What we keep, and why

Your yearbook photos

A page photo is read and then deleted. From it we keep each portrait as a small greyscale crop and the name printed with it, which become part of that class for everyone who has its link. A cover photo is kept on our server so the next person with the same yearbook finds the class, and is only ever shown blurred, so nothing else in your photo can be seen. Photos are checked automatically for nudity, and anything questionable waits for us to look at it before it's used.

Your classmates

Living classmates are shown as the photo and name printed in the yearbook, and nothing more: we never look anything else up about them. For a classmate who has died, we keep only the facts we match on from public obituaries and burial records (names, dates, places and schools) and a link to the notice. When there's no yearbook photo, we may show the photo published with their obituary.

Want someone removed, or a mistake fixed? Use the flag on their photo, or write to info@yeardead.com.

Where you are

To put schools and classes near you first, we guess roughly which town you're in from your internet address. The lookup happens on our own server, using IP geolocation by DB-IP, and the guess is used for that page and never stored. We never ask for your device's location.

When a school isn't on our list yet, our server looks it up in OpenStreetMap's public search with what you typed and the rough area. Nothing about you goes with it.

Stopping abuse

To protect the site and the people in it, we keep a log of the pages asked for, with the internet address and browser each came from, for 90 days. Only we see it. We use it to spot and block abuse, such as floods of uploads or someone harassing a class, and we may block an address or a browser that misuses the service.

Your email

You only give us an email if you sign in, report a problem, or follow classmates. We use it to send sign-in links, answers to your reports, and the notices you asked for, and for nothing else: no newsletters, no marketing, and it's never shown to anyone. We keep a copy of the emails we send for a year, so we can answer questions about them. Emails reach you through an email delivery service, the one outside party that sees your address.

Cookies

We use no advertising, analytics or tracking cookies, and no third-party scripts. The few we set are needed for the things you ask the site to do, which is why there's no cookie banner:

Your browser also remembers, on your device only, whether you've already seen a class's opening and whether you skipped a step. That never leaves your device.

How long we keep things

• Page photos: deleted once read. Unused photos: deleted within a few hours.
• The request log: 90 days.
• A browser that never sent anything: forgotten after 3 days; any other after 400 days unused.
• Accounts never confirmed: 2 days. Other accounts: until you ask us to delete them.
• Classes, and the portraits and names in them: for as long as the site runs, since they're shared by the whole class.

Who else sees it

Nobody, apart from the services that keep the site running: the network that delivers our pages and shields them from attacks, and the service that delivers our emails. Neither may use your data for anything else. We'll only hand anything over if the law requires it, such as a court order, or to protect someone from serious harm.

Your rights

Write to info@yeardead.com to see what we hold about you, to correct it, or to have it deleted, and we'll answer within 30 days. If you're in Canada you can also complain to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada; in the European Union or the United Kingdom, to your data protection authority. Where the GDPR applies, we rely on our legitimate interest in running the site and keeping it safe, and on your consent for the emails you ask for.

Children

yeardead is for adults. Please don't scan a class whose members are still in school.