Privacy Policy

The short version

Etch collects very little, publishes most of what it collects, and cannot delete what you etch. That last point is unusual enough that it is the first thing here rather than buried below.

What we collect

From X, when you sign in: your handle, display name, account id, and — if you permit it — your email address. We ask for the email for one reason: etches cannot be deleted, so an account with no email and a lost X account is a permanent record its owner can never reach again. It is a recovery route, not a marketing list.

What you write: the words of an etch, its topic, and its public description. For a sealed etch the words are stored until its reveal time and are not disclosed before then.

Operational data: ordinary server logs, and page views counted by our host's analytics (Vercel Web Analytics), which sets no cookies and does not identify you. We do not run advertising trackers, and we do not sell anything to anyone.

What becomes public

Your handle, display name, verified X link, and your whole record: every etch, its date, topic, description, status, and hash. Revealed etches show their words. Sealed etches show everything except the words, the salt, and the exact timestamp until they reveal.

Hashes are published on a public blockchain. A hash discloses nothing about its content on its own — without the salt and exact timestamp it cannot be reversed or guessed at.

Erasure — read this carefully

We cannot delete an etch. We can and do destroy its contents.

Retracting an etch permanently erases the words of the etch and the salt from our database. This is real erasure: with the salt gone, the published hash is cryptographically unlinkable to any content, by us or by anyone. What survives is the record that something was etched and retracted — date, topic, description, hash, timestamps.

If an etch was public before you retracted it, anyone who copied it still has their copy. We erase ours; we cannot erase theirs. Please treat etching as publishing, because it is.

You can retract any etch and disconnect X; your etches and their tombstones stay on the record, for the same reasons.

Where it lives

Account data and etches are stored with Supabase. The site runs on Vercel. Attestations are on Arbitrum, a public blockchain, and are outside anyone's control including ours.

Your rights

You can see everything we hold about you — it is your record, already visible. You can correct your display name, retract any etch, and disconnect X. For anything else, write to us.

Contact

Privacy questions: privacy@etch.app.