Privacy Policy
Last updated: May 2026
We protect your identity absolutely. We use aggregate data to sustain the platform and improve military life. Here's exactly how.
The Two Buckets
Everything Honest MOS does with data falls into two buckets:
Bucket 1: Your Identity — Sacred
Never sold. Never shared. Never exposed. This includes: your email, name, IP address, device info, MOS-rank-base combination when it could identify you, your verification records, and your protected content. Nobody gets this. Not advertisers, not researchers, not the DoD, not partners. Nobody.
Bucket 2: Aggregate Insights — Used to sustain & improve
Population-level trends, anonymized statistics, aggregated scores. Things like “the average QoL score at installations in the Southeast declined 12% this quarter” or “68W is the most-reviewed MOS with an average 3.8 rating.” No individual can be identified from aggregate data. We enforce minimum population thresholds on every data slice.
If we can't present data without risking someone's identity, we don't present it. Period.
What We Collect
Plain English
Your email (for your account), profile info you choose to share, the content you create, and basic analytics about how the site is used.
- Account info: email address, display name, hashed password
- Profile info (all optional): branch, MOS, rank, component, duty station, ETS date
- Avatar: a photo you optionally upload. It's stored publicly and shown on your profile page and on any posts you make as Callsign or On the Record. Ghost posts never show your avatar.
- Content: reviews, stories, reactions, slang submissions
- Verification: peer verification status, VA API confirmation (status only — we don't store VA records)
- Usage analytics: pages visited, features used, device type (collected via privacy-respecting analytics, not invasive tracking)
- Theme preference and notification settings
What We Don't Collect
- Social Security Numbers
- Financial or banking information
- Real-time location (unless you explicitly use a location feature and grant permission)
- Contacts, messages, or data from other apps
- Biometric data
- Military discharge documents or service records
How We Use Your Data
To operate the platform
- Display your content, manage your account, run the OPSEC scanner
- Send emails you've opted into (welcome, SITREP, notifications)
To improve the platform
- Aggregate analytics to understand what's working and what's not
- Anonymized trend analysis to prioritize features
To sustain the platform
- Third-party display advertising, sold on our behalf by Mediavine. We don't hand them anything about you — not your account, your reviews, or your activity — but their demand partners do set their own cookies in your browser. See the Advertising section below for exactly what that means and how to shut it off.
- Anonymized, aggregated data products: research reports, trend analyses, and benchmarking datasets that use population-level insights. These may be provided to defense researchers, policy organizations, academic institutions, or government agencies. No individual is identifiable in any data product we produce.
- Affiliate partnerships with vetted services, clearly labeled on the platform
To improve military life
- Aggregated data may power dashboards, reports, and tools used by installations, researchers, policymakers, and advocacy organizations — always at the population level, never at the individual level.
What We Will Never Do With Your Data
- Sell or share information that identifies you as an individual
- Give advertisers access to your account, your reviews, or your activity here
- Connect anything you write on this platform — a review, a story, an anonymous submission — to an advertising profile
- Let an advertiser change a rating, a ranking, or what we publish
- Fingerprint your browser, or build a cross-site profile of you ourselves
- Share protected content with official accounts, partners, or anyone
- Provide individual-level data to any third party for any reason
- Allow partners or sponsors to access your personal profile, reviews, or activity
Advertising & Monetization Transparency
We're upfront about this: Honest MOS needs revenue to exist.
How ads work here
- Display ads are served by Mediavine, an advertising network. They run the auction; we don't pick the individual ads.
- This is real third-party advertising, and we're not going to dress it up. The networks bidding on those slots set cookies and may use them to recognize your browser on other sites. That is how display advertising works everywhere, including here. If a site tells you otherwise while running an ad network, it is lying to you.
- We pass them nothing. No account, no email, no MOS, no review history, no verification tier — none of it leaves our systems for an ad network, ever. What they see is a page about a military job and a browser.
- Ads appear throughout the site, including within articles and review feeds. That's how display advertising pays for a site this size. What they never do is change anything: no advertiser can move a rating, a ranking, or a review's visibility, and none of them can buy their way out of criticism. The wall here is between money and our judgment, not between money and page layout.
- Ads stay visually distinct from platform content, so you can always tell which is which
- Submission forms, your account pages, and moderation tools carry no ads at all — you shouldn't be sold to mid-way through writing something
- Operation Ring the Bell carries no ads either. That section asks you to join a bone marrow registry on behalf of a volunteer program that isn't ours, and we earn nothing from it — so we don't sell advertising against it
- Users can report ads that feel predatory, misleading, or inappropriate
- Turning it off: EU, UK, EEA and Swiss visitors get an explicit opt-in, and declining means the ad script never loads at all. Everyone else can use the “Cookie Preferences” link in the footer, or any ad blocker — we don't detect them, block you, or nag you about it.
How affiliate links work
- Some pages (civilian salary sections, certification paths, education resources) may include affiliate links to relevant services
- These are always labeled (“Affiliate link” or “Sponsored”)
- Affiliate relationships never affect ratings or recommendations
- We vet affiliate partners and reject predatory services
How data products work
- We may produce and sell anonymized, aggregated reports and datasets
- Examples: installation-level trend reports, MOS satisfaction benchmarks, retention correlation studies
- These contain population-level statistics only — never individual data
- Minimum population thresholds ensure no individual can be identified
- We will publish our anonymization methodology so you can verify our approach
Posting Modes — What Others Actually See
Plain English
Every post has its own posting mode. Ghost on one review, Callsign on another — they are completely independent. Posting On the Record for one MOS review does not link to or affect any other post you've made.
