Summary
Shelf is a private library for the text artifacts you and your agents create. We designed it to need very little about you, and this policy exists to say exactly how little.
- We ask for an email address. That is the entire account. There is no password, because we do not want to hold one.
- We store the files you put in Shelf. We do not read them, mine them, sell them, or use them to train any model, and unlike the analytics point above, that is a standing commitment rather than a description of the current build.
- We use analytics on this website, and only if you accept the cookie banner. Declining leaves the site fully working. We run no advertising and no cross-site tracking.
- We keep a small security log so we can answer "what happened to my file" and stop abuse. It never contains your file contents, your sign-in codes, or your search queries.
- You can download everything at any time, and deleting your account deletes your content.
The rest of this page is the long version.
Who we are
Shelf is operated by [LEGAL ENTITY NAME], registered at [REGISTERED ADDRESS] (“Shelf”, “we”, “us”). We are the data controller for the personal data described here.
For anything in this policy, reach us at developer@getshelf.dev.
What we collect
Information you give us
| Data | Why we have it |
|---|---|
| Email address | It is your account identifier and the only way we can send you a sign-in code. Required. |
| Display name | Shown in your own workspace. Optional, and you can change or clear it at any time. |
| Your files | The artifacts you create or upload, Markdown, JSON, CSV, HTML, SVG, text and code, together with their names, folder paths, labels, colours and stars. This is the product. |
| Preferences | Theme choice, editor indentation, and similar settings, so the app behaves the same way next time. |
Your files may contain personal data if you choose to put it there. We treat their contents as yours: we do not inspect, index for advertising, sell, or use them to train machine-learning models. Automated processing happens only where it is necessary to give you the product, rendering a file, running a search you asked for, enforcing a storage limit.
Information we collect automatically
| Data | Why we have it |
|---|---|
| IP address | Rate limiting, abuse prevention, and the security log. Our hosting provider also uses it to route your request. |
| User agent | Recognising sessions and diagnosing browser-specific faults. |
| Audit events | Timestamped records that an action occurred, signed in, created, renamed, deleted, so we can answer questions about your own account. |
| Operational logs | Sampled error and performance traces from the application server, used to keep the service running. |
What we do not collect
Some of these are permanent design decisions; others are simply true of the current build. We have marked which is which, because a policy that blurs the two is not much use to you.
By design, and not expected to change:
- No passwords. There is nothing to steal from us in a breach.
- No sign-in codes or session tokens in logs. These are excluded at the point of writing.
- No file contents or raw search queries in logs.
- No contact-list or address-book imports.
True today, and subject to the notice commitments in Changes:
- No advertising identifiers, no fingerprinting, no session recording. We measure which pages get read. We do not attempt to identify your device or follow you across other sites.
- No third-party requests at all unless you accept analytics. Every asset we ship, fonts, styles, scripts and images, comes from
getshelf.dev. Decline the banner and the site makes no request to anyone else.
How we use it
- To run the service, storing, rendering, searching and returning your files.
- To sign you in, sending a six-digit code to your email address and creating a session.
- To keep it secure, rate limiting, abuse detection, and investigating incidents.
- To support you, answering an email you send us, which necessarily means reading that email.
- To meet legal obligations, responding to a valid, lawful request.
We do not sell personal information, we do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising as those terms are used in United States state privacy laws, and we do not use your files to train machine-learning models. These are standing commitments.
We also do not currently carry out profiling or automated decision-making that produces legal or similarly significant effects, and we have no plans to. Should that ever change, it would be a material change under Changes and you would hear about it before it took effect.
Legal bases (UK and EEA users)
| Purpose | Basis |
|---|---|
| Providing the service and storing your files | Performance of a contract |
| Sending sign-in codes | Performance of a contract |
| Security logging, rate limiting, abuse prevention | Legitimate interests, keeping the service available and safe |
| Service announcements you cannot opt out of (an outage, a policy change) | Legitimate interests |
| Responding to lawful requests | Legal obligation |
Who we share it with
We share personal data with a small number of processors who operate the infrastructure Shelf runs on, and with nobody else for commercial purposes.
