Privacy Policy

Still Comrades is an independent online community for serving and former members of the armed forces and emergency services, operating at stillcomrades.com and stillcomrades.co.uk. For the purposes of data protection law we are the data controller for the information described on this page.

We are not affiliated with any armed force, ministry of defence, government or veterans' organisation.

We hold only what the community needs. In every case the purpose is one of these: to run your account and the members' area, to publish what you have chosen to share, to help members find one another, to keep people safe, to answer you when you write to us, or to meet a legal obligation.

• Your account: the email address you sign in with, your name, and your role. Your password is held by our authentication service in hashed form — nobody at Still Comrades can read it.
• Your member profile: display name, first name, country, service, service status, unit, battalion, ship or squadron, rank, years served, bases, postings, a short biography, your introduction, and whether you wish to be found in the comrades directory.
• Your privacy choices: whether your profile is public, members-only or private, whether you appear in Find Comrades, and which profile fields you keep hidden.
• Service details you record with material: the country, service, unit, rank, dates and establishments you attach to a story, photograph, recollection or tribute.
• Stories, recollections and comments: the text, tags, any photographs attached, and the display name shown as the author.
• Photographs and albums: the image, its title, caption, approximate date, location, the names of people pictured (recorded only when you confirm they agreed), and the audience you chose.
• Mess Room: the title and text of discussions and replies, your display name with the optional service line, reactions, and which discussions you follow.
• Connection requests: who asked whom, the message sent, and how the request was answered.
• Remembrance: the name of the person remembered, their service details, your tribute, photographs, source notes, and how you describe your connection to them.
• Enquiries and membership applications: your name, email address, service details, your message, and the reference we give you.
• Reports: what was reported, the reason, any details you add, and that you were the person reporting it.
• Notifications: the notice itself, the page it opens, and whether you have read it.
• Account records: whether an account is active, suspended or closed, and the reason recorded for a decision.
• Technical information: the page and file requests our hosting platform receives, error records, and the browser checks that keep sign-in and forms working. This sits with the platform, not inside any member record.

All of it is held in our hosting platform's database, which is the only copy we keep — we hold no separate backups or exports of member information.

Photographs and other files are held in the platform's private file storage. There is no permanent public address for them: a viewing link is issued only after a permission check and stops working after fifteen minutes.

Email we send to members, and the notifications that tell you an administrator has received an enquiry, are passed to the platform's email service for delivery.

Permission is checked on the server for every request, not in the page you are looking at. What follows is what each audience can actually reach.

• Anyone visiting, without signing in: material published to everyone — public stories, photographs and albums, public recollections, approved public tributes, services and units register entries, and any profile set to public. Only a display name is shown, never an email address.
• Signed-in members: members-only material — members' profiles, stories, photographs, recollections, approved members-only tributes — and the Mess Room. A profile field you have hidden is not sent to them at all.
• You: everything on your own record, including your hidden fields, your drafts, your own reports and your notifications.
• Moderators: reported material, content held for review, and the records needed to decide a report.
• Administrators: the whole record — including the email address on an account, account status, enquiries and applications, unapproved tributes, private photographs, and the moderation and audit records.

A field you hide is removed on the server before the profile is built, so it cannot be recovered from the page or its data. A private or members-only photograph is never served from a public address: the link is issued after a permission check, and a copied link stops working within fifteen minutes.

Unapproved tributes, drafts and content held for review are not shown to visitors at all. A closed or suspended profile is not returned to anyone but an administrator.

No member ever sees another member's email address. Reconnecting works through a connection request which the person asked accepts or declines; we do not hand addresses over. Enquiries and membership applications are visible only to administrators.

Stories, recollections, photographs and Mess Room posts are published by you, at the moment you choose to publish them. They are not checked by a person beforehand. If someone later reports them, they can be held from view while they are looked at.

Tributes in Remembrance are different: a person reviews every submission and nothing appears until it has been approved. Reference articles in the military history archive are written and published by the editors.

You choose the audience for your profile, for each photograph and for each story, and you choose the display name shown with your material — it need not be your full name. You can change that audience, or withdraw the material, at any time.

Photographs of other people belong to them as much as to you. We ask you to confirm that everyone pictured has agreed before any names are recorded.

We do not sell your personal information. We do not build advertising profiles, run advertising, or track members across other websites. We do not take payments on this site, so we hold no card or bank details. We do not publish a member's email address, and we do not pass one to another member.

