Your letter is yours

What we keep

• Your letter, encrypted. Each letter is sealed with AES-256-GCM under its own random key. That key is stored only sealed under a key made from your private link (and one per family link). The links themselves are never stored, only a one-way fingerprint used to find the row. Without a link, the letter cannot be read from our database or our backups. A link does appear in the server’s logs when it is used (see below), so someone with access to both those logs and a copy of the database could open that letter. Only the site’s administrator has that access.
• Saved versions, encrypted the same way.
• Dates: when a letter was started, last changed and last opened; when each family link was made and last opened; the short name you gave each family link (so you can tell them apart).
• Counters against abuse: how many letters or saves came from a network address today, kept as a salted one-way hash and deleted after two days.

What we never ask for

No account, no email, no phone number, no payment details (there are no payments during the preview). The forms refuse long numbers so that account, policy and Social Security numbers do not end up in a letter.

Cookies

Pages with a form set one security cookie (it proves a form came from this site). Nothing tracks you and there are no analytics services. The banner ad described under Advertising sets no cookies; it counts one page view per page as a daily total.

Advertising

The home, How it works, Before you prepay, Pricing and About pages show one banner ad from AdEngine (adengine.us), the small ad network run by WeldonPC, the company that builds and hosts this site. For now the ads are for WeldonPC’s own services. There is never an ad on your letter, its family links, the Start, Sample, Privacy or Terms pages, or an error page.

To show an ad, your browser loads a script from adengine.us, asks it for one banner, loads the banner image, and reports once that the page was viewed and once that the banner was shown. Like any website, adengine.us receives your network address (IP address) and your browser type with those requests. The requests name this site; they never carry the address of the page you are on, so a private link never reaches adengine.us.

• No cookies, no profile. AdEngine sets no cookies, gives you no ID and does not track you from site to site.
• How your network address is used. adengine.us looks up the approximate city for your address in a location database kept on its own server (nothing is sent to anyone else), so that ads meant for one area are shown only there. It also uses the address to count each ad view or click only once and to leave out robots and WeldonPC’s own office traffic. The address is not stored with the counts; the temporary entries made from it expire within six hours and are cleared from the server within two days.
• What is kept. Daily totals only: page views for this site, and views and clicks for each ad. The adengine.us web server also keeps a standard access log (network address, time, address requested, referring site, browser) for security; it is deleted on a rolling schedule.
• Clicking an ad passes through adengine.us, which counts the click, and then opens the advertiser’s site, which has its own privacy policy.
• Nothing about you is sold or shared.

Links in server logs

Like any website, the server’s access log records the addresses requested, which include your private link, for as long as the host keeps its logs. If a page ever fails with an error, the site’s own error log also records the address, link included; those error logs are deleted after 30 days. Anyone with a link can open that letter, so treat the link like a key.

Deleting

From your letter you can delete it at any time: the letter, its versions and every family link are removed from the site at once, and the links stop working. Copies stay inside the nightly database backups, still encrypted, for up to 14 days, after which the oldest backup is deleted. Letters that were started but never saved are removed after 30 days. Saved letters are kept until you delete them.

Questions

To ask about this policy or your letter, Contact WeldonPC, the company that builds and runs Kindly Noted. Please never send your private link: we do not need it, and anyone who has it can open your letter.