← today

Privacy

This policy is provisional. It states our practice plainly and we hold ourselves to it, but it hasn't been through formal legal review yet — treat it as our honest current commitment, not a finished legal document.

What a submission licenses

When you submit a name through the form on this site, you're licensing us to publish the name mapping only — the formal name and what it's known as. We never publish:

• Your story or any personal detail in it.
• Third-party personal details (anyone else named in your submission).
• Your email address, or any way to identify who submitted it.

What submissions store

A submission itself doesn't store a raw personal identifier. It's keyed by a salted, one-way fingerprint derived from the name pair you gave us — it lets us rate-limit and de-duplicate submissions without ever storing or reconstructing who sent them. This claim is deliberately scoped to submissions rather than asserted of the whole site, and it stays scoped even though the reminder signup that once made the wider claim false is now closed (see Reminders and your email below): if you gave an optional email for a thank-you note on the submission form, we use it once, to send that note, and don't keep it afterwards — so "we never receive a raw identifier" would still be a stronger claim than we can make. Scoped and true beats absolute and nearly true.

How community entries get published

A submitted alias is not published on receipt. It publishes only after:

• at least 3 independent reports of the same mapping,
• across at least 21 days (so one person retyping the same thing three times doesn't count),

and even then it's labelled 🗣 reported — unverified — until a written source corroborates it. Every published community entry is one-click reportable and removable: if you see your family's name used in a way you didn't intend, tell us and we take it down while we sort it out.

Reminders and your email

We don't collect email addresses for reminders. Reminders by email aren't available: the reminders page has no signup form, and the endpoint behind it refuses to save anything. We built the feature, then couldn't prove the mail actually arrives, so we closed it rather than take addresses for reminders that might never land. We don't know when it will come back, or whether it will.

• There is nothing to opt into. No reminders form, no list, no account — so we hold no email address of yours for this, and no saved list of names. (The submission form's optional thank-you field is the one place the site still takes an address at all — see above. It is used once and not kept.)
• This page changes before that does. If we ever open it, we will say here exactly what we store and why, before a single address is collected — not afterwards.

The calendar — the feature that does work — stores nothing at all: your subscription link holds only the names you picked, and it never reaches us as an account. See the calendar page.

Surname submissions

The surname-suffix decoder does not currently accept submissions. That intake is closed pending legal advice — surname claims touch family and regional identity in ways we want proper guidance on before opening it up.

What we don't do

• No tracking pixels or read-receipts in any email we send.
• We never sell or share your email address or a submission with anyone.
• No third-party advertising, and no ad trackers, anywhere on this site.

Questions or a takedown request

Use the submission form's story field, or the escalation note it includes. A human reviews every message that does reach us.