Privacy information

• We don’t ask or require you to provide any personally identifying information when you submit materials through SecureDrop. However, please keep in mind that the actual messages you send and receive through securedrop may include personally identifying information included by you or the journalist.
• The system does not record your IP address, information about your browser, computer, or operating system.
• The server will only store the date and time of the newest message sent from each source. Once you send a new message, the time and date of your previous message is automatically deleted.
• Journalists decrypt and read each message offline. Journalists will delete messages and any materials submitted through SecureDrop from the server on a regular basis. The date and time of any message will be securely deleted from the server when the message is deleted.
• Once you read a journalist’s message, we recommend you delete it. It will then be securely deleted from the file system.
• Also please note that when you submit certain types of files through SecureDrop, you may be sending us metadata associated with that file.
• For example, if you submit a photo through SecureDrop in JPEG format, the file may include information about the date, time, and the GPS location of where it was taken, and the type of device used to take the photo. Similarly, if you submit a Word file (.doc or .docx) through SecureDrop, it may include the identity of the document’s author, the author’s operating system, GPS data about the author’s location, and the date and time when the document was created.

Our policy is to scrub metadata from the files we receive through SecureDrop before publication. If you don’t want to send us metadata, please use the Metadata Anonymization Toolkit to scrub the file before you submit it.

However, no one can truly guarantee 100% security of any system. Like all software, SecureDrop may contain bugs. Ultimately, you use the SecureDrop service at your own risk.