Privacy policy

What I collect

Your account: your email address, an optional name, and either a password (stored only as a one-way hash; I can't read it) or your Google sign-in.

Your birthdate is checked once when you claim a handle, to confirm you're over 18. It is never stored.

Your profile: your handle, display name, and anything you choose to add, like a photo, a bio, links, interests, and a city-level location.

What you do on tendril: posts, replies, images and GIFs, saved posts, who you follow, and your direct messages.

Joining: your introduction, the handles of any members you say you know, who invited you if you came through an invite link, and the answers members give when they review your application.

Keeping the place safe: reports and moderation records, and short-lived records of accounts that repeatedly hit rate limits (kept for 30 days, then deleted).

I don't collect payment details, and tendril itself runs no third-party trackers. The few third-party requests that do happen (fonts, video embeds) are listed under "Who I share it with".

How I use it

To run tendril: show your posts to the members you've chosen to share them with, deliver your messages, and let members review new arrivals.

To email you: confirmation links, password resets, and notices like your admission being approved. Nothing promotional without asking first.

To keep the community safe: reviewing reports, spotting abuse patterns, and acting on the guidelines. Automated systems screen member-visible content (posts, replies, profiles) for abuse; flagged items go to human review. Direct messages are never scanned.

I don't build advertising profiles, I don't sell or rent your information, and I don't share it with data brokers. Ever.

Who can see what you post

Everything you post is visible to members only. Nothing on tendril is public to the open web or to search engines. Your privacy settings narrow it further: a private account limits your posts to approved followers, and reply controls limit who can respond.

Every member is vetted by this community. But no setting can stop a member from screenshotting what you share and passing it along. Assume anything you post could travel beyond tendril, and share at the level of trust you actually have.

Direct messages are visible only to the people in the conversation, and there's no tool in the product for anyone else to read them, with one exception: if a participant reports a conversation, she shares that thread with me for review. They are also not end-to-end encrypted: like everything else, they live in the database, and I could be legally required to produce them. Treat them with the same care as anything else you share.

Who I share it with

To run tendril I rely on a few providers, who process this data on my behalf and can't use it for their own purposes:

• Amazon Web Services (AWS): hosts the server and sends email (via Amazon SES).

• Neon: the database, where everything you post and your account details live. Connections to it are encrypted in transit, and Neon encrypts the stored data at rest.

• Cloudflare: serves the site, manages DNS, runs the anti-spam check (Turnstile) on sign-up, and stores uploaded images (avatars, post photos, GIFs) in R2, tendril's file storage.

• Google: like most sites, the site's fonts load from Google Fonts, so Google sees a standard page request (IP address and browser). If you sign in with Google, Google also tells me your email, name, and photo, and learns that you signed in to tendril.

• YouTube and TikTok: only when a post embeds a video. The preview image and the player load from their servers, and their own privacy policies apply to that content. Posts without video embeds never touch them.

• Klipy: powers GIF search. When you search for a GIF, your search words go to Klipy. The GIF you pick is copied to tendril's own storage, so viewing posts never touches Klipy.

• OpenStreetMap (Nominatim): only if you add a location to your profile. Your coordinates are sent once to look up your city, then discarded. Only the city-level name is stored.

• Anthropic: powers the automated abuse screening. New posts, replies, and profile bios are sent to Anthropic's Claude API to be checked against the community guidelines; Anthropic processes them on my behalf and doesn't train on them. Direct messages are never sent.

Beyond that, I disclose data only if the law genuinely requires it, and as narrowly as possible.

How long I keep it

As long as your account is active. If your account is deleted, your profile and content are removed from the service, with copies in backups expiring on their own schedule. Rate-limit records are deleted after 30 days. Moderation records are kept while they're relevant to community safety.

The waitlist

If you joined the waitlist on the landing page, I hold your email, your first name if you gave one, your quiz picks, and any feedback you typed. I keep that until you've joined tendril or asked to be removed, and I use it only to invite you and to decide what to build first.

Cookies & tracking

Tendril uses one cookie: the session cookie that keeps you signed in. Sign-up uses Cloudflare Turnstile, a privacy-friendly anti-spam check that looks at your browser and IP address to confirm you're a real person. It's there to stop bots, not to advertise, and it doesn't follow you around the web.

There are no analytics or advertising cookies and no cross-site tracking from tendril itself. The one exception is embedded videos: YouTube (used in its reduced-tracking "nocookie" mode) and TikTok players follow their own policies when a post embeds one. If I ever add privacy-respecting analytics, I'll update this page first.

Your choices

You can edit your profile, change your contact email, and adjust who sees your posts directly in Settings, any time.

For anything else, including seeing everything I hold about you, correcting it, or deleting your account and data entirely, email [email protected] and I'll take care of it.

Changes

If this policy changes in a way that matters, I'll tell members before it takes effect and update the date on this page.