Privacy

When you first open this, your browser gets a random number. That number is the only thing that owns your star until you choose to keep your Observatory. It is not linked to your name, your device or your email.

You can keep your Observatory without giving an email at all. If you do add one, it is so the Observatory can follow you to another device — not so it can be shown to anyone else.

If you speak instead of typing, the audio is discarded as soon as it has been turned into text. Only the words are stored. There is no recording to go back to, by us or by anyone.

A place is stored at county level at most, and stars are spread slightly so that a dot never points at one address. We never ask for a street, and we never infer one.

A short quote from your story may appear anonymously, with a state or country and nothing finer. Names, organisations and small towns are removed before a quote is shown, and a second check looks for email addresses, phone numbers and anything that reads as a name.

If that check is not confident, the quote is not shown. Your star is still placed. RIDER can hide a quote later; nobody has to approve one first.

You can turn your words off before you add your star, and nothing of yours will be quoted.

People see constellations, counts and anonymous quotes. They do not see your name, your organisation, your email, or which star is yours.

If you send a signal to someone, or shine to a constellation, you choose what they see — a full name and organisation, a first name, or nothing but where you are from. You can hide again at any time.

Two people who both shine to the same constellation can see each other's chosen display. Two people who agree to an introduction each receive the other's email, because that is the point of the introduction.

You can send five signals a day, one at a time to any one person, and you can block or report anyone. Repeated reports pause someone's ability to send. A signal nobody answers expires after thirty days.

There is no device fingerprinting, no advertising tracker, and no sale of anything to anyone. IP addresses are used briefly to stop abuse — a submitted story, a sign-in attempt — and are hashed with a daily salt; they are never stored with a story.

We count things like how many people reached their Observatory, so the room can be run well. Those counts carry no identity.

A star you have kept is kept until you delete it. A star nobody kept is kept for twelve months, then reduced to a count with no story attached.

Delete my data, in Me, removes your stars, quotes, Observatory, signals and your keeper record within a day, and the sky recalculates without them.

A published Observatory shows anonymous content only. It is off by default, it is not indexed by search engines unless its owner allows it, and unpublishing makes the link private immediately.

The Constellation is run by RIDER. If something here is unclear, or you want your data removed and cannot sign in, write to us and we will do it.