Privacy policy

halfface is early, and we would rather tell you exactly how it works today than write something that sounds safer than it is. This is the plain version. There is no second, longer one.

The short version

• We collect what we need to run your account and carry your questions and answers. Not more.
• We do not sell anything about you, and we do not use it for advertising.
• We do not train AI models on your content, and we do not let anyone else train on it either.
• What moves through halfface is not sealed yet. We can technically read it. We are building the sealing, and we will tell you when it arrives.
• You can delete your account and its data yourself, whenever you want.

Who this is about

halfface is operated by Saad Chaudhry as an individual. A legal entity has not yet been established; these pages will be updated with notice when one is. In this policy, "we" means the operator and "you" means you. This covers the halfface service and this website.

What we collect

• Your account. Your email address and your name, as your sign-in provider hands them to us, plus the handle you pick.
• The names you give things. When you connect a second brain, you name it. We keep that name so you can tell them apart.
• What gets exchanged. The questions that come in, the questions you send, the drafts prepared for you, and the answers you approve. Preparing a draft means reading from the second brain you connected, for that one question.
• Operational logs. Ordinary server records: what reached the service, when, and whether it worked. They keep the thing running and help us find faults.
• Activity records. A tamper-evident record of what happened in your account: who asked, what you approved, and when. It is written so it cannot be quietly rewritten afterwards, by anyone, including us.

What is not yet sealed

We want you to know this before you put anything real into halfface.

The content that moves through the service, the questions, the drafts, and the answers, is not end to end encrypted. It travels over an encrypted connection and it sits on infrastructure we control, but we hold the keys. That means we can technically open it and read it.

We do not go looking. In practice we reach for it only to fix a fault you have reported, to keep the service running, or where the law requires it. But "we do not" is a promise about our behaviour, not a guarantee built into the system, and we are not going to dress it up as one.

End to end sealing, where content can only be opened by the people it belongs to, is being built. When it ships we will tell you, and we will say plainly what it covers and what it does not.

Who else handles your data

Running a service means relying on other companies. These are the ones that touch your data on our behalf, and what each one does:

• Fly.io runs the servers halfface lives on.
• Cloudflare carries the network traffic and stores data.
• Google handles sign-in, which is why you never give us a password.
• Resend delivers the emails we send you.

Each one gets only what it needs to do its job. We keep this list current: if another company starts handling your data, it appears here.

What we never do

• We do not sell your data, and we do not rent, trade, or share it for anyone else's marketing.
• We do not use it for advertising, ours or anyone else's.
• We do not train AI models on your content. Not the questions, not the answers, not what is in the second brain you connected. We do not let the companies above train on it either.

Email

We email you about things happening in your account: someone has a question for you, an answer came back, something is waiting on you, or something important about the service changed. That is all. No marketing, and no newsletter you did not ask for.

Separately, if you joined the waitlist or applied to be a design partner on this website, we keep the address and whatever you wrote, and we use it to reply to you and to tell you when halfface opens up. Ask us and we will delete it.

Cookies

One cookie, so the service knows you are still signed in. That is the whole story. No advertising cookies, no cross-site tracking, no analytics following you around this site.

The demo page embeds a video player from YouTube in its privacy-enhanced mode. If you play the video, YouTube may set its own storage on your device. Nothing else on the site loads anything from a third party.

Keeping it and deleting it

We keep your account data for as long as your account exists. Operational logs are kept only as long as they are useful for running and debugging the service, and then they go.

You can delete your account and its data from your account page. That removes your profile, the names you gave your second brains, and the content held on your side of the service. You do not have to ask us, and we do not have a retention hold that keeps it anyway. Deleted data is removed from our live systems immediately, and backup copies expire automatically within 7 days.

Your handle is the one exception. When you delete your account, the handle you chose is permanently retired and never reissued to anyone else. We keep only the handle itself and the date it was retired, nothing more, so the name cannot later be used to impersonate you.

If you cannot sign in to delete your account yourself, email us from the address on your account and ask us to delete it. We will honour that request.

One honest caveat: an answer you already sent is theirs now. Deleting your account does not reach into someone else's account and remove what they already received.

Your rights

If you are somewhere with data protection law, such as the EU or the UK, you have rights over your data: to see it, to correct it, to take a copy with you, and to have it deleted. Write to us and we will do it. You can also complain to your local data protection authority. The governing law for the service is set out in the terms of service, currently the Netherlands.

Changes to this policy

If something changes in a way that matters to you, we will tell you before it takes effect, and the date at the top will change. Small wording fixes just get the new date.

Talk to us

Questions, requests, or anything on this page that reads wrong: saadchdhry@gmail.com. A person reads it.