Privacy

Lantern's central servers store the following information: Your email address, the email address of the account that invited you, and the email addresses of anyone you invite. When you invite someone to join Lantern, they receive an email which contains the name and email address of the account you use with Lantern, and Lantern also securely transmits a Google Talk Oauth "refresh token" from your computer to a Lantern server. This allows an instance of Lantern to run under your account from the cloud, providing access to your trusted contacts and participating in the Lantern network even when your own computer is asleep.

Participating in the Lantern network entails proxying traffic for users connected to you on the Lantern trust graph, and advertising the Lantern users you know about to other users connected to you on the trust graph, according to the Kaleidoscope Limited Advertisement Protocol. This allows Lantern users to share internet connections with one another only when connected on the trust graph.

Lantern takes the responsibility of providing internet access very seriously. We have an explicit interest in keeping any personally identifiable information routed through Lantern servers and clients limited, secret, and ephemeral. All Lantern software and infrastructure has been configured with strong security protections and data expungement policies in accordance with that interest. Any human contact with identifiable information is limited to only the core Lantern developers and is strictly incidental to making sure Lantern works.

Optional information: If enabled, we use Google Analytics to store information about your use of Lantern, exceptional.io to store information about errors in the Lantern software, and Google App Engine to store information about the countries you have logged in from and the number of bytes that you have sent and received. We ask before enabling any of this collection. Users who decline enjoy the same level of surface as users who opt in. We are committed to storing only optional information that is not personally identifiable.

We promise to use any information we collect only to provide the Lantern service, and to provide it to other Lantern users only for the same purpose. If you would like us to delete any identifiable information that we have collected about you, please email us at admin@getlantern.org and we'll be glad to do so.