- Nothing that identifies you
- No name, rank, base, or unit
- No avatar
- Month and year only (not exact date)
- Verification tier badge (e.g., “Peer Verified”) — no identity behind it
- The post itself — entirely hidden
- Database-layer enforcement, not a filter setting
- Your display name (chosen by you, not your real name)
- Your avatar, if you've uploaded one
- Verification tier badge
- Branch and component, if you've added them to your profile
- Month and year only (not exact date)
- Your real name or email
- Your specific duty station or unit
- Rank or MOS unless you've explicitly added them to your callsign profile
- Your display name
- Your avatar
- Rank, MOS/AFSC, branch, component
- Verification tier (maximum credibility)
- Exact post date
- Posting On the Record here has zero effect on other posts
- Your Ghost posts elsewhere stay Ghost — no cross-linking
- Each post's mode is set at creation and stored independently
- You can't downgrade an On the Record post after publishing
Modes are per-post, not per-account
You might post On the Record with your name and rank on a Rate My MOS review because you want maximum credibility — and on the same day post Ghost on a story about your unit because you want full anonymity. Those two posts are structurally unconnected. The platform cannot link them. Neither can anyone else.
Protected Content — Special Handling
Content marked as “protected” receives the highest level of protection:
- Excluded from all queries by official accounts (database-layer enforcement)
- Excluded from any data products where population size is small enough to risk identification
- Never shared with partners, researchers, or government entities in identifiable form
- May contribute to large-scale aggregate statistics (e.g., overall MOS rating) only when the population is large enough to prevent identification
- Protected status can only be changed by the content author
Third-Party Services
We use a small number of third-party services to operate:
- Hosting: Vercel (your data is processed on their infrastructure)
- Database: Supabase (PostgreSQL database hosting)
- Email: Resend (for sending emails you've opted into)
- Product analytics: PostHog (self-hosted pattern; used for understanding feature usage and platform health — no cross-site tracking. This includes masked session replay: every form field's typed value is blanked before it ever reaches PostHog, and OPSEC-flagged text is excluded entirely)
- Traffic measurement: Google Analytics 4, configured with IP anonymization, no Google Signals, no ad personalization, and restricted data processing enabled. We use it to measure aggregate page traffic for advertising verification purposes — not to build individual profiles. No personal data is passed to Google. See the Advertising section above for what this means in practice.
We do not use Facebook Pixel, surveillance ad networks, browser fingerprinting, or any cross-site tracking technology. Our GA4 configuration explicitly disables the features that make Google Analytics a surveillance tool.
EU / EEA / UK / Switzerland: if you're visiting from a jurisdiction where opt-in consent is required before analytics cookies are set, you'll see a consent banner before PostHog or GA4 load, and neither initializes until you accept. You can withdraw or change that decision at any time via the “Cookie Preferences” link in the footer.
Data Requests & Law Enforcement
If we receive a legal request for user data:
- We comply with valid, specific legal process (subpoenas, court orders)
- We challenge overly broad requests
- We notify affected users when legally permitted
- We provide only the minimum data required by the specific legal instrument
- We publish aggregate statistics about data requests in our transparency reports
We have designed the system so that protected content is architecturally difficult to expose even under compulsion. We don't build backdoors.
Cookies
We use:
- Essential cookies: authentication, session, theme preference
- Analytics cookies: Google Analytics 4 sets a first-party
_gacookie to distinguish sessions for aggregate traffic counting. It is not used for cross-site tracking, ad targeting, or individual profiling. PostHog sets a session cookie for product analytics. - Advertising cookies: set by Mediavine and the demand partners bidding on our ad slots — third-party cookies, some of which are used to recognize your browser on other sites. We don't set them and we don't receive what they collect, but they are on this site and saying otherwise would be a lie. The Advertising section above explains what that does and doesn't mean, and the “Cookie Preferences” link in the footer is where you turn off what can be turned off.
We don't use:
- Any cookie that ties your Honest MOS account, your reviews, or your MOS to an advertising profile
- Any transfer of your personal information — email, MOS, rank, installation, verification tier, review history — to an ad network. Ever.
- Google Signals or Google Audience features
Your Rights
You can:
- See what data we have about you (profile settings → data export)
- Correct inaccurate data
- Delete your account and personal data
- Opt out of non-essential emails and analytics
- Request full content deletion (not just anonymization)
- Lodge a complaint with a data protection authority if applicable
Contact: [email protected]
International Users
Honest MOS is designed to meet strong privacy standards regardless of where you're stationed. If you're accessing from a jurisdiction with specific data protection laws (GDPR, etc.), we respect those rights.
Changes to This Policy
If we change this policy:
- We notify users via email before changes take effect
- We publish a clear summary of what changed and why
- Material changes get a minimum 30-day notice
- We never retroactively weaken protections on existing protected content
Protected by default. Honest by design.
Read our Constitution