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Policy

Privacy & User Agreement

Effective 3 November 2026 · Operated by GreyNOC · Contact: [email protected]

The short version: GreyNOC has no accounts — your identity is a cryptographic key that lives in your browser and never leaves it. Private rooms, direct messages, and calls are end-to-end encrypted; we cannot read them. The Community Lobby, public rooms, and the feed are public, and so are the arcade, CTF and duel leaderboards — they publish the handle you compete under, never your key. Lobby, public-room, unsigned and system feed items are erased on server restart; signed Campus posts and social actions are saved under the retention rules in section 5. The core messenger sets no cookies; GreyPath Operations uses functional cookies for authorization and run-resume state. GreyNOC runs no ads and never sells your data. Anonymous daily visit and enrollment counts are described in section 8. Payments are handled entirely by Stripe — your card number never touches our servers. California residents: we do not sell or share your personal information and we honor your CCPA/CPRA rights — see the California Privacy Notice in section 11.

1. Who we are

GreyNOC operates this service (the Academy campus, Code Lab, training programs, certifications, study cohorts, the Reports board, the CTF board and duels, and the GreyNOC OS arcade) at chat.grey-noc.com. For anything in this document — questions, data requests, complaints — email [email protected].

2. Your identity is a Campus key

We do not require names, emails, phone numbers, or passwords to use the Academy. If you choose to send a business inquiry through the Cyber Lab contact form, we collect the contact details you submit for that separate purpose. Your Academy identity is an Ed25519 key pair generated in your browser on first use. The private key is never uploaded in plaintext; the public half acts as your pseudonymous handle. You may enable an encrypted identity backup linked to GitHub. Restoring it requires both that GitHub account and the Campus passphrase used when the backup was saved. Your screen name is whatever you choose — it does not need to be your real name. Losing the key without a usable backup and its passphrase means losing access to records tied to that identity. A Full Access migration code transfers plan access, not the identity key.

3. What we can never read (end-to-end encrypted)

WebRTC connection setup uses Google's public STUN servers and may reveal network metadata, including IP information, to Google and to the peers you connect with. STUN does not receive the encrypted room, message, or call content.

4. What is public in the app

The Community Lobby, public rooms, and the home feed are not private: what you post there is visible to everyone connected and passes through the server in plaintext. Lobby and public-room messages and unsigned or system feed items are held in server memory only and are erased whenever the server restarts. Signed learner posts, replies, quotes, attachments and related social actions are saved in a bounded server record and remain visible after you disconnect until deleted, moderated, or pruned at capacity. Reports you publish are public by intent and persist until you delete them or the bounded report store prunes the oldest entries (you can delete your own reports in-app). Presence — your screen name, online/away status, and the “where in the app” activity badge — is broadcast to other users while you are connected; you can blank the activity badge with Hide my activity in Settings or leave the roster entirely with appear offline. Presence is never written to disk.

Leaderboards are public. The GreyNOC OS CTF board, the CTF hunt board, the CROSSFIRE duel standings and the FRAGNET ladder each publish a ranked table to anyone who opens them, showing the handle a competitor is listed under and their score. Your identity public key is never part of that table — the server strips it before the standings leave the process — but a handle you type yourself is shown exactly as you typed it, so do not put a real name there unless you mean to publish it. Taking part is optional; nothing you do in a course or an exam appears on a board. Cohort boards are not public: only that cohort's members and administrators can read one, and a post there is shown under a per-cohort tag rather than your key (section 5).

5. What we store, and for how long

Persisted server-side, keyed to your identity key or an opaque vault token your browser holds:

These records survive server restarts. The store has bounded capacity; if a limit is reached, the service may prune the oldest or least-recently-used records before the retention event listed below.

Browser-only state includes your private keys, appearance and preferences, trust pins for buddies' keys, and cached progress, kept on this device only. You can wipe it any time (section 10).

6. Payments (Stripe)

GreyNOC Pro checkout happens on Stripe's hosted payment page. Your card details go directly to Stripe and never touch GreyNOC's servers. We pass Stripe your identity public key as the purchase reference; Stripe returns and we store: your Pro status, Stripe customer ID, your checkout email, and, for subscriptions, the subscription ID and renewal date — keyed to your identity key so your entitlement can be honored and refunds or chargebacks can revoke it. Subscriptions are cancellable any time under Settings › Full Access & billing (which opens Stripe's billing portal) or from the receipt Stripe emails you; access continues until the end of the paid period. Stripe processes your payment data under its own privacy policy.

