Privacy policy

What this covers

This page, and the site you are reading it on. Listening happens in PodcastHERS, which is a separate application with its own account and its own policy; nothing you do there is described here.

The terms of service are a separate document and have not been published in the rebuild yet. The legal index explains why, and where the current version still lives.

What is held

Nine things, and there is no tenth. There is no advertising network on this site, no analytics script, and no tracking pixel — so there is no profile of your browsing built here, because nothing collects one.

• Your account

  Your email address, because it is how you sign in and how we reply. Your name and profile picture too, if you chose to sign in with Google — Google passes those across, and nothing else. There is no password: we never stored one, so there is none to lose or leak.

• How you signed in

  The links and codes we email you, until they expire or you use them. Alongside each request, a one-way hash of the address it came from — never the address itself — so that somebody hammering the form can be slowed down without us learning where anybody lives.

• Your membership

  Which plan you are on, whether it is active, paused, overdue or cancelled, when it next renews, and the reference numbers Stripe uses for you. No card number, expiry date or security code ever reaches SHEQONOMI: the card is typed on Stripe's own page and Stripe hands back a reference.

• What you told us when you joined

  Which of the identity groups you picked, the roles under them, and the goals you ticked — the answers that decide which parts of the site open for you. Your part-finished answers are saved as you go so you can come back to them, and that draft is deleted 60 days after you last touch it whether you finish or not.

• Your public listing, if you make one

  The display name, headline, biography and location you write — the four things the editor asks for — plus every earlier version of them. The history is kept on purpose: an approved public page may not be quietly rewritten, so a change that materially alters it goes back for review with the last approved version still standing.

• The podcast feeds you connect

  The address of the feed, and what the feed itself publishes — episode titles, dates, and the download figures your hosting company reports. All of it comes from a source you control and can disconnect.

• What you write to us

  Anything sent through the contact form or the support form, kept as a record rather than only as an email — an email-only form loses your message on a bad minute at the mail provider and shows you the same thank-you either way. We also keep a log of which emails we sent to which address and whether the provider accepted them.

• Who referred you

  If you arrived through somebody's referral link, the code travels with you in a cookie named sheq_ref for 30 days and is attached to your account once, the first time. It is attribution and nothing else — a code has never unlocked anything, and the code that brought you cannot be overwritten by a later link.

• What an administrator did

  Every change one of the two administrators makes to an account: who made it, what the record looked like before and after, and the reason they gave. This is the one thing on this list that outlives an account, and the section on deletion below says why.

Cookies

Two. One keeps you signed in, and clearing it signs you out. The other is sheq_ref, which remembers for 30 days that somebody referred you. Neither is sold, shared, or read by anybody else.

Who else sees it

Five companies, named rather than summarised. Nobody else — we do not sell anything on this list, and there is no advertising business here to sell it to.

• Stripe

  Takes payments and runs subscriptions. Your card details are theirs, not ours, and we could not show them to you if you asked. They hold their own record of what you paid under their own obligations.

• Resend

  Delivers our email — sign-in links, receipts, and anything an administrator sends you in reply.

• Google

  Only if you choose to sign in with Google. Then Google confirms the address to us and passes your name and picture. If you sign in by emailed link instead, Google is not involved at all.

• Vercel

  Runs the site itself, so every request you make passes through their servers.

• Neon

  Runs the database everything above is stored in.

How long it stays

Sign-in links and codes expire on their own, in minutes. A part-finished sign-up is deleted 60 days after you last touched it. Everything else stays for as long as your account does, and then until somebody carries out your request to remove it.

Two things outlive the account deliberately. The record of what an administrator did — including deleting your account — is kept, because an audit trail that can be edited by the person being audited is not an audit trail. And Stripe keeps its own record of what you paid, under obligations that are Stripe’s and not ours to waive.

Getting a copy

Your public listing you can download yourself, right now and without asking, from Creator tools. For anything else, ask — see below.

Deleting your account

A person does this, not a program. SHEQONOMI has exactly two administrators. One of them carries out your request by hand, working through a written procedure kept with the code, and replies to the address on your account when it is done.

We are saying that plainly because the alternative is to imply otherwise. There is no button in this site that deletes an account, no countdown running in the background, and no scheduled job that anonymises anything. If this page one day describes something automatic, it will be because something automatic was built.

To ask, use Support if you can still sign in, or the contact form if you cannot — both carry a topic called “My data, or deleting my account”, and choosing it is what puts your request in front of an administrator rather than in the general queue. Because a person is doing the work, they will check that you control the account before removing anything; usually that is a reply to the address held on it.

What deletion does not reach

Your sign-in, your membership record, your answers, your listing, your feeds and your messages all go. Three things do not, and it is better that you know which before you ask than after.

• The administrative record described above, including the record of the deletion itself.
• Stripe’s own record of your payments, which lives on Stripe’s systems and which we cannot reach from here.
• Backups taken before your request. They still contain what you asked us to remove until they are replaced or destroyed. They serve no page and are opened only if the live database is lost.

Correcting something, or complaining

Most of what is held about you, you can edit yourself in Settings and Creator tools. For the rest, or if you think we have got something wrong and want it looked at by a person, the same two routes above reach one.

Changes to this page

This page describes the site as it is built today. When the site changes, this changes with it in the same release — that is enforced by a test rather than left to somebody remembering.