Privacy Policy

1. Who is responsible for your data?

Wheesper is the service described in this policy. The person or organisation operating Wheesper is the controller of personal data used to provide and secure the service.

Discussion creators choose what they ask and who receives their private link. Depending on how they use Wheesper, a creator may also have independent privacy obligations concerning information submitted to their discussion.

2. Information we collect

When you create an account or discussion

• If you create an account, your email address, account identifier, authentication records, and account timestamps. An email address is not required to create a guest discussion.
• The discussion title, optional opening message, expiration choice (including “Never”), status, and the replies posted in it.
• For a guest discussion, the service generates a secret, cryptographically signed management credential. The credential itself is not stored in the application database.
• Operational records such as creation, update, locking, moderation, and deletion timestamps.
• Content reports, including the reported discussion or reply, selected violation category, pseudonymous reporter account identifier, and submission time.

When you join or reply

• A pseudonymous account and a stable, randomly assigned display name for each discussion you join.
• Your replies, their position in a thread, and posting timestamps.
• Session and membership identifiers needed to keep you in the right discussion and deliver private live updates.

Technical and security information

• Your browser sends ordinary request information, including an IP address, user agent, requested page, and request time, to the service and its infrastructure providers.
• Wheesper does not store raw IP addresses in its application database. It converts an IP address into a one-way, secret-keyed fingerprint that changes daily and uses it only for abuse throttling.
• Cloudflare Turnstile processes security signals, which may include IP address, user agent, browser and device characteristics, TLS fingerprint, site key, and site origin, to distinguish people from bots.

When you contact us

If you email Wheesper, we receive the email address you use, your message, attachments you choose to include, and ordinary email metadata. Please do not send passwords, authentication links, or more personal information than necessary.

We do not use advertising trackers or third-party analytics, and we do not intentionally collect a participant's name or email address. Please remember that free-text messages may contain personal or sensitive information if you or another participant choose to include it.

3. How and why we use information

• Provide the service: authenticate creators, create and display discussions, assign pseudonyms, post replies, provide live updates, receive content reports, support authorised moderation, and carry out deletion choices. Where applicable, this is necessary to perform our agreement with you or to provide the service you request.
• Keep Wheesper safe: verify human visitors, enforce rate limits, investigate failures, and prevent spam, fraud, or misuse. We rely on our legitimate interests in protecting the service and its users.
• Meet legal obligations: preserve, disclose, or remove information where applicable law requires it.
• Defend legal rights: establish, exercise, or defend legal claims when necessary.

Wheesper does not use your information for targeted advertising and does not make decisions about you that produce legal or similarly significant effects using solely automated processing.

4. Who can see information?

Anyone who has a discussion's private link can enter that discussion and see its title, opening message, pseudonyms, and replies. A private link is a bearer credential: it is designed to be difficult to guess, but it can be forwarded. Share it only through a channel you trust.

Discussion creators can see and moderate discussion content, but Wheesper does not reveal a participant's name, email address, or raw IP address to them. Application-level anonymity does not mean that network and service providers have no technical identifiers.

Authorised Wheesper administrators can access discussions across the service, review reported content, lock or delete discussions, and remove replies when needed for safety, policy enforcement, security, or legal compliance. Content reports are not displayed publicly or to ordinary participants.

5. Service providers and disclosures

We disclose information only as needed to operate Wheesper, comply with law, protect people and the service, or complete a business reorganisation. Our main service providers are:

• Supabase for database hosting, creator and anonymous authentication, and private realtime messaging. See the Supabase Privacy Policy.
• Cloudflare for Turnstile bot and abuse protection. See the Turnstile Privacy Addendum.
• Vercel for application hosting when Wheesper is deployed using its current production configuration. See the Vercel Privacy Policy.

These providers may process data in countries other than your own. Where data protection law requires it, we use an adequacy decision, approved contractual protections, or another lawful transfer safeguard.

We do not sell personal information or share it for cross-context behavioural advertising.

6. Cookies and local storage

Wheesper uses authentication cookies or equivalent browser storage to keep creators and anonymous participants signed in, refresh sessions, and restrict discussion access to members. These technologies are necessary for the service to work and are not used for advertising.

If you create or open a guest discussion management link, the browser stores its secret management token locally so the management page can survive an email sign-in redirect. The token remains until the discussion is claimed or deleted, or you clear browser storage. Anyone who obtains it can manage the discussion.

After a creator requests a sign-in email, the browser stores a timestamp for about one minute to prevent repeated requests. The value contains no email address and remains until it is overwritten or you clear browser storage. Cloudflare Turnstile may use strictly necessary cookies or similar signals for bot detection.

The browser also stores your light or dark appearance choice under a theme preference. The preference contains no account or discussion information, remains until you change it or clear browser storage, and is used only to display the interface in your chosen mode.

7. How long we keep information

• Creator accounts: kept while the account is active and deleted when the creator uses the account deletion control, subject to limited backup, security, and legal retention.
• Discussions and replies: kept until the creator deletes the discussion, deletes the account and all data, or an authorised administrator removes them. Signed-in discussions default to “Never,” while guest discussions require an expiration within 30 days. When a dated discussion expires, it becomes read-only but is not automatically deleted.
• Account deletion choices: a creator may delete their account and all discussions and replies, or delete only their account and keep every discussion and reply as a permanent anonymous read-only archive. Archived content remains available to anyone with its existing private link and has no automatic expiry cleanup.
• Moderated replies: the reply text is erased and a tombstone remains so the threaded conversation still makes sense.
• Rate-limit records: daily rotating IP fingerprints and related event times are deleted after 24 hours.
• Content reports: linked to the reported discussion or reply and deleted when that target is deleted. Until then, they are kept as reasonably needed to investigate abuse, enforce our rules, handle disputes, and meet legal obligations.
• Authentication and infrastructure records: kept only as long as reasonably needed for sessions, service operation, security, legal compliance, and provider backup cycles.

Deletion from active systems may not immediately remove information from encrypted backups. Backup copies are isolated and disappear through the ordinary backup cycle unless retention is required by law.

8. Your choices and rights

Depending on where you live, you may have the right to access, correct, delete, restrict, or receive a copy of your personal data, and to object to processing based on legitimate interests. You may also complain to your local data protection authority. These rights can be subject to legal exceptions.

Creators can delete individual discussions or, when deleting an account, choose between deleting all associated data and preserving discussions and replies as permanent read-only archives. Participants should include their discussion link and pseudonym when making a request; because Wheesper deliberately does not collect their real identity, we may need information from their current session to verify that a request concerns them.

We will not discriminate against you for exercising a privacy right.

9. Security

Wheesper uses high-entropy private and management links, hashed link credentials, access controls, role-restricted administrator functions, private realtime channels, server-side authorisation checks, encrypted transport, abuse throttling, and bot protection. No online service is perfectly secure. Treat participant links as access credentials and guest management links as passwords.

10. Children

Wheesper is not intended for children under 16, and we do not knowingly collect personal data from children under 16. If you believe a child has provided personal data, contact the operator so it can be reviewed and, where appropriate, deleted.

11. Changes and contact

We may update this policy when the service or legal requirements change. We will change the effective date above and provide additional notice when a change materially affects how personal data is used.

To ask a privacy question or exercise a right, contact the Wheesper operator at rami@wheesper.com.