7. IP addresses & security logs

We use your IP address transiently for rate limiting and abuse defense (connection caps, attack-pattern scoring, temporary bans). This data lives in server memory with short windows (roughly 10-minute scoring, 15-minute automatic bans). High-severity security events (for example, exploit probes) may be written to server console logs with the offending IP. Operator-imposed manual bans store the IP, reason, and timestamps until they expire or are lifted, and may be permanent; placing one also disconnects any connection already open from that address. Bounded administrative-control and GreyPath-deletion audit records also store the operator's IP. The administrative console can display the connection IP of a live session alongside the screen name on it, for as long as that connection is open: the pairing is read from the open connection when an authorised operator loads the page, is never written to disk, and is never sent to other users — the buddy list and every other client-facing view continue to carry no address information at all. If an operator then bans or unbans an address, that action is written to a bounded administrative audit trail that records the address, the operator's own address, the duration, and the reason they gave — and when the ban was placed from a session, that reason may name the screen name it was placed for. Those audit entries persist after the ban itself expires or is lifted, until they age out of the trail.

8. Cookies & local storage

The core messenger sets no cookies and GreyNOC embeds no third-party analytics, ad, or fingerprinting scripts. GreyPath Operations sets signed, functional HttpOnly cookies: one remembers acceptance of its authorization statement (normally 30 days), and separate cookies resume in-progress Black Glass, Quiet Meridian, and Last Light runs (normally 12 hours). They are scoped to the relevant /greypath routes, use SameSite=Strict, and are marked Secure in production. Client state such as identity keys, preferences, progress, the 18+ confirmation, and trust pins are kept in browser local storage to make the app function. Our edge provider (Cloudflare) may set its own operational cookies as part of serving the site.

Our own Academy usage counters record visits, free-operation steps, enrollment steps, and confirmed purchases as daily aggregate totals retained for up to 120 days. Browser events send only a predefined event name; the counters do not store a visitor identifier, identity key, URL, referrer, user agent, or raw IP address. Requests still pass through normal IP-based rate limiting and our edge provider. Browser-only receipts prevent the same event from being counted repeatedly in one day and are pruned after 35 days when updated. The counters start on your first public page view, before any confirmation or profile exists, and do not submit lesson answers or code.

We count visits and enrollment steps from your first public page view onward (the age and policy confirmation comes later, at the campus door) using our own daily aggregate counters, retained for up to 120 days. These counters store event names and totals, not identity keys, names, URLs, referrers, user agents, raw IP addresses, lesson answers, or code. Ordinary request rate limits and our edge provider still process connection information. Browser-local receipts prevent duplicate counts: dated receipts are pruned after 35 days when updated, while the first-dashboard receipt remains until browser storage is cleared.

9. Service providers

We do not sell personal information, and we do not share it for advertising. Ever.

10. Your choices & rights

The KEEP / WIPE switch in Settings' Danger Zone erases your local identity and settings, and deletes your server-side saved profiles, training progress, exam records, certificates (including the locked certificate name), authored Campus social posts and actions, delegated terminal posting keys and the optional GitHub link. Because of how the system is built, a wipe does not remove: your Pro billing record (including the checkout email), sealed offline messages queued for you, buddy-list entries, published encryption prekeys, arcade, board and range records (GreyNOC OS, the CTF board, duel standings, FRAGNET and GreyNet Browser), promotion records, Academy support tickets, Cyber Lab contact inquiries, minimal exam-attempt counters and locks, operator credential revocation records, security/ban/audit records, or reports you published (delete those in-app first). You can download your Campus social record from Settings before wiping. To have those residuals removed — or to request a copy of other data we hold against your identity key — email [email protected]. We verify such requests by asking you to prove control of the identity key (and, for billing records, the checkout email), since that key is the only thing that ties data to you.

Cyber Lab contact inquiries are separate from your Academy identity. To request access to or deletion of an inquiry, provide its reference and contact us from the email address used in the form. An operator will verify the request before changing the record.

If you are in the EU/UK (GDPR) or California (CCPA/CPRA), the rights to access, correct, delete, and port your data apply as described above; we honor them regardless of where you live. California residents: section 11 is your full California Privacy Notice, including the categories we collect, how to exercise each right, and our response times. We cannot produce end-to-end encrypted content in response to any request — we do not hold the keys. We process the little personal data we have to provide the service you request (contract), and to keep the service secure (legitimate interest).

11. California Privacy Notice (CCPA/CPRA)

This section is the notice California residents are entitled to under the California Consumer Privacy Act as amended by the CPRA. GreyNOC is available to California residents. We honor everything below regardless of whether the CCPA's business-size thresholds actually apply to us — we would rather meet the standard than argue about it.

11.1 Notice at collection — what we collect and why

You see a short version of this notice on the age & policy confirmation, which we show before a first-time visitor creates a learner profile or enters the community campus. Loading the public page still means your request reaches our edge provider and server, which see your IP address, and the limited aggregate counters and browser receipt described in section 8 begin with that public-page visit. The real-time service connection and locally generated identity keypair are deferred until the campus boots — when you ask to enter, return as an onboarded visitor, or open a campus deep link. The private key remains on your device; the public identity is used by campus services as described in sections 3, 7, and 9. Sections 3–9 above are the long version; the statutory categories map onto them like this:

We do not collect Social Security or government ID numbers, financial account numbers (Stripe holds those, not us), biometric information, precise device geolocation from the app, education records as defined by FERPA, or inferences drawn to build a profile about you. We run no ads, no third-party analytics, and no fingerprinting.

11.2 Retention

We keep each category only as long as section 5 describes: pending buddy requests and results expire after 30 days, uncollected sealed messages after 7 days, IP scoring within roughly 10–15 minutes (longer only for manual bans and audit records), and lobby, public-room, unsigned and system feed content until the next server restart. Signed campus posts and their social actions follow the bounded record and deletion rules in section 5. Saved profiles, training progress, exam records, and certificates persist until you wipe them. Records a wipe does not reach — your Pro billing record and checkout email, promotion records, buddy-list entries, published prekeys, arcade and range records, support tickets, Cyber Lab contact inquiries, and the rest of the section 10 list — persist until you ask us to remove them; security, ban, and audit records are kept for as long as they serve that purpose, and an operator-imposed ban may be permanent (section 7). The store has bounded capacity, so the oldest or least-recently-used records may be pruned sooner. We do not keep personal information for longer than needed for these purposes.

11.3 We do not sell or share your personal information

We have not sold personal information, and we have not shared it for cross-context behavioral advertising, in the preceding 12 months — nor will we. We do not sell or share the personal information of anyone, including minors under 16. Because there is nothing to opt out of, GreyNOC does not run a “Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information” link; if that ever changes, this section changes with it and the link appears. The service providers in section 9 (Stripe, Cloudflare) process data on our behalf under contract, which is not a sale or a share.

11.4 Sensitive personal information

We do not use or disclose sensitive personal information for any purpose beyond what is necessary to provide the service you asked for. We do not use it to infer characteristics about you. Your identity private key — the credential that would unlock everything — never leaves your device, so we never hold it. Because we make no use of sensitive personal information that the CPRA lets you limit, the “Limit the Use of My Sensitive Personal Information” right would not change how we handle your data; you can exercise it anyway and we will confirm it in writing.

11.5 Your California rights

11.6 How to exercise them

Most of it you can do yourself, instantly, without asking us: the KEEP / WIPE switch in Settings' Danger Zone deletes your local identity and your server-side profiles, progress, exam records, and certificates. For anything the wipe leaves behind (section 10), email [email protected] with the request you are making. That mailbox is the designated method for all California requests.

How we verify you. GreyNOC has no accounts, so the only thing that ties data to you is your identity key: we ask you to prove control of it by signing a challenge we send (and, for billing records, to confirm the checkout email). We cannot honor a request we cannot verify to this standard, and the law does not require us to re-identify data we hold in a form that cannot be linked to a real person — but we will always tell you which of the two it was rather than going quiet. An authorized agent may submit a request for you with your written permission; we will still need the key-control proof.

Timing. We confirm receipt within 10 business days and respond within 45 calendar days. If we need more time we will tell you before the 45 days are up and take at most another 45 (90 total). We do not charge a fee to handle these requests, unless one is manifestly unfounded or excessive, in which case we will explain before doing anything.

What we cannot produce. End-to-end encrypted content — private rooms, direct messages, calls, and sealed offline mail — is not something we can hand over, correct, or read on request. We do not hold the keys. That is a design property of the service, not a refusal.

