How we handle your data

The short version

No analytics unless you opt in, and we do not sell, share, or profile your data. We do carry advertising: Google AdSense runs on the public pages, sets its own cookies, and is the one third party that sees your visit. There is a section on it below and you can turn its personalisation off. We store only what a feature you chose to use needs in order to work: nothing for anonymous reading and auditing beyond a rate-limit counter; your email and your saved drafts if you create an account and use Studio; a shared audit's text for 30 days if you create a share link. Text you send for analysis goes straight to an AI provider under a zero-data-retention agreement and is not stored there or used to train models.

What we store

It depends on what you use, so here is the honest inventory, from least to most:

Anonymous use (reading briefings, running free audits): an IP-keyed daily quota counter in Cloudflare KV, recording how many API requests your IP has made in the current 24-hour window so we can enforce the free-tier limit. It expires automatically and is linked to nothing but the IP itself. Your audited text is not saved.

An account (passwordless sign-in): your email address and server-side session records. No password exists to store.

Studio: the drafts you save, their version history, and the audit results attached to them - stored in our database, tied to your account, until you delete them. That storage is the feature.

Share links: creating one stores the shared text and its audit for 30 days, after which it expires automatically. Signed-in users also get a minimal index entry (link id, a title only if you typed one, timestamps) so links can be listed and revoked at /creator/shares; revoking deletes both immediately.

Feedback and the email list: whatever you type into the feedback form (with an optional email), and the signup record described in "Email list" below.

Questions you ask the tool: the question itself is kept, along with what the research found and which sources were dropped. A question may later be published as a page on this site, credited to nobody and marked as machine-made. Nothing about you is stored alongside it: no name, no email, no account link for signed-out use, and the address of any page you were reading is kept only as a one-way hash. Ask nothing you would not want to see published, and if a published question should come down, say so and it will.

Published briefings (the question, the mapped positions, and the structural analysis) are editorial content authored for the site. They contain no personal data.

Email list

The email signup forms on the site (at the end of a briefing, on the extension page, and in the footer) are entirely voluntary. If you submit one, we store three things in our own database: the address you gave, which form it came from, and a timestamp. That is the whole record.

The list is used for exactly one thing: sending you new briefings by email once a sending address is set up. Until then, nothing is sent at all. The address is never shared, sold, or used for anything else. To be removed, email hello@thewhetstone.review and we will delete it.

AI providers

When you submit text for analysis, it is forwarded to Google Gemini under Google's Zero Data Retention policy for the Gemini API. This means Google does not store your input or output, and the content is not used to improve Google's models. You can read Google's terms at cloud.google.com/terms/data-processing-terms.

We do not use the Anthropic API for public requests at this time. If that changes, this page will be updated.

Cookies

We set no tracking or analytics cookies of our own. Signing in sets one functional first-party cookie (whetstone_session) that keeps you signed in and does nothing else. There is no Google Analytics and no Meta Pixel. Google AdSense does set its own cookies, and it is the only third-party script on the site: see the advertising section below. Your browser may cache static assets as normal HTTP caching - that is not a cookie.

Advertising

The public pages carry advertising through Google AdSense, which is how the briefings get paid for. Google places cookies or similar identifiers in your browser and may use them, along with your visit to this site and to other sites, to choose which ads you see. We never send Google the text you submit for analysis, your drafts, your email address, or anything from your account. We do not receive any personal data back from Google, only aggregate earnings figures.

You can turn off personalised advertising for your Google account at myadcenter.google.com, which works across every AdSense site and not only this one. Google's own account of what it collects is at policies.google.com/technologies/partner-sites. Ads are not loaded on this page, on the extension privacy policy, on the internal labs pages, or on any admin page.

The Chrome extension

The extension maps the argument on a page you choose. When you run a mapping, that text is sent to the same AI provider (Google Gemini, under the zero-retention policy above) and the result appears in the side panel. The page content is not stored on our servers.

It has its own policy, and that one is authoritative: the extension privacy policy. It covers three things this page cannot summarise fairly: the small script that runs on every page so the selection pill can appear, the optional ambient mode that is switched off when you install it, and the placement cache, which is keyed on a page's address for up to seven days.

Read that page rather than this paragraph. This section previously said usage analytics were off by default and could be changed in the extension's settings. Both had stopped being true: the analytics switch defaults to on, and it now lives in the panel under Options. Corrected 11 August 2026.

Your rights

Everything above that is tied to you can be removed: delete your drafts from Studio, revoke share links at /creator/shares (unrevoked ones expire on their own within 30 days), and for anything else - your account, a feedback message, an email-list entry - email hello@thewhetstone.review and we will delete it. Anonymous use leaves nothing behind to request.