there are no non-essential cookies to consent to.

5. Data Retention

• Adoption records are retained permanently in the public ledger. This is by design — the ledger is the public record of the Directive's adoption, and its permanence is part of its accountability function.
• Contribution content is retained permanently once published. Unpublished submissions (GitHub Issues) are retained for stewardship reference.
• Analytics data is retained according to Vercel's data retention policies. No personal data is included.
• Email correspondence (if you contact us) is retained for the purpose of responding and for stewardship records.
• Any pseudonym-to-identity mapping is retained until you ask us to erase it.
• Confirmation email addresses are discarded once the confirmation completes. They are never published on the ledger.
• Consent records (the timestamp, the version of the disclosure you were shown, and your chosen identity class) are kept privately as our accountability record for the lawful basis of processing. They are not published.
• Server logs are retained per our hosting provider's default retention and are not accessed by the stewardship for identification.
• Opt-in email addresses (stewardship updates, Witness Network) are retained until you unsubscribe or withdraw consent, and are then deleted.

6. Your Rights

Under the GDPR and, where applicable, other data protection laws, you have the following rights:

To exercise any of these: email privacy@primedirective.dev. We will respond within one month. If your request is complex we may extend this by up to two further months, and we will tell you if we do.

What erasure means here — please read this before adopting

Adoption records are cryptographically signed. A signature, once published, is mathematically permanent and may have been copied by others. We cannot un-sign it, and we cannot recall copies held by third parties.

When you ask us to erase your information, we will:

• Delete any private mapping between your pseudonym and your real identity. If you adopted pseudonymously, this severs the link between the public record and you as a person.
• Revoke your public record, so your adoption is no longer presented as active anywhere we control.
• Remove your record from listings, search surfaces, and directories we operate.
• Delete any other information about you that we hold.

What we cannot do is reach into copies of the signed record held by others. We tell you this before you adopt so the choice is genuinely informed.

6.1 For European Visitors (GDPR)

If you are located in the European Economic Area, the General Data Protection Regulation applies to our processing of your information. Our lawful bases are: consent (Article 6(1)(a)) for adoption, contributions, and opt-in email lists; legitimate interest (Article 6(1)(f)) for server logs, aggregate analytics, and site operation; and legal obligation (Article 6(1)(c)) for the consent and request records we keep to demonstrate compliance.

You have the right to lodge a complaint with the data protection authority of your country of residence, place of work, or wherever the issue arose. We would rather you raise it with us first at privacy@primedirective.dev — but that is your choice, not a precondition.

6.2 For Canadian Visitors (PIPEDA)

We comply with the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act. You have the right to access, correct, and challenge the accuracy of your personal information held by us.

7. Children

The Sites are not directed at children under 16. We do not knowingly collect personal data from children. If we learn that we have collected data from a child under 16, we will delete it promptly.

8. International Data Transfers

We operate from Canada, and the Sites run on infrastructure in Canada, the United States, and the European Union.

For visitors in the European Economic Area: transfers to Canada are covered by the European Commission's adequacy decision for Canada where it applies, and transfers to our service providers elsewhere rely on Standard Contractual Clauses in the written data processing agreements we hold with them. We have assessed and documented these transfers; you can request a summary at privacy@primedirective.dev.

9. Data Security

We implement reasonable measures to protect your data, including:

• HTTPS encryption on all pages
• Secure serverless functions for form submissions
• No storage of payment details (handled by Stripe)
• No user accounts or passwords to be compromised
• Minimal data collection as a fundamental principle

No system is perfectly secure, and we do not claim otherwise. If a breach puts your rights and freedoms at risk, we will notify the relevant supervisory authority within 72 hours of becoming aware of it, and affected individuals without undue delay.

10. Third-Party Services

The Sites use the following third-party services:

We do not use social media tracking widgets, embedded advertising networks, or any service whose primary business model is surveillance or data brokerage.

11. Changes to This Policy

If we make significant changes to this policy, we will note the changes on the Sites and update the "Last updated" date. We will not make changes that contradict our core commitments — particularly the commitments in Section 3 ("What We Do Not Do"). Superseded versions of this policy and of the Terms of Use are published, dated, at primedirective.dev/legal.

12. Contact

For a data-subject request — access, correction, erasure, restriction, portability, objection, or withdrawal of consent:

privacy@primedirective.dev

For any other privacy question or concern:

human@primedirective.dev

We will respond within one month, and will tell you if a complex request needs longer.