W3C privacy policy

Status: This document supersedes the 2014 version. This policy was was updated on 13 May 2025.

Public web browsing (non-logged-in)

We make no effort to identify public users of our site. No identifying data is disclosed to any third party for any purpose. Data that we collect is used only for server administration, site improvement, usage statistics, and web protocol research. We also collect information as provided by the public in different sections of the website in relation to fundraising activities.

We log HTTP requests to our site including 'IP', 'Referer' and 'User-Agent' to be able to analyze the traffic. We use cookies for purposes including to understand usage patterns of the site and to maintain session state for some applications.

Pages may link to or embed content such as video from other sites, or payment forms to process fees and donations. Those resources are governed by the privacy policies of their originating sites.

When you are completing a donation, you are asked for an email address, real name, and affiliation in addition to your payment information, to assist with administration and due diligence. We do not sell or trade your information to anyone. By donating, you agree to share your personal information with World Wide Web Consortium, Inc., and its service providers. World Wide Web Consortium, Inc. and its service providers are located in the United States and in other countries whose privacy laws may not be equivalent to your own.

Collected information may be kept indefinitely as administrative, diagnostic, and research material, or discarded for any reason. Such information is not disclosed outside of authorized personnel. Aggregate (non-identifying) statistics generated from these logs may be reported publicly as part of research results.

Logged-in usage

When you create a user account, you are asked for a username, email address, real name, and affiliation.

We use some of this information to show organizational affiliations and participant activity including group membership, mailing list and conference call contributions, editorship credits, and fundraising purposes. This record of activity is important to organizational due diligence, and transparency in our Process and Patent Policy.

Mailing lists

Mailing lists associated with W3C are publicly archived. On your first submission to one of these lists, you will be asked to approve the public posting of your message. We do not remove postings from archived lists per our archive-editing policy.

Hosting and Content Delivery Networks (CDN)

W3C services are hosted on AWS. When you visit our website, your personal data will be processed on AWS servers. For more information, please see the AWS privacy policy.

We use Cloudflare to protect our website and to optimize its performance. See the Cloudflare privacy policy.

Portions of the W3C website are hosted on GitHub Pages. GitHub may collect user personal information from visitors including logs of visitor IP addresses, to comply with legal obligations, and to maintain the security and integrity of their service. See the GitHub privacy statement for details.

Law enforcement and other compelled disclosures

In the event that we are required by law (including a court order) to disclose the information you submit, we will make an effort to provide you with notice (unless we are prohibited) that a request for your information has been made, and give you an opportunity to object to the disclosure. We will attempt to provide this notice by email, if you have given us an email address. We will independently object to over-broad requests for access to information about users of our site. If you do not challenge the disclosure request we may be legally required to turn over information.

Changes from the previous version of the policy

The policy has been clarified to reflect current technology and W3C practices. We do not intend material changes in what W3C does with information resulting from visits to our site. The changes from the previous version are:

  • Addition of clarifications related to data collection, as well as due diligence related to fundraising purposes.
  • Addition of a section on hosting and content delivery networks.
  • Removal of the section on W3C honoring the Do-Not-Track header, which is an obsolete section.