Privacy Policy

At Lyefl, we take your privacy seriously. This Privacy Policy explains how we collect, use, disclose, and safeguard your information when you visit our website at lyefl.com or use our mobile application.

1. Information We Collect

We collect information you provide directly to us when you:

• Sign in with Apple or Google (they hand us your email address, your name and your profile picture; you pick the username)
• Update your profile (name, country, profile image)
• Write or interact with pages
• Put works on a shelf in your Library
• Write a page while Revisions is on (the default): we keep what each paragraph said before you changed it, one record per sitting, so you can look back at your own drafts. This history is yours alone — it is never shown to a reader, never shared, and is deleted with the page. You can turn Revisions off, or delete a page's history or all of it, in Settings → Writing
• Contact us for support

We also automatically collect certain information when you use the service, including:

• Search queries you perform on the platform
• Which pages you have read — kept in your browser, and sent with a request when your Library works out what is new since your last visit
• Device information and browser type
• IP address and general location data
• Usage patterns and interaction data
• A notification token for each device you allow notifications on
• Where you are, if you allow location — see section 5
• The camera details carried in a photograph's EXIF, with the precise GPS fix stripped out before we store it

2. How We Use Your Information

We use the information we collect to:

• Create and manage your account
• Provide, operate, and improve the Lyefl platform
• Personalize your experience and surface relevant content
• Store and display the photographs and writing you put on a page, and the handful of colours read off a photograph that tint the page around it
• Send you account notices, and the comment and activity mail and notifications you have left switched on
• Respond to your comments and questions
• Monitor and analyze usage to improve our services
• Detect, prevent, and address technical issues or abuse

3. Information Sharing

We do not sell, trade, or rent your personal information to third parties. We may share your information only in the following circumstances:

• Public content: Entries you publish as public are visible to all users
• Service providers: The providers who run the service for us — hosting, storage, sign-in, notification delivery, mail and website analytics — bound by confidentiality obligations. Section 4 names them and says what each one receives
• Legal requirements: When required by law or to protect the rights and safety of Lyefl and its users
• Business transfers: In connection with a merger, acquisition, or sale of assets

4. Third-Party Services

Lyefl carries no advertising. The writing and the photographs on a page are made by the person who wrote it. A small number of providers make the service work, each with its own privacy policy:

• Apple and Google: sign-in. They tell us your email address, your name and your picture. There is no password to lose, because Lyefl has none
• Hosting, database and object storage: where your account, your writing and your photographs are kept
• Expo's push service and Firebase Cloud Messaging: they carry a notification to your device. They receive the device token and the words of the notification
• Our mail provider: it delivers account notices and activity mail, and receives your email address and the text of the message
• Open-Meteo: the weather lookup, only when you have allowed location. It receives coordinates and nothing else — no name, no account, no page
• Vercel Analytics: aggregate page views on the website at lyefl.com. The mobile app carries no analytics, attribution or advertising SDK of any kind

5. Where a Page Was Written

Location is optional, and the app only ever asks for it while it is open in front of you. Nothing is read in the background. If you allow it, your position does three things: it notes roughly where a page was written, it fetches that day's weather, and it helps pick the day's prompt. Refuse and everything still works — the prompt simply arrives without weather, and the page carries no place.

Before a coordinate is stored we round it to a grid of about ten kilometres, so what we keep places a page in its district and never at a street or a door. The weather lookup is the exception worth naming: to ask Open-Meteo what the sky was doing we send it the position trimmed to three decimal places, on its own, attached to no account.

You can also decide whether other readers see where your pages were written. The switch is in Settings, under Readers on the website. Turned off, a page shows readers a rough area only; you always see your own.

6. Notifications

If you allow notifications, we store one token for each device you allow them on, so we know where to send them. It is a delivery address for that device and nothing more; it carries no message history. Signing out of a device removes that device's token, turning notifications off in your system settings stops them arriving, and deleting your account deletes every token you have.

7. Data Storage and Security

Your data is stored securely using industry-standard practices. Account and content data is kept in a managed PostgreSQL database, and uploaded images in managed object storage; we implement appropriate technical and organizational measures to protect your personal information against unauthorized access, alteration, disclosure, or destruction.

However, no method of transmission over the internet or electronic storage is 100% secure. While we strive to protect your information, we cannot guarantee absolute security.

8. Cookies

On the website we use cookies to keep you signed in and to remember your preferences, such as light or dark. The aggregate page-view counting is described in section 4. You can control cookies through your browser, though switching them off will sign you out and may affect other features.

9. Your Rights and Choices

You have the right to:

• Access the personal information we hold about you
• Update your profile information at any time via Settings
• Delete your search history via Settings
• Make entries private so they are only visible to you
• Choose whether readers see where a page was written via Settings
• Deactivate your account via Settings, which hides it and keeps it
• Delete your account yourself, in the app — see the next section

10. Deleting Your Account

You do not have to write to us. Delete your account from inside the app: Settings → Account → Delete account on the website, Settings → Delete account on the phone. Nothing waits on our approval.

Deleting signs you out at once and starts a 30-day grace period. Sign back in inside those 30 days and the deletion is cancelled, with nothing lost. When the 30 days are up, a nightly job carries it out, and this is what it does:

• Wipes your username, first and last name, bio, country, profile picture, cover photo and accent colour, and unlinks your Apple and Google sign-in. An anonymous handle takes their place, so that nothing else in the database breaks. Your email address is overwritten with an address at an unroutable domain that can never receive mail — the row has to hold something there, so it holds something that reaches nobody
• Deletes every private page you wrote, including unfinished drafts, which are private from the moment they are made
• Deletes every notification token, so no device of yours hears from us again
• Deletes your commonplace: the passages you copied out of other people's writing and the notes you wrote beside them
• Deletes the notes you wrote in your own margins, beside your own pages — they were private to you, and they go with the account
• Deletes the almanac gifts you kept, which are the record of what you chose to hold on to
• Takes your name and picture off the pages you had published, leaving the anonymous handle in their place

Two things to be plain about, because they are the ones people are surprised by. Pages you chose to publish are not deleted — they stay in the community, no longer attributed to you. If you want them gone as well, delete them yourself before you delete the account — each page can be deleted on its own — or write to us at the address in the last section. Letters you sent are not deleted either: a correspondence is one thread held between two people, and removing your half would take the other person's half with it. Once the account is scrubbed those letters carry no name.

11. Children's Privacy

Lyefl is not directed to children under the age of 13. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13. If you believe a child has provided us with personal information, please contact us and we will take steps to delete such information.

12. Changes to This Policy

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. We will notify you of any significant changes by updating the date at the top of this page. Your continued use of Lyefl after any changes constitutes your acceptance of the updated policy.

13. Contact Us

If you have a question, a concern, or a request about this policy or about what we hold, write to us: