Privacy Policy

Our Privacy Position

Verified Onion Index exists to document Tor hidden services, marketplace economies, escrow patterns, and the public record of takedowns and deanonymization research. That work does not require knowing who you are. We deliberately keep our footprint small: no accounts, no profiles, no behavioural tracking, and no interest in building a dossier on anyone reading an entry about AlphaBay’s collapse or the fallout from DisrupTor. The sections below describe, plainly and without padding, the little that passes through our hands.

Cookies and Local Storage

We set no advertising cookies and no cross-site identifiers. If a preference needs to survive a page reload — a filtered view, a collapsed list — it is stored client-side in your own browser and never transmitted to us. Clearing site data removes it permanently. Any cookie you do encounter here is likely functional in that narrow sense; we are not quietly running an analytics beacon alongside it.

What We Actually Receive

Standard web server behaviour applies. When your browser requests a page, the server records the request path, a timestamp, the referring URL if one was sent, your IP address, and your browser’s user-agent string. These are ordinary log entries, retained briefly for troubleshooting, then discarded. We do not ask for your name, email address, or payment details, and there is no form on this site that collects them.

• Request paths and timestamps
• IP address and user-agent header
• Referrer, where the browser supplies one

How Those Logs Are Used

For two things only: keeping the service reachable and blocking abusive traffic — scrapers hammering the index, credential-stuffing bots, denial-of-service attempts. Aggregated request counts help us notice outages and broken links. We do not sell, rent, trade, or otherwise hand your data to third parties, and we do not assemble profiles for marketing.

Outside Services

We do not embed external analytics suites, social widgets, or ad networks on these pages. A content delivery network may sit in front of the site to absorb traffic and terminate TLS; in that case the CDN operator sees the same request metadata described above. No third-party script executes in your browser as a result of reading this directory.

Your Rights

You may ask us, at any time, what personal information we hold about you, request a copy of it, ask for correction of anything inaccurate, or request erasure. Because retention is short, a log entry tied to your IP may already be gone by the time you write — we will tell you honestly what remains. Withdrawing consent is as simple as leaving; no account exists to close.

Children

This directory is intended for adults researching network privacy and cybercrime reporting. It is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect information from them, consistent with COPPA. Should we learn that a minor’s data reached us, we will remove it.

Policy Updates

When our practices change, the revised text appears on this page with a new effective date at the top. Substantive shifts will be called out rather than buried. Continued use after an update means you accept the version then posted.

Reaching Us

Questions, access requests, or deletion requests about {site_name} privacy practices go to {contact_email}. We aim to respond within a reasonable window and will never ask you for credentials or identifying documents to process a request.