11.7 Shine the Light (Cal. Civ. Code § 1798.83)

We do not disclose personal information to third parties for those parties' own direct marketing purposes. If you want that confirmed in writing, email us and we will send it.

11.8 California users under 18 (Cal. Bus. & Prof. Code § 22581)

GreyNOC is an 18+ service (section 12) and is not directed to minors. If content was nonetheless posted here by someone under 18, that person — or a parent or guardian — may email us to have it removed. Removal takes the post out of public view; it may not erase copies other users already saw. Signed Campus posts are stored as described in section 5; lobby, public-room, unsigned and system feed items are erased on server restart.

11.9 Consumer complaints (Cal. Civ. Code § 1789.3)

GreyNOC's free features cost nothing; the current Full Access price is shown on the Full Access page before you check out. To file a complaint about the service, email [email protected]. California residents may also contact the Complaint Assistance Unit of the Division of Consumer Services of the California Department of Consumer Affairs in writing at 1625 North Market Blvd., Suite N 112, Sacramento, CA 95834, or by telephone at (800) 952-5210.

12. Age requirement

Creating a learner profile and using the community campus require you to be 18 or older, self-attested on the age & policy confirmation shown before either one (that confirmation is the only place we ask). Public course information, the free operation, pricing and the playbook library are open to read without it. The service is not directed to children, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 18 — if you believe we hold such data, email us and we will delete it promptly.

13. Security & incidents

Beyond end-to-end encryption, the service uses signed identities, post-quantum sealing for offline mail, a hardened content-security policy, and active abuse monitoring. No system is perfect: if a breach affects personal data we hold, we will notify affected users where feasible and any supervisory authority as required by law (including within 72 hours where GDPR applies). Security researchers: responsible disclosure is welcome — see the project's security policy before testing anything.

14. Changes to this policy

We may update this document as the service evolves. Material changes will be posted here with a new effective date; continuing to use GreyNOC after a change takes effect means you accept the updated version.

User Agreement

a. Acceptance & eligibility

By using GreyNOC you agree to this User Agreement and the Privacy Policy above. You must be at least 18 years old.

b. California residents

GreyNOC is offered to California residents on the same terms as everyone else. Section 11 of the Privacy Policy is your California Privacy Notice: it lists what we collect, states that we neither sell nor share personal information, and explains how to exercise your CCPA/CPRA rights. We will not deny service, change your price, or degrade your experience because you exercised those rights. Nothing in this agreement waives a right California law gives you, and where any term here conflicts with California law as it applies to you, California law controls and the rest of this agreement stays in effect.

c. Your identity key is your responsibility

Access, entitlements, and credentials are bound to your device identity key. Keep your device and browser storage safe. An enabled GitHub backup can restore the same key only with the Campus passphrase used for that backup. Without a usable key copy or backup and passphrase, we cannot restore the identity or its records. A Full Access migration code transfers plan access and does not recover the identity key.

d. Acceptable use

e. Your content

You keep ownership of what you post. You grant GreyNOC the limited license needed to display and relay it to other users (that is what a chat service does). Public posts are public. Signed Campus posts and social actions persist under the bounded retention and deletion rules in section 5. Lobby, public-room, unsigned and system feed items vanish on server restart; keep your own copies of anything you care about.

f. GreyNOC Pro

g. Certifications

Certificates are earned by passing open-book, server-graded exams and are issued under the name you lock, verifiable by anyone holding the certificate serial. Cheating, sharing exam content, or gaming the grader voids the credential.

h. Disclaimers

The service, including all training content, is provided “as is”, without warranty of any kind. Educational material is not professional, legal, or career advice. We do not guarantee uptime. Lobby, public-room, unsigned and system feed items do not survive restarts; signed Campus social records follow section 5. The service may change or end at any time.

i. Limitation of liability

To the maximum extent permitted by law, GreyNOC's total liability for any claim arising from the service is limited to the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the claim, and we are not liable for indirect, incidental, or consequential damages.

j. Termination

You can stop using GreyNOC at any time (see section 10 for erasure). We may suspend or terminate access for violations of this agreement.

k. Governing law

This agreement is governed by the laws of the United States. If any provision is found unenforceable, the rest remains in effect.

l. Contact

Questions about this agreement or your data: [email protected].