Privacy Policy

Moderation and your messages

We can read a conversation only after it has been flagged or reported.

Classified MP does not read private conversations as a matter of course. There is no routine monitoring, no scanning of your messages for advertising, and no way for staff to browse conversations at will.

A conversation becomes reviewable in exactly two situations. First, when you or the other person reports it. Second, when an automated check flags a message — for example, a message that appears to arrange a firearm transfer without a licensed dealer, or that asks for payment by a method we have warned you about. The check runs on the words in the message. It does not involve a person reading your conversation unless it flags something.

When one of those happens, a moderator may open the flagged message and the 2 messages either side of it to judge it. They can open the whole conversation if that is necessary to make a fair decision, and that is recorded as a separate act.

Every time a moderator opens a conversation or a user record, we record it permanently — who looked, at what, when, and which report or flag they were acting on. Those records cannot be edited or deleted by the person who made them, including by us. This is enforced by the system, not by policy: a moderator who could read your messages without a record being kept would have to defeat the database itself, not merely change their mind.

We do not read conversations that have not been flagged or reported. If nothing in your conversation has been flagged and nobody has reported it, no moderator has opened it.

You can ask us for that record. Write to privacy@classifiedmp.com from the email address on your account and we will send you every occasion on which a moderator opened one of your conversations or your account record, when it happened, and which report or flag justified it. If there are none, we will tell you that. We build the record this way so that the answer can be a real one rather than an assurance.

Server logs and your IP address

Like every web server, ours records each request it answers: the address your device connected from, the page or file you asked for, the time, and what your browser said it was. This is how a fault gets diagnosed after somebody reports it.

We keep those records for about a week, then delete them. They are not a record of what you looked at that we hold on to, and they are not used for anything except finding out why something broke.

Separately, and for a different purpose, we count how many times each listing has been viewed. Your address is not stored for that. It is combined with the listing and put through a one-way hash, and only the result is kept — so it is not readable as an address by anyone who obtains the database, and because the listing is part of what is hashed, the same person viewing two listings produces two unrelated values that cannot be joined into a history of what they looked at. Even those are deleted after two days; they exist only to stop one person reloading a page from counting twice.

What we collect

Not yet written. What follows says what this section will cover — it is being drafted and we would rather tell you that than publish something nobody has agreed to.

When it is written, this section will describe the details held on your account, the text and photos in your listings, the approximate location kept for a listing (the centre of a ZIP code — never a street address for a private individual), the contents of your messages, and the confirmations you gave when you signed up.

How long we keep it

Not yet written. What follows says what this section will cover — it is being drafted and we would rather tell you that than publish something nobody has agreed to.

When it is written, this section will state how long each kind of information is kept, and what happens to it afterwards. The periods are being reviewed, and we would rather publish nothing here than publish a number we then have to change.

Cookies, third parties, and your rights

Not yet written. What follows says what this section will cover — it is being drafted and we would rather tell you that than publish something nobody has agreed to.

When it is written, this section will list the cookies this site sets, the companies that handle information on our behalf and what each one receives, and how to ask us for a copy of what we hold or to have your account deleted.

You can already write to privacy@classifiedmp.com with any of those requests. That address is read by a person, and it works whether or not this section has been finished.