Privacy policy

The Eko Review is run by Eko Vision Foundation, a nonprofit. This page explains what we hold about you, why, who else can see it, how long we keep it, and how to get it back or delete it. It is written to be read — if any part of it is unclear, that is our problem and we would like to hear about it.

Last updated: 17 September 2026

Who we are

Eko Vision Foundation
300 Massachusetts Ave NW, Apt 426
Washington, D.C. 20001

For anything on this page — a question, a request for your data, a complaint — write to theekoreview@ekovisionfoundation.org. A person reads that inbox. We have not appointed a data protection officer.

What we collect

What you tell us

• Your email address and a password. The password is stored by our sign-in provider as a hash — we never see it and cannot recover it. We do not collect phone numbers, and there is no sign-in through Google, Facebook or any other social account.
• A display name, which is shown next to anything you post.
• Accessibility preferences — text size, contrast, reduced motion, link underlining and similar. We keep these so the site looks the way you set it on every device you sign in from.
• Which description fits you — for example a blind or low-vision user, a family member, or a vision professional. A short label from this is shown next to your reviews, so readers know whose experience they are reading. We also keep the answers you gave to that question at sign-up; those are not public, and see the note below about getting a copy of them.
• A confirmation that you are 16 or older, ticked when you register. It is your own statement; we do not verify it.
• Welcome survey answers, if you give them. These get their own section below, because they are the most sensitive thing we hold.

What you create

• Reviews — your ratings, including the separate scores for reliability, adaptability, maintenance and connectivity, how long you have used the product, and what you wrote.
• Comments, community posts and replies.
• Products you submit to the catalogue, and any photos you upload with them.
• Votes and likes — whether you found a review helpful, and which products you liked.
• Reports you file about someone else’s comment, and the reason you gave.

Reviews, comments, posts and replies are public once a moderator approves them, shown with the display name you had when you wrote them. Before approval they are visible to you and to moderators.

What we record automatically

• A security and activity log of significant actions — signing in, posting, a moderator acting on something — with the time and the account involved.
• A one-way hash of your IP address on those log entries, not the address itself. It is hashed with a secret salt, so it can show that two actions came from the same place without our being able to work out where that place is. We use it to stop abuse and nothing else.
• Sign-in timestamps, kept by our sign-in provider.
• Notifications we have sent you, and whether you have read them.

We do not use analytics, advertising or tracking of any kind. There is no Google Analytics, no advertising pixel, no third-party script watching what you read. We do not build a profile of your browsing, we do not sell anything about you, and nothing here is shared with advertisers.

Why we collect it

To run the site: to let you sign in, to show your reviews with your name and perspective attached, to remember how you like the page to look, to let moderators keep the community usable, and to keep the service secure. Without these we could not provide the thing you came here for.

The welcome survey is different, and it is the only thing here we ask your permission for separately.

The welcome survey

After registering, some members are shown a short survey. It asks which assistive technologies you use and for how long; or, if you support someone else, what that relationship is and what you help with; or, if you are a professional, your role and setting. It never asks you to state your sight status.

We treat these answers as sensitive anyway. Saying you use a screen reader — or that you support someone who does — reveals disability information about you or a family member, whether or not the question was asked directly.

This is what we tell you before you answer, word for word:

These questions are optional. Your answers can reveal disability-related information about you or someone you support, so we treat them as sensitive.

We use them to decide which technologies we review more closely, what guidance to write with our experts, and to report anonymous totals to our funders.

We never sell your answers, share them with advertisers, or share individual answers outside the foundation.

You can delete your answers at any time in your account settings.

Members who have agreed did so against that wording, version 2026-09-15, and we store which version they agreed to. A small number of members answered the survey before we asked for agreement in this way; we are asking each of them once, and their answers stay only if they say so. Until that is finished, we will not claim every answer we hold was consented to, because it would not be true.

You can delete your survey answers at any time from your account settings. Nothing else about your account changes when you do.

Who else can see it

Your reviews, comments and posts are public once approved — that is the point of the site. Moderators can see submissions before approval, and can see reports filed about content.

Four companies handle data on our behalf in order for the site to work at all:

• Supabase — our database, sign-in and file storage. Your data is held in the United States (Ohio).
• Vercel — hosting, and the logs of web requests that come with it. Vercel also runs a bot-detection service on the four sign-in-related requests — creating an account, signing in, asking for a password reset, and setting a new password — which inspects those requests to tell a person from an automated one.
• GitHub — where an encrypted backup of the database is stored each night and kept for 90 days. The contents are encrypted, but a copy of the data does sit there.
• Google — delivers the email we send you, which today means the message confirming your address and the one you ask for when you have forgotten your password. Your email address and the contents of those messages pass through Google’s mail servers in the United States.

We do not share your data with anyone else, and we never sell it.

How long we keep it

• The security and activity log: 24 months, after which entries are deleted automatically, every night.
• Your account and everything on it: until you delete it. We do not expire accounts for inactivity.
• Backups: 90 days, as above.

We are still building automatic clean-up for uploaded images that are left behind when the thing they belonged to is removed. We would rather say that than name a period we are not yet keeping.

Your rights

• Get a copy of your data. Your account page has an export that gives you a file containing your profile, your reviews, comments, posts and replies, your votes, likes, submitted products, reports you filed, your survey answers, the answers you gave at sign-up and your notifications.
• Correct it. Your display name, preferences, perspective and survey answers are all editable from your account page, and reviews can be edited after posting.
• Delete your survey answers on their own, without deleting anything else.
• Delete your account. This removes your profile, your sign-in, your votes, your likes and your notifications.

One thing to know before you delete. Your reviews, comments and posts stay on the site, with your name replaced by “Former member”. The community keeps the knowledge you contributed; you keep your privacy. We would rather tell you that now than at the moment you press the button.

What the export does not include

Two things are deliberately left out, and one is missing because we have not built it yet. We would rather list them than let you assume the file is everything:

• The audit trail of actions on your account, because it records which moderator acted and what they wrote about it. Available on request — write to us and a person will review it.
• Some moderator notes on your own content, for the same reason: they are one person’s written assessment of another. Also available on request. The reason a review was rejected is shown to you and is in your export.

How we protect it

• Access rules are enforced by the database itself, not only by the application, so a bug in a page cannot hand one member another member’s data.
• Your survey answers, the answers you gave at sign-up and your account role are readable only by you — not by other members, whatever the page does. The short perspective label is the exception, and deliberately so: it appears next to your reviews, because a reader needs to know whose experience they are reading.
• IP addresses are stored only as salted one-way hashes.
• The site sends a strict content security policy, so a browser will refuse to run scripts we did not put there.
• Traffic is encrypted in transit, and we require HTTPS.

If you believe you have found a security problem, please write to theekoreview@ekovisionfoundation.org rather than posting it publicly.

Children

Accounts on The Eko Review are for people aged 16 or over, and we ask you to confirm that when you register. Children are an important part of the community this site serves — “parent of a blind or low-vision child” is one of the perspectives we offer — and they are served through a parent’s account rather than one of their own.

If you believe a child holds an account here, tell us and we will remove it.

Changes to this policy

When this page changes in a way that affects what we do with your data, we will update the date at the top and, where the change is significant, tell members directly. Previous versions are in the public history of the site’s source code.