They fall into four categories: hosting and compute, which runs the application and serves this site; storage, which holds your files and the metadata about them; email delivery, which sends your sign-in codes; and analytics.
The analytics processor is Google, through Google Analytics 4, and it receives nothing at all unless you accept the cookie banner. If you accept, it receives your IP address with anonymisation enabled, plus the pages you view and basic device and browser information. Declining means no request is made to Google and no data reaches them. You can withdraw consent at any time using the cookie settings link in the footer of any page.
Today that is a small number of well-known providers. We will name every one of them to you on request, in writing, at developer@getshelf.dev. We update this section before adding a new category, and material additions are announced to account holders.
We may also disclose data where we are legally required to, where it is necessary to protect someone's safety or our rights, or as part of a merger or acquisition, in which case we will tell you before your data becomes subject to a different policy.
Where your data lives
Shelf runs on a global network, and requests are handled close to wherever you are. That means your data may be processed in a country other than your own, including the United States.
Where personal data is transferred out of the UK or EEA, that transfer relies on the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses and the UK Addendum, incorporated into our agreements with those providers.
How long we keep it
| Data | Retention |
|---|---|
| Account record and preferences | Until you delete your account |
| Your files and their versions | Until you delete them, or you delete your account |
| Deleted files | Recoverable for [30] days, then purged from backing storage |
| Sign-in codes | Minutes, they expire on use or shortly after issue |
| Sessions | Until you sign out or the session expires |
| Audit and security logs | [90] days |
| Support email | [24] months |
Deleting your account removes your files and account record. It is not reversible, and we mean it: this is a deletion, not a flag on a row we keep forever.
Your rights
Depending on where you live, you have some or all of the following rights. We honour all of them for every user, regardless of location, because maintaining two standards is a good way to get one of them wrong.
- Access, a copy of the personal data we hold about you.
- Portability, your files, in the formats you stored them in. You already have this: every artifact downloads from the app.
- Correction, fix anything inaccurate. Most of it you can edit yourself.
- Deletion, remove your account and its contents.
- Objection and restriction, object to processing based on legitimate interests, or ask us to restrict it.
- Withdraw consent, where we relied on consent, withdraw it without affecting what came before.
- Non-discrimination, exercising any of these will never degrade your service.
Write to developer@getshelf.dev. We respond within 30 days, and we will ask you to confirm control of the account's email address before acting, because otherwise anyone could delete your library by asking nicely.
UK and EEA users may complain to their local supervisory authority. In the UK that is the Information Commissioner's Office, at ico.org.uk. We would rather you came to us first, but it is your right either way.
Security
Data is encrypted in transit with TLS and at rest by our storage provider. File content is written immutably, so a corrupted or mistaken save does not destroy what came before. Sessions use host-only cookies. Untrusted HTML and SVG artifacts are served as downloads rather than executed on the application's origin, which removes an entire class of attack in which a file you stored gets to act as you.
Shelf is new software, so two things are worth stating plainly. It carries no third-party security certification and no signed DPA is available yet. And because the service renders and searches your files, it can read them; storage is encrypted, but it is not encrypted in a way that would stop us reading your content if we chose to. Keep your own copy of anything you cannot afford to lose. For specifics, write to developer@getshelf.dev.
Children
Shelf is not directed at children and is not intended for anyone under 16. We do not knowingly collect personal data from children. If you believe a child has created an account, write to developer@getshelf.dev and we will delete it.
Changes to this policy
Shelf is early, and what we collect will change as it grows, product analytics and error reporting are the likely additions. We would rather set out how a change happens than pretend none is coming.
- Any revised policy is posted here with a new effective date before the change takes effect.
- For a change that materially expands what we collect or reduces your rights, we email account holders first.
- Anything requiring consent is not set until you give it, with declining as easy as accepting.
- We will not quietly broaden the scope of collection and hope nobody diffs the page.
Contact
Privacy questions and rights requests: developer@getshelf.dev
Security reports: developer@getshelf.dev
Abuse and content complaints: developer@getshelf.dev
Everything else: developer@getshelf.dev
Postal: [LEGAL ENTITY NAME], [REGISTERED ADDRESS].