Privacy Policy

1. The short version

• We store your email address, an optional display name, your plan, your usage counts and your payment references.
• We do not store the substance of anything you scan or rewrite.
• We do not store raw IP addresses. Where we need to recognise a network, to stop one machine creating a thousand accounts, we store a salted one-way hash instead.
• To stop one person collecting several free allowances, we recognise the device you use with a first-party cookie and a hash of basic browser characteristics. We store only salted one-way hashes of these, never the values themselves, and use them for nothing else.
• We never receive your card or mobile-money details. Those go to Paynow and stay there.
• We do not sell personal data, and we do not share it for advertising.

2. Who is responsible

Traceless Writer is the controller of the personal data described in this policy. Questions, requests and complaints may be sent to privacy@tracelesswriter.com, or raised through the support form inside the Service.

3. What we collect

(a) Information you give us

• Your email address, which identifies the account and is where confirmation and password links are sent.
• A display name, if you choose to provide one. It is optional and may be removed at any time.
• A password, which is never stored by us in readable form: authentication is handled by Supabase, which stores a cryptographic hash.
• The content of any support message you send us, and the email address you send it from. Please do not include passwords, payment credentials or confidential third-party material in a support message.
• A student email address, if you verify one in order to buy the Student Plan. We send a verification code to it, record the address and when it was verified, and use it only to confirm that the Student Plan is being bought by a student and that one student address is used by one account. We keep a keyed one-way hash of the code, never the code itself.

(b) Information generated by your use

• Usage records: that an operation of a given kind occurred, when, how many words it involved, which engine and level were used, and the model cost. No text.
• Your plan, billing period, and the references and statuses of payments you have made.
• Your referral code, and the fact that an account was referred by another.
• The version of the Terms you accepted and when you accepted it.
• Security records: a salted hash of the network address a signup came from, and a canonicalised form of the email address, used to enforce one free account per person.
• Device records: salted one-way hashes of a random device identifier kept in a cookie and in local storage, of basic browser and hardware characteristics (such as screen size, time zone, processor count and graphics renderer), and of your network address, recorded when you sign in, rewrite or scan. They are compared only with other accounts, so that several free accounts on one device share a single free allowance, and so that we can review suspected abuse.

(c) Information we deliberately do not collect

• The text you scan, rewrite or upload, and the text we return to you.
• Raw IP addresses.
• Card numbers, mobile-money numbers, PINs or one-time passcodes.
• Advertising identifiers, cross-site tracking data, or third-party behavioural profiles. The device records above are first-party, hashed, and never shared or used to follow you on other sites.

4. Why we process it, and on what basis

We process personal data to perform our contract with you, creating and maintaining your account, metering your allowance, taking payment, and providing support. We process a limited additional set on the basis of our legitimate interest in keeping the Service secure and financially viable: preventing abuse, enforcing one free account per person, rate-limiting automated traffic, and understanding aggregate cost. Where we rely on legitimate interest we have considered your rights and freedoms and have chosen the least intrusive measure that works, which is why network addresses and device characteristics are hashed rather than stored.

One automated decision is made from the device records: when several free accounts are linked to the same device, they share one free allowance instead of each receiving their own. It never affects a paid plan, never closes an account, and can be reviewed on request through support. We do not otherwise process your data for advertising, profiling, automated decision-making with legal effect, or model training.

5. Who processes data on our behalf

Operating the Service requires third parties. Each acts on our instructions under a written agreement, and each is subject to its own privacy policy which we encourage you to read.

• Supabase: authentication, database and account records. Holds your email, display name, plan, usage counts and support threads.
• Model and inference providers: receive the text of an operation for the duration of that operation in order to return a result. They are contractually restricted from using it for training. They do not receive your identity.
• Paynow: payment processing. Receives your email and the amount, and collects payment credentials directly from you on its own systems. We receive a reference and a status.
• Hosting and content-delivery providers: serve the application and handle transport-layer logs, which we do not use to build profiles.
• Cloudflare Turnstile: bot mitigation on the sign-in and sign-up forms.
• Resend: email delivery. Receives the address a message is going to and the message itself, for account confirmation and password emails and for the code that verifies a student email address.

These providers operate internationally, so your data may be processed outside your country of residence. Where required, transfers rely on the standard contractual protections offered by the provider concerned.

We disclose personal data outside this list only where compelled by law or valid legal process, where necessary to establish, exercise or defend legal claims, or in connection with a merger or acquisition, in which case you will be notified.

6. How long we keep it

• Input and Output: not retained. Held only for the duration of the operation.
• Account record: for as long as the account exists, and deleted when you delete it.
• Usage records: retained while the account exists, as the billing and allowance audit trail.
• Payment records: retained for as long as required for accounting and tax purposes, which may outlast the account.
• Support threads: retained while the account exists; the ticket survives account deletion in anonymised form where a billing dispute makes that necessary.
• Security hashes: retained for the rolling window over which the signup rule applies.
• Device records: deleted after 90 days without use, and immediately when the account is deleted.

7. Cookies and local storage

We set only what the Service needs to function: a session cookie issued by Supabase that keeps you signed in, a short-lived cookie used during sign-in flows, a local-storage entry recording whether you prefer the light or dark theme, and, on the sign-in pages and inside the app only, a device cookie (tw_did, mirrored in local storage) and a browser-characteristics hash cookie (tw_dtr), which are security cookies used solely to enforce one free allowance per device. Cloudflare Turnstile may set its own token while it verifies that you are not a bot.

We do not set advertising cookies, we do not use third-party analytics that profile individuals, and we do not permit third-party tracking on our pages.

8. Your rights

Subject to Applicable Law, you may ask us to give you a copy of the personal data we hold about you; to correct anything inaccurate; to delete your account and its data; to restrict or object to a particular processing; or to provide your data in a portable form. Your display name and password are editable directly in account settings, and account deletion is available there and is immediate and irreversible.

Requests may be sent to privacy@tracelesswriter.com. We will respond within one month, and will tell you if we need longer. If you are dissatisfied with our response you may complain to the data-protection authority in your jurisdiction.

9. Security

Access to account data is constrained at the database level by row-level security, so one account cannot read another's records even in the event of an application fault. Privileged operations run through constrained server-side functions rather than open table access. Passwords are hashed by our authentication provider. Traffic is encrypted in transit.

No system is perfectly secure. We cannot guarantee absolute security, and we ask you not to submit material whose exposure would be seriously harmful. Where a breach affecting your personal data occurs and the law requires notification, we will notify you and the relevant authority without undue delay.

10. Children

The Service is not directed at children under thirteen (13) and we do not knowingly collect their personal data. If you believe a child has provided us with personal data, contact us and we will delete it.

11. Changes to this policy

We may update this policy. The current version and its effective date appear at the head of this page. Where a change materially affects how we handle your data, we will tell you before it takes effect.