Foreman Privacy Policy

This document describes the data Foreman collects about you, why it is collected, what is done with it, and your options for how it’s processed.

The Foreman project does not share data with 3rd parties, except for hosting requirements (e.g. GitHub, YouTube) as detailed below, or when required to by law.

Types of data we collect

  • Contact details
    • Name
    • Email address
  • Data that identifies you
    • IP addresses
    • Browser UserAgent strings
    • Debug archives
    • Answers to survey questions

How and why we use your data

The website

The Foreman website is a static site which does not track, collect, store information or set cookies. There is no account for the website itself. The webserver (Apache) logs will contain IP addresses, timestamps, and UserAgent strings - these are log-rotated and deleted after 4 weeks.

The website also uses Google Analytics, but we only collect anonymous data. IP addresses are anonymised, and we do not use User-ID, or any linked Google product (e.g. AdWords). Google Analytics data is deleted after 26 months (the default for Google Analytics).

The webserver logs and Google Analytics are used to produce aggregated statistics about the community, such as popularity of different browsers, operating system packages, plugins, etc.

  • Legal basis for this data usage: Legitimate interest

Website videos

The website does embed videos from YouTube, FOSDEM, and Slideshare - see the links below for details:

for details. These videos do not autoplay.

Website downloads

The downloads from our website are cached by Fastly, a CDN provider. This may also log your IP address - see Fastly’s privacy policy for details. We don’t currently use this data at all, but we may use it for aggregated statistics in the future.

Codebase

The Foreman community use GitHub to manage the code that comprises the Foreman project. Refer to GitHub’s privacy policy for details on how GitHub handles the data you post there.

Commit messages can contain names and email addresses. You are free to use psuedonymous data for commit messages. We do prefer a working contact mail in case of needing to contact contributors to the codebase, but it is not mandatory.

We also use non-identifiable data from the codebase to provide aggregated statistics such as average time to merge, number of open pull requests, etc.

  • Legal basis for this data usage: Legitimate interest, consent

The Foreman community also runs a self-hosted bug tracker using the Redmine software. When you sign up for a Redmine account, you provide us with an email address and a name.

Externally, we only use this email within Redmine to contact you about bugs you have reported or subscribed to. You have full control over what emails are sent from your Redmine account preferences.

Email addresses can also be linked to GitHub commits (see above) if the emails match, or manually by an admin (on request). This enables Redmine to automatically attribute issue changes to your user, based on the public commit data from the GitHub repositories (e.g. closing it when you fix an issue). This populates your Redmine “activity” page, which is public.

The bug tracker also uses cookies to store your session.

We also use the bug tracker data to provide aggregated statistics such as number of open/closed bugs, average time to close a bug, etc.

  • Legal basis for this data usage: Legitimate interest, consent

Communication

The Foreman project maintains two public IRC channels on libera.chat, refer to libera.chat’s privacy policy for details on how they handle your data.

The Foreman community uses a self-hosted forum using the Discourse software. When signing up for a Discourse account, you provide a name and email address - and in addition we store the IP address of your most recent connection. The email address is only used to send you updates to your forum topics, personal messages from other users, and digest summaries. You have full control over the emails sent from your Discourse account preferences. The forum also uses cookies to store your session.

We also use the IP addresses and public post data to provide aggregated statistics about the forum community, such as posts-per-month, user engagement, etc. We also use the IP addresses to help identify sock puppeting and spam accounts.

  • Legal basis for this data usage: Legitimate interest, consent

Surveys

The Foreman community runs a survey each year. Completing the survey is opt-in, and providing a contact email address in the survey is optional. Such addresses are stored until the survey analysis is complete, and then deleted from the raw survey data before publication. The survey data is used to gain understanding of the community, and aggregated statistics based on the survey results are published each year.

  • Legal basis for this data usage: Legitimate interest, consent

Foreman debug archives

The Foreman project provides a tool called foreman-debug which collects logs from your Foreman server and uploads it to a secure location in our infrastructure. Use of this tool is entirely voluntary (it is never run automatically), and the data is used by our developers to assist users in debugging complex problems. The data is not used for any analysis or statistics, is only accessible to a small number of the Foreman developers, and is deleted regularly.

  • Legal basis for this data usage: Consent

Your rights regarding your data

Your choices

You can choose not to provide us with personal data

Using a VPN, Tor, or other IP / UserAgent masking service will not affect your use of the project website, as it is entirely static. For Redmine & Discourse, we do not mandate use of real names, and using pseudonyms will not affect the services.

Your accounts on our services

Your Redmine & Discourse accounts contain options to control what emails are sent to you. 3rd party services such as GitHub retain their own policies and privacy options.

Your rights

Where the EU General Data Protection Regulation 2016/679 (“GDPR”) applies to the processing of your personal data, especially when you access the website from a country in the European Economic Area (“EEA”), you have the following rights, subject to some limitations, against the Foreman Project:

  • The right to access your personal data
  • The right to rectify the personal data we hold about you
  • The right to erase your personal data
  • The right to restrict our use of your personal data
  • The right to object to our use of your personal data
  • The right to receive your personal data in a usable electronic format and transmit it to a third party (also known as the right of data portability)
  • The right to lodge a complaint with your local data protection authority

If you would like to exercise any of these rights, you may do so by contacting the Foreman Project at contact us or on IRC. Please understand, however, the rights enumerated above are not absolute in all cases, especially in regards to the right to erase your data:

  • Git commits will not be rewritten
    • contributing to the codebase is opt-in,
    • providing personally identifying information in commit messages is a further opt-in
    • we have a legitimate interest in contacting contributors and showing IP provenance
  • Redmine & Discourse data which is public (i.e forum posts, bug comments etc) will be pseudonymised
    • Your account name, handle, and email address will be scrambled, removing your personal data from the site
    • Posts are not removed, as we have a legitimate interest in retaining the history of discussions about our project

Contacting us

If you have any questions about this policy or our use of your data, please feel free to contact us or on IRC.

Changes to this Privacy Statement

Foreman reserves the right to update this policy from time to time. Material changes will be posted to the Announcements list and posted to the front page of the website. This policy was last updated on 28th May 2018.

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