Privacy
What this site collects, why, how long it keeps it, and how to make it stop. Written to match the code rather than to reassure.
Last updated 5 August 2026
The short version
Anything you write in the Hearth stays in your browser. There is no request that carries it and no store that holds it — the destruction you see is the whole of it.
A letter you choose to send from an overture card is different. It is stored in full, because it has to be delivered to someone and kept where you can both read it again. Your email address is never shown to the person who receives it.
While you are still writing one, it is kept in your own browser so that closing the window does not destroy it. That is your device, not our server — nothing about it is sent to us, and it is erased the moment the letter goes out or you empty the box.
What is collected, and why
| Data | Why it exists |
|---|---|
| Username | Your identity on the site and what you sign in with. Never shown to another writer — a letter arrives unsigned. |
| Email address | Delivery only: the letters sent to you, the confirmation link, and a password reset if you ask for one. An answer to a letter you sent is not emailed — it appears on your account page. Never shown to another writer. |
| Password | Stored only as a scrypt hash with a per-password salt. The password itself is never written down and cannot be recovered from what is stored. |
| Profile picture (optional) | Shown to you on your own account page. Cropped and shrunk in your browser before it is sent. Leave it empty and nothing is stored. |
| Account creation date | Shown to you as “member since”. |
| Session token | An opaque random value in a cookie so you stay signed in. It is not derived from anything about you. |
| Letters you send | Subject, the name you addressed it to, the full text, timestamps and delivery status. Kept so it can be delivered, so a reply can be routed back, and so you and the recipient can both read the exchange again. |
| Letters you receive | The same row, seen from the other side. |
| A gift you ask for | What you told us you feel, the overture you chose, the name of the person it is for, whether the finished letter goes to them or back to you, and which of the two forms you asked for. Their email address is collected only if you ask us to deliver it to them — choose to keep the letter yourself and we neither ask for an address nor store one, because there would be nothing to use it for. Kept because a person has to read it to write the letter, and afterwards so we can answer either of you about it. |
That is the entire list. There is no analytics, no advertising, no tracking pixel, no profiling, and no cookie other than the one that signs you in.
No payment details, of any kind. A gift has a price, but there is no gateway on this site and no card field on any page — the amount is settled with a person afterwards, and nothing about how you pay it is stored here. A printed letter needs somewhere to post it; we ask you for that in the same conversation, and it lives in that correspondence rather than in this database.
What is never collected
Anything written in the Hearth. That page makes no network request. The literary line you receive is matched to the tone of your writing inside your own browser, so even the matching never leaves the machine. When the words come apart on screen there is nothing left anywhere to delete.
Who else sees it
Our email provider. To deliver a letter, the recipient’s address and the letter’s text are handed to the service that sends the mail. An answer is not sent that way — it is written here and read here, so replying on this site hands nothing to anyone. If you answer from your mail client instead, that message passes through the service holding the mail domain on its way in.
Nobody else. The typefaces are served from this site, so reading a page here contacts no other company at all. There is no font host, no CDN and no third-party script on any page.
Site administrators. An administrator can see who wrote to whom, whether a letter was delivered and whether it was answered — never a word of what was written. That restriction is in the code: the queries that build the admin pages do not select the text. It exists so a complaint from either person can be answered.
Whoever writes your gift. The one exception to the line above, and the reason the exception exists: a letter cannot be written from a brief nobody reads. If you ask for a gift, a person here reads what you wrote in full, along with the name and address you gave. Nothing you write anywhere else on this site is read that way.
Nothing is sold, and nothing is shared for advertising.
If someone asked us to write to you
A gift is the one place where an address reaches us from somebody other than its owner. If a letter arrived for you from this site, someone gave us your address so that one letter could be written and sent. We hold it for that, and for answering you about it — never to make you an account, add you to anything, or write to you again.
You did not agree to this, and you do not have to live with it. Reply to the letter, or write to the address below, and we will delete your address and the gift it belongs to. We will also tell you what was held, though not who asked — that is the one thing a gift keeps back, and the person who asked was promised it. If you would rather they were told you asked us to stop, say so and we will pass that on.
Nothing is sent by a form. Every gift is read and written by a person before it leaves here, which is what stops this from being a way to mail anyone anything.
How long it is kept
Sessions expire and are deleted. Confirmation links expire and are single-use. Letters are kept for as long as your account exists, because the whole point of keeping them is that you can read them again years later. Delete your account and they go with it.
Your rights, and how to use them
See what is held about you. Every letter you sent and every letter that reached you is on your account page, with your address, username and join date.
Erase it. Account page → Delete account. It is immediate and it is not reversible. It removes your account, your address, your sessions and every letter you sent — including from the account of the stranger who received one. Letters that reached you stay with the person who wrote them, holding nothing that points back to you.
Withdraw consent. Deleting the account is the mechanism; there is nothing processed about you afterwards.
Correct it. Account page → Change your details. Your username, email address and picture are all yours to edit, and so is your password. Changing the address puts the account back to unconfirmed and sends a link to the new one, because the old confirmation proved you could read a different inbox.
Complain. Write to us first at the address below. If we do not resolve it, you can take a complaint to the Data Protection Board of India.
How it is protected
Passwords are hashed with scrypt and compared in constant time. Session cookies are HTTP-only and unreadable by scripts, and are marked Secure in production. Sign-in attempts are rate limited. Answering happens on this site rather than by mail, so replying discloses no address at all; answer from your inbox instead and it routes through a single-use alias that identifies a message rather than a person, which discloses none either. No system is perfect, and this one is small and self-hosted — that is a trade-off you should know about.
Children
This site is not intended for anyone under 18, and no account should be created for one.
Contact
Grievance Officer: Shivam Chauhan. Email: shivamchauhan88460@gmail.com. We answer within 30 days.
This is the address for questions about your data, for the erasure and correction requests described above, and for anyone who received a gift they did not ask for.
Where this stands legally
Privacy is a fundamental right in India under Article 21 of the Constitution, settled in K.S. Puttaswamy v. Union of India (2017). The obligations that actually bind a site like this one are statutory: the Information Technology Act, 2000 and its SPDI Rules, 2011, and the Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, whose Rules were notified on 13 November 2025 and whose notice and consent requirements take effect on 13 May 2027. This notice is written to be itemised and plain, which is what those rules ask for.
If this notice and the running code ever disagree, the code is what is true and this page is what is wrong. Tell us and we will fix the page.