the short version
Slates is private by design. Only the people in your circles see what you share. We don’t sell data, we don’t serve ads, and we don’t hand your content to anyone you didn’t invite. Your account is yours; the moments you write into it are yours; if you want them gone, ask and we’ll delete them.
what we collect
When you sign up, we collect your email and the name you choose. If you use Sign in with Apple or Google, the identity provider tells us a unique account identifier and your email. We don’t receive anything else from them.
When you use the app, we store the content you create — photos, voice clips, written notes, titles, captions, stickies, reflections, margin notes, sealed letters, and any tags you add to entries. We store the circles you create or join and the membership records that connect you to them. We store mood marks you log in your solo space. If you turn on live location sharing inside a circle, we store your latest pin while you have sharing on; turning it off deletes the pin. If you attach a place to a note, we store the place name and coordinates you chose. When you search for a place, we send the search text to our server; if you use current location, we also send your latitude and longitude so results can be nearby.
We log basic technical information to keep the service running — timestamps of requests, IP addresses tied to auth events for fraud detection, server error reports when something breaks, and app issue details you choose to send us through support. We don’t connect this technical log to a per-user analytics profile.
what we don’t collect
No analytics SDKs, no ad networks, no tracking pixels, no third- party cookies, no Facebook or Google or TikTok tag, no fingerprinting, no behavioral profile. We don’t scan your photos to train anything. We don’t read your notes for any purpose other than rendering them back to you and the people in your circle.
who can see what
Content in a circle is visible only to active members of that circle. Every request that fetches content checks your membership against the circle’s member list on the server side. Your solo space (the circle named “my pages” or whatever you renamed it to) is visible only to you. Nobody at Slates browses your circles. We don’t have a public feed and we never will.
where it’s stored
Account data, circles, notes, replies, reflections, mood marks, margin notes, member aliases, notifications, and other structured records live in a Postgres database hosted on Fly.io in Singapore. Photos, voice clips, and other media files live in Cloudflare R2 object storage. Both the database and the object store encrypt data at rest with provider defaults. Traffic between your device and our servers is encrypted in transit (HTTPS).
third parties we rely on
We use a small set of vendors to run the service. They process data only on our behalf for the purpose described, and we don’t authorize them to use it for anything else.
- Fly.io hosts our API server and Postgres database. They see all data that passes through the service by virtue of running our infrastructure.
- Cloudflare hosts our media files (R2), our landing site (Workers), our DNS, and our email routing. Photos and voice clips are served through their CDN.
- Resend sends transactional email (verification and account messages). They see your email address and the contents of those messages.
- Apple handles Sign in with Apple. They see that you signed in to Slates; they don’t see what you do inside the app.
- Google handles Sign in with Google; for sign-in, they see that you signed in to Slates. Google Places may also process the place search text and location bias we send when you search for venues.
- Mapbox helps return address, street, neighborhood, and locality results for place search. They may process the place search text and location bias we send for that request.
That’s the full list. We’ll update this page before adding anyone else.
how long we keep things
We keep your content for as long as your account exists, because the whole point is that you can come back to it later. When you delete an entry, it’s removed from the views your circle can see and queued for permanent deletion from our servers within 30 days. When you delete your account, all of your account data, content, and stored media is removed within 30 days; backup snapshots roll over within another 30 days after that.
Technical logs (request records, error reports) are kept for up to 90 days for operational reasons.
your rights
You can ask us, at any time, to:
- show you everything we have associated with your account;
- delete your account and all your content;
- correct anything that’s wrong or out of date;
- export your data in a portable format.
You can delete your account in the app from Profile → Privacy & account → Delete account. You can also email support@slatesoflife.com and we’ll handle it within a few days.
people under 13
Slates is for people 13 and older. We don’t knowingly collect information from children under 13. If you’re a parent or guardian and you believe your child has created an account, email support@slatesoflife.com and we’ll delete it.
reports and blocks
If someone in one of your circles shares something abusive, you can report the content (long-press the entry — you’ll see a quiet “report” action) or block the user (from their member sheet). Reports come to us. We commit to reviewing them within 24 hours and to acting on confirmed violations. You can also leave any circle at any time.
security
We hash passwords with argon2, gate every content endpoint behind a membership check, and rotate session tokens. Sign in with Apple and Google handle their own authentication. If we ever discover a breach affecting your data, we’ll email you and post a note on this page within 72 hours of confirmation, whichever is sooner.
if you’re outside the US
Our servers are in Singapore. Using Slates means your information is processed there. If you’re in the EU or UK and want to invoke a GDPR right, the requests above (access, deletion, correction, portability, objection) cover it — email us and we’ll respond within 30 days. If you’re in California, the equivalent CCPA rights are honored the same way.
if this page changes
We’ll update the effective date at the top whenever we change something material, and we’ll email you if the change affects how we handle your data. The old version stays available on request.
contact
Email support@slatesoflife.com. We read every message that comes in.