Privacy Policy

Last updated:

Before you rely on this: this is a plain-language draft written to accurately describe what this application actually does with your data, not a legal document reviewed by an attorney. If you're operating this platform for real users, have it reviewed by a lawyer — especially the sections on payment data and any region-specific rights (GDPR, CCPA, etc.) that may apply to your users.

What we collect

If you create an account, we store your email address and a bcrypt-hashed version of your password — never your password itself in readable form.

If you save a clipping (an article, photo, or record you found), we store what you chose to save: its source, title, date, a link back to the original, and any note you wrote.

If you subscribe to Pro, Stripe (our payment processor) handles your card details directly — we never see or store your card number. We store only your Stripe customer ID and subscription status so we know which plan you're on.

To enforce free-tier daily search limits for people who haven't signed in, we log a one-way cryptographic hash of your IP address (not the IP address itself) along with the date and the type of action taken. This hash can't be reversed back into your actual IP address.

Search queries you type, and the historical records our system aggregates from public sources (newspaper archives, Wikipedia, government registers), are processed to generate results and, for Pro users, an AI-synthesized narrative. These queries and the synthesized results are not permanently tied to your identity beyond the account they were run under.

Third parties we share data with

Stripe — processes payments for Pro subscriptions. See Stripe's privacy policy.
Anthropic — powers the AI story-synthesis feature (Pro tier). Your question and the retrieved historical sources are sent to Anthropic's API to generate a narrative. See Anthropic's privacy policy.

We do not sell your data to advertisers or data brokers. If ads are shown to free-tier users, the ad network itself (not us) may set its own tracking cookies — see that network's own privacy disclosures once one is configured.

Public-domain content is not "your" data

The historical newspapers, government records, maps, and encyclopedia content this platform surfaces come from public sources (the Library of Congress, the Digital Public Library of America, Wikipedia, the National Register of Historic Places, and others) and are not personal data about you. See our data sources & attribution page for how each is credited.

Cookies

session — keeps you signed in. Contains a signed token, not readable plain-text data.
csrf_token — a security measure that prevents other websites from forging requests on your behalf. Contains a random value, not personal data.

Your choices

You can delete saved clippings from your account at any time. To delete your account entirely or request a copy of your data, contact the site operator directly — this is currently a manual process, not yet self-service.

Changes to this policy

If this policy changes materially, we'll update the date at the top of this page.