We keep information while there is a reason to keep it. There are no automatic deletion timers: nothing disappears on a fixed date, and nothing is kept merely because deleting it would take an effort. Where something is no longer needed, we remove it.

• Account and profile: while your account is open. When the account is closed the profile is stripped of personal detail and marked closed, as described below.
• Stories, recollections, comments and Mess Room material: until you remove them or ask us to. They are not deleted for being old.
• Photographs and albums: as long as the record that holds them; when the record goes, the stored file is queued for removal.
• Connection requests: while a request is open or a connection stands, and as history after a decline or cancellation — until one of the accounts closes, which removes that account's pending requests and its notifications.
• Tributes: while approved and published. A submission that is not approved is never published; it stays in the review area until it is removed, which we will do on request.
• Enquiries and membership applications: for as long as it takes to answer them and act on them. They are not deleted on a timer — ask us and we will remove yours.
• Reports, moderation decisions and audit entries: kept as the community's safety record, including after the content they concern has gone, because they show what was decided and why. These entries are never edited or deleted.
• Notifications: until you clear them, or your account closes, at which point they are deleted.
• Technical and error records: held by our hosting platform for the period it sets for service and security logs.

Deleting a photograph, story, comment, recollection, tribute or album removes it from the site at once: it stops being shown, counted, searched for or opened.

The stored file is queued for removal at the same moment. The application itself is not able to delete a file from storage directly, so an administrator carries that step out in the file library and the queue records when the file is confirmed gone. Until then the file cannot be reached from the site, because a viewing link is only ever issued for a record that exists.

If a photograph is also used by another record that is still live, we will tell you before removing it rather than break that record silently.

Moderation and audit entries about a decision are kept, but they hold a short description rather than the content itself.

You can ask us to close your account from your profile page, and an administrator confirms the outcome with you. What happens then is deliberate rather than total:

• Open connections and pending requests are removed, and your notifications are deleted.
• For each kind of material you contributed — stories, photographs, recollections, tributes, Mess Room discussions — you choose whether it is kept, withdrawn from view, or deleted. Kept material can have your name replaced with 'Former member'.
• Your profile is marked closed, set to private, removed from Find Comrades, and every personal detail on it is cleared, including your profile photograph, which is queued for deletion from storage. The empty record is kept so the audit trail still shows what was decided about the account; it is never shown to anyone but an administrator.
• Any staff access ends.
• A short entry recording that the account was closed, when, by whom and why is kept in the moderation record, and that record is retained.
• The sign-in itself is deleted from the platform's user list by an administrator as part of closing the account. Until that step is done the account can still sign in, but it cannot write anything and its profile and material stay out of view.

We share information only with the providers who make the site work, and only so they can provide those services to us under contract: our hosting and database platform, its private file storage, and its email delivery service. Web fonts are requested from Google's font service, which means Google receives your IP address as part of delivering the font files.

We may disclose information where the law requires it, or where it is necessary to protect someone's safety. We do not sell, rent or trade it, and we do not run advertising on this site.

You have the right to ask for a copy of your information, to have it corrected, to have it erased, to restrict or object to how we use it, and to receive it in a portable format. You may withdraw consent at any time.

Two limits are worth knowing in advance. Audit records that show a moderation decision are kept, as explained above, and a stored photograph may remain in the file library until an administrator has confirmed its removal — it is unreachable from the site in the meantime.

To exercise any of these, contact us through the contact page. We will respond within one month. If you are unhappy with our response you may complain to the Information Commissioner's Office in the United Kingdom, or to the equivalent authority where you live.

Access to member information is limited to the people who need it to run the community, and every moderation and administration action is checked on the server before it happens. Information is transmitted over encrypted connections and held in access-controlled systems.

Private photographs and albums are stored privately and served through short-lived links issued after a permission check. Photographs uploaded from now on are re-encoded before upload, which removes camera, date and location details; photographs contributed earlier may still carry them, and you are welcome to ask us to check or replace one.

If an account is suspended, every attempt to write, upload or change anything is refused on the server at once, whatever page the person is looking at.

Membership is for people aged 16 and over. We do not knowingly collect information about children. If you believe a child has submitted information, contact us and we will remove it.

If we change how we handle information we will update this page and its date, and where the change is significant we will tell members by email.