Let us be direct about something, which is that we find privacy policies, as a genre, to be among the more spiritually defeating documents the modern world has produced. Long, procedural, written in a register designed less to inform than to insulate; and read by… almost nobody (which is perhaps the point?). We have nonetheless arrived at the occasion of needing one, and have decided to write it such that you might actually read it.

Here is what we do, and why:

On recordings

Our meetings are recorded. We say this plainly and at the top, because you deserve to know it before you walk in. The recording is not made to surveil you or to build a dossier on your opinions about Plato or your very reasonable ambivalence about the third act of a film everyone else seems to love. It is made for one purpose: so that we can produce session notes afterward: a written account of what we read, what we discussed, and what we found, which members can return to, share with a friend who missed the session, or simply use as evidence that yes, they did once spend two hours pondering the sincerity of Saint Augustine.

On who can hear those recordings

Nobody, by default. The recordings are not public. They are not posted, shared, indexed, or made available to anyone who was not in the room (or on the call, as the case sometime has it). If you were present for a session and would like to revisit the recording, you may request access. If you were not present, the recording is not for you, we think this is both fair and consistent with the reasonable expectation that what is said in a room is said in a room and context and localized energy is very important to understanding an experience.

On session notes

The notes we produce from these recordings are anonymized. Observations, ideas, questions, disagreements, that is, the actual substance – and only this – of the conversation, is what we aim to preserve. The names attached to them are not. We are interested in what was thought, what was cooperatively built in the course of our mutual exploration. The notes are the artifact; you are not.

On attendance

We do not maintain or publish records of who attended what, or how often, or how much anyone spoke, or in what direction the balance of their contributions tended. We believe that participation is its own reward and its own record, held by you, in your own memory, which is admittedly imperfect but is nonetheless genuine and genuinely yours.

Who we share your data with

Absolutely fucking nobody. Your data is not something we will ever have an interesting in “sharing” with anybody. In fact, making money off of people’s data is scum-behavior. How disgusting must you be to do such a thing, seriously? In fact in fact, the collection and sale of people’s “data” might just actually be the among the. worst things you could do in a system such as ours. In fact in fact in fact, we find the manufacture, collection, and distribution of “data” to be the very fodder that feeds Moloch (also known in some sacrosanct circles as M. Noodle), who happens to be the most corrosive and destructive force known to us. So, please hear us very clearly that our mission is diametrically opposed to the notion that the “data” of humans beings is a substance which has any business whatsoever to be subjected to the vampiric fangs of capitalistic thought forms. This manner of participation in our economic system leads to the inevitable desire to control the thoughts and desires of others, which, if you’ve been paying attention, protecting such a precious resource as your own thinking is kind of the whole mother-loving point of our endeavor.

On changes to this policy

We reserve the right to revise what is written here, as circumstances change and as we learn more about what we should have said in the first place. If we do, the new terms will govern what comes after them, not what came before. Whatever was recorded, noted, or otherwise handled under a previous version of this policy will continue to be treated according to the terms that were in place when it happened, as is only fair. You showed up under certain conditions; those conditions do not get quietly renegotiated after the fact. That is not how trust works, and we would like, above most other things, to be trustworthy… and what is a community without trust?

That is more or less everything. We have tried to be as honest with you here as we try to be in the rooms themselves, which is to say, imperfectly but genuinely.