We’re announcing a big update to our accounts system today. The name is changing from My Account to Dashboard to better reflect the services we are providing. A large part of this update includes providing you detailed insights, statistics and charts about the DNS traffic on your network. These insights come from data we log on our clusters of DNS servers.

It’s important to let you know that we don’t share your personal data. We don’t sell it. We don’t trade it. We don’t do anything with it that isn’t in your best interests.

How do we know what’s in your best interests? We don’t…so we give you control over any DNS data we collect. You can tell us to keep it (for the detailed insights and charts) or you can tell us to purge it. You can even tell us not to store it at all. We know that for most of you, keeping logs about your DNS traffic (which, again, we won’t ever sell) provides you a greater experience and quality of service. In fact, like everything else we do, this feature was driven by your feature requests and desires to see more about what’s going on with your network.

To underline these choices, we’ve made significant changes to our privacy policy to better explain our data policies and your data choices. I encourage you to read the privacy policy for yourself. The changes create a clear more straightforward policy that is more protective of your data as it relates to your use of our free service.

Among other changes, we’re providing more clarity about how long your DNS data is stored. Without an account, data is kept for 2 business days. (An account is optional.) With a free OpenDNS account, your data is kept indefinitely, unless you choose to delete data and have us stop recording your data. You can set your stats collection preference in the new Dashboard. If you delete your account, your DNS data is removed.

The policy was reorganized to put information about DNS first, since that’s our core business and the focus of many questions. We also updated some other sections to be more explicit wherever possible. Finally, in a small note, we clarified that the Creative Commons license applies to the privacy policy, not the site as a whole. This is the same change we made to the Terms of Use.

• Current OpenDNS privacy policy
• Old policy

Thanks for making OpenDNS the largest, fastest-growing DNS service in the world.

At OpenDNS, we’re treating customers the way we want to be treated. Writing a clear, concise privacy policy helps you understand what we’re doing. Understanding leads to trust, which we want to earn.

We’ve spelled out our policies and goals in the OpenDNS privacy policy, effective June 1, 2006. You should read the whole thing — it’s not long. If we missed anything of importance, please let us know.

The unwritten policy? If we can’t look our mothers in the eye about what we’re doing, then it’s not the right thing.

As noted in the policy, any significant updates will be blogged about here.

Kudos to Automattic

When writing the OpenDNS privacy policy, we found the Automattic.com privacy policy to be a great model. The Automattic team was community-minded enough to place their policy under a Creative Commons ShareAlike license. That license allows for commercial use and derivative works, which describes our policy.

We (OpenDNS) are responsible for our policy, in every respect, but our thanks go to the Automattic team for their jumpstart. In the same spirit, we’ve put the OpenDNS privacy policy under the same Creative Commons license.

Automattic is behind WordPress.com and Akismet. WordPress is used for the OpenDNS blog.