Our users' privacy is paramount to us. Packet Storm has always operated with this notion at the forefront of our minds. Unlike most free services that harvest your every move and sell your data in order to make profits, we have opted to use business models that do not violate our users' trust. When you use Packet Storm, we will not share or sell your data.

When you sign up for an account on Packet Storm, we ask for minimal personal information. You are asked for a name to put in the URL that will link to your profile, a user name you would like to be shown on your profile page, your location at a country specificity, and your email address. Your source IP address will be frequently logged with actions taken on the site (as is standard for every web site). For revenue-related functions, such as advertisement purchases, we use Stripe. Packet Storm does not locally store any financial or personal data generated from these processes.

GDPR / privacy laws

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and similar data protection laws are great advancements, though they can be massively complex to understand. Anyone looking to make a request for deletion should note that in order for data to tie to an identity, there needs to be more than a single piece of data.

For instance, an author profile attributed to John Smith that does not have an email address linked cannot be attributed to a specific John Smith. However, if there is an email address linked, we can take action if we actually receive a request from the email address on file for John Smith. If the only data we have is a name, that does not qualify on its own.

If you are not considered a source of any files on the Packet Storm, or if you want to be GDPR-level purged without touching any files related to you on the site, you can simply delete your account for our systems to be in compliance.

Deleting your account

You can delete your account at any time by going to your Settings under the main menu and clicking Destroy My Existence under Cancel My Account. This will permanently delete any user record associated with the account.

Account deletion comes with one noted caveat: it will not affect files on the site. In the edge case where you not only want to delete your account but also want your files removed, please email the Data Protection Officer to accommodate your needs prior to deleting your account. By contacting us before you delete your regular user account, we will have methods of verifying your identity on file (assuming the user account has the same email address on file as the file source account).

Submission removals

If you contact us using information we have on file for you as a source, we are able to remove content. The content is yours and we merely store it as a free service. However, if your content has multiple sources attributed to it, who has rights becomes more complex. You can research more on how we approach these requests under our copyright section.

For all other inquires or requests, please mail our Data Protection Officer.