Privacy

What stays on this device

• Letters you keep. They're stored only in this browser and never reach our servers, unless you choose to let one drift.
• Letters you let go. They aren't saved anywhere, not even here.
• Your anonymous identity. It's a random ID kept in this browser. If you clear this browser's data or use a private window, you start fresh, and kept letters can't be recovered.
• A few settings, like how you view your bottles and which country's support lines to show.

What reaches our servers

• Letters you release: the words and the feeling you chose. People walking the shore may read them, never with anything that points to you. Before a letter is released, our own code checks it for phone numbers, links and cruelty. A released letter fades from the shore after 14 days and is deleted 2 days later.
• Gifts and reports. If someone leaves a gift on your bottle, you see the gift, never who left it. A report is only a reason picked from a list. Both are deleted along with the bottle. If three people report a bottle, it's set aside, and we may read it to decide whether it returns.
• Candles. A candle's color, and the hour it was lit, show to everyone as light. The words you add are stored so you can see them again, they're shown only to you, and they're deleted when the candle burns out after 3 days.
• Which bottles you've found, so the same one never washes up for you twice. These are deleted along with the bottle.
• Counts that stop abuse. We count how often each identity and each connection does things like releasing letters. Your IP address is never stored: it's turned into a code that changes every day, and the counts are deleted within a day.

A safety check that never leaves your device

Before you seal a letter or light a candle with words, the app looks on this device for words that suggest you may be in danger, so it can offer support. Nothing about that check is sent or saved.

Services we use

• Vercel runs our pages and server code. Like any website, it sees your IP address to deliver pages and to block floods of requests.
• Google Firebase holds the anonymous identity and the database, on servers in Singapore.
• Google reCAPTCHA checks that requests come from a real browser, and Google receives information about your device and browser to do that.
• Cloudflare forwards email sent to our privacy address.

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

There are no ads, no analytics and no tracking. One cookie keeps your anonymous session for up to 14 days. Our fonts are served from our own site.

Erasing everything

Erase everything, at the bottom of Your bottles, removes your bottles and candles from this device and from our servers, and ends your anonymous identity. Reports you've made stay until the bottle they point at is deleted, so reporting can't be undone by erasing.

Questions

Because we don't know who you are, we can't look up your data on request. Erase everything is how to remove it. For anything else, write to privacy@dearestsea.com.