Legal

Privacy Policy

Last updated 25 August 2026

Floc is a professional network, so a lot of what you add is meant to be seen. This page explains exactly what is public, what stays private, and what we do with the rest.

What we collect

Account details — your email address and, if you sign in with Google, the name and profile picture that Google shares with us.
Profile content — display name, headline, bio, skills, links, location and, for organisations, mission, focus areas, team size and founding year.
Project content — projects, contributions, files, images, comments, tasks, records and change history.
Interactions — follows, likes, expressions of interest, team memberships, private messages and attachments.
Technical data — basic logs needed to run the service securely and diagnose faults.

What is public

Your profile, your publicly-developed projects (Open source or All rights reserved) and your contributions to them are public and visible to anyone on the internet, including search engines. Attribution is part of how the platform works: contributions are credited by name in the change log and version history.

What stays private

Your email address, your password, private messages and their attachments, expressions of interest, notification settings and reports you file are not public. Private messages are visible only to the people in that conversation, and to a moderator if a message is reported.

Drafts and deleted projects are not shown publicly. Public projects show only what the Project Lead chooses to publish, and grant no reuse rights simply by being visible.

Confidential projects

Confidential projects are access-controlled at the database level, not merely hidden in the interface. Their content — title, summary, description, files, images, tasks, discussions, team, change log and version history — is readable only by the Idea Lead and participants whose access is active. They are excluded from feeds, search, recommendations, public profiles, previews and search-engine indexing, and no public link exposes them.

For each Confidential project we store records of who was invited and when, whether and when they accepted the confidentiality terms, the exact version accepted, when access was granted, when it was revoked, and changes to the project's sharing status. These records form the project's Disclosure Log. They are append-only, are visible to the Idea Lead and to the participant an entry concerns, and are retained after access ends — including after a participant leaves — because they document a confidentiality relationship. The Idea Lead can export the full log as a CSV file containing those fields; once exported, the file is under the Idea Lead's control and outside Floc.

An invitation notification tells you that you have been invited to a confidential project and nothing else about it. When a Confidential project publishes a task or opportunity, only the text the Idea Lead writes into that posting becomes public; the posting's link to the project is stored privately and is never exposed to other users.

How we use it

To run the platform: showing projects and profiles, matching open tasks and opportunities to your skills, delivering messages and notifications, keeping accounts secure and dealing with reports. We do not sell your data and we do not use it for advertising.

Who we share it with

Only the service providers needed to operate Floc — hosting, database and storage, and email delivery — acting on our instructions. We also share information where the law requires it.

Your choices

Edit or remove most profile and project content directly from your account.
Turn individual notification types on or off under Account.
Block another member to stop them starting conversations with you.
Ask for a copy of your data, correction, or deletion of your account by writing to us. Where contributions must remain for attribution, we can anonymise your credit instead.

Identity verification

Floc may require identity verification where it is necessary for access or participation. In particular, identity verification is required before a person can be granted access to a Confidential Idea. It may also be required for particular roles or collaboration settings chosen for a public Idea.

When you verify your identity, we store the verification status, date of verification and the verified name associated with your account, together with the minimum verification information needed to operate and document the process. Where a third-party verification provider is used, Floc minimises the identity information and documents it stores itself.

Verification does not by itself grant access to an Idea. For a Confidential Idea, the person must also accept the applicable confidentiality agreement and be granted access by the Idea Lead or another authorised person.

Your public profile may show that your identity has been verified, but it does not expose unnecessary underlying identity-verification information.

Retention, deletion and export

We keep your data for as long as your account is active. Deleting a project you fully control is a soft delete: it is hidden immediately and kept, unpublished, for around 30 days so you can restore it, then permanently removed. Project history is retained after deletion of an account so collaborative work and other people's attribution stay intact. Access to data is protected by row-level security rules so members can only read what they are entitled to see. You can request an export of your own data by writing to us; an Idea Lead can export a Confidential project's Disclosure Log directly from the project.

Contact

Privacy questions and data requests go to hello@sparkhive.io.