Privacy Policy

Last updated: September 27, 2026

This page explains what personal information Freedom Climbers collects when you use freedomclimbers.com, why we collect it, who it is shared with, and what you can do about it. If you have any questions, email us at support@freedomclimbers.com.

Who we are

Freedom Climbers is a personal-finance education blog and community forum. Our website address is https://freedomclimbers.com. You can contact us at support@freedomclimbers.com.

What we collect and why

Community (forum) accounts. When you join, we store your username, your email address, your password (stored in encrypted, hashed form) and anything you choose to add to your profile. We use your email address to send account emails, such as the link to set your password or a password reset.
Forum posts. Topics and replies you post in the forum are public, together with your username and profile picture. Please don’t share account numbers, your full name, your address or photos of statements.
Comments. When you leave a comment on a post, we collect the name, email address and (optional) website you enter, the comment itself, your IP address and your browser’s user agent string. These help with spam protection. Comments are reviewed before they appear.
Server logs. Like most websites, our web server keeps standard logs of requests (such as IP address, pages requested, date and time, and browser type). These are used for security and troubleshooting.

Spam protection

We protect sign-up, login, comment and forum forms with hidden “honeypot” fields. This check runs on our own website, and it does not send your information to an outside service.

Profile pictures (Gravatar)

An anonymized string created from your email address (also called a hash) may be provided to the Gravatar service to see if you are using it. The Gravatar service privacy policy is available here: https://automattic.com/privacy/. After approval of your comment, your profile picture is visible to the public in the context of your comment. The same applies to forum posts.

Cookies

We don’t use advertising or analytics cookies. The cookies we use are the standard WordPress ones:

If you leave a comment, you can choose to save your name, email address and website in cookies, so you don’t have to fill them in again next time. These cookies last for one year.
If you visit the login page, we set a temporary cookie to check whether your browser accepts cookies. It contains no personal data and is discarded when you close your browser.
When you log in, we set cookies to keep you logged in and remember your screen display choices. Login cookies last for two days, or two weeks if you select “Remember Me”. Screen options cookies last for a year. Logging out removes the login cookies.

Our email newsletter hasn’t launched yet, so we don’t collect newsletter sign-ups today. When it launches, we plan to use Kit (kit.com) to send it. We’ll only add you if you sign up yourself, and every newsletter will include a link to unsubscribe. We’ll update this page when the newsletter goes live.

Media

If you upload images to the website, you should avoid uploading images with embedded location data (EXIF GPS) included. Visitors to the website can download and extract any location data from images on the website.

Embedded content from other websites

Articles on this site may include embedded content (for example videos, images or articles). Embedded content from other websites behaves in the exact same way as if you had visited the other website. These websites may collect data about you, use cookies, embed additional third-party tracking, and monitor your interaction with that embedded content, including tracking your interaction if you have an account and are logged in to that website.

Who we share your data with

We don’t sell your personal information, and we don’t share it for advertising. We use a few service providers to run the site:

ScalaHosting hosts our website and its database, so the information described above is stored on their servers.
Email delivery. We plan to send account emails (such as sign-up and password reset emails) through Brevo, an email delivery service. When it is connected, your email address and the content of those emails will pass through Brevo so they can be delivered.
Kit will send our newsletter once it launches (see “Newsletter” above).
Gravatar, as described above.

If you request a password reset, your IP address will be included in the reset email.

How long we keep your data

If you leave a comment, the comment and its metadata are kept indefinitely. This lets us recognize and approve any follow-up comments automatically instead of holding them in a moderation queue.

For people who register on our website, we also store the personal information they provide in their user profile. You can see, edit or delete your profile information at any time, except your username, which can’t be changed. Website administrators can also see and edit that information. Forum posts stay on the site until they are deleted. You can ask us to delete your account and posts at any time.

What rights you have over your data

If you have an account on this site, or have left comments, you can ask for an exported file of the personal data we hold about you, including any data you have given us. You can also ask us to erase any personal data we hold about you. This doesn’t include any data we are obliged to keep for administrative, legal or security purposes. To make a request, email support@freedomclimbers.com.

Changes to this policy

We’ll update this page when we change how we handle personal information, for example when the newsletter launches or when we connect a new service. The date at the top shows when it was last changed.