Privacy Policy

The short version

• We collect your email address, the tools you ask us to watch and a record of each sign-in.
• Your address is stored encrypted, and your record is filed under a fingerprint of it rather than the address itself — a stolen copy of our database does not say who you are.
• We never see your card. Our payment provider handles that.
• We do not sell or share your personal information. Ever.
• Site analytics are cookieless and anonymous — no session recording, no advertising network, no cross-site tracking, no consent banner needed.
• You can delete your account from your account page. Choose this site only or both Cyber Toolchain and AI Toolchain. You can also email info@cybertoolchain.io for help.

Who is responsible

Cyber Toolchain LLC, a Florida limited liability company, operates The Cyber Toolchain and is the data controller. Contact: info@cybertoolchain.io.

What we collect

If you subscribe

• Your email address — so we can send you the thing you asked for.
• Which newsletters you want, and which tools or categories you filter to — this is the product; without it Grep cannot work.
• Delivery records — which issue went to you and when, so a retried job cannot send you the same issue twice.
• Sign-in links — single-use, stored only as a hash, and deleted automatically after they expire.
• Sign-in history — the time of each sign-in attempt and the IP address and browser type it used, so we can look into a sign-in that was not yours.

If you pay

Payment is handled by Paddle, which acts as the Merchant of Record. Your card details never reach our systems. We receive from Paddle only what we need to know you are entitled to what you bought: a customer reference, which plan, its status, and when the period ends.

If you send feedback

We email your message, the page path, and any reply address you provide to our team. Query strings and URL fragments are excluded. Feedback does not sign you up for a newsletter, and its contents are not sent to an AI model or recorded in site analytics. Cloudflare Turnstile helps prevent spam.

If you use Updates

Updates keeps its working state in this browser: the tools you follow, the tools you mute, what you thought of each item (Useful or Not relevant) and the mark for the last time you looked. If you’re signed in, we also keep the tools you follow on your account, so the list is the same on every device. If you’re signed out, we sync it the next time you sign in. It doesn’t change what we email you. The rest isn’t sent to us. If you follow tools, we also keep the day you last visited, so we can tell how often readers come back. We only send how long ago it was, in a range. The only thing we count about Updates is anonymous totals, such as how many items were shown or opened by kind. Those counts carry no tool name, account or email address. Here is every piece of Updates data, where it lives and how to remove it.

If you just visit the site

We use PostHog for basic traffic analytics, configured deliberately narrowly: page views and a few actions such as clicking to subscribe, no autocapture of clicks or form contents, and no session recording. PostHog stores nothing in your browser, neither a cookie nor local storage. It does receive your IP address with each page view. It keeps that address and the approximate location it works out from it, together with the page you viewed, the referrer and your browser type. To count visitors it also makes a visitor code from your IP address and browser type, and that code changes every day. We do not use advertising or cross-site tracking of any kind, which is why this site has no consent banner.

Newsletter pages that offer two versions of a summary keep two small things in your browser’s session storage while the tab is open: a random code, and which version was shown first. Both are gone when you close the tab. If you give a thumbs up or down, we store your vote with that code for 90 days, so that a refresh does not count twice. The code is not tied to your account or your email address.

Entries in a newsletter also ask “Was this useful?”. That’s a separate question from the one above. Your answer stays in this browser, so the button remembers it. We also send it to PostHog with the tool name, the issue and the category, without your email address. If you’re signed in, we save it to your account too, with the tool name and the issue, so we can see which tools you’d rather hear less about.

The site is hosted on GitHub Pages, which keeps its own server logs including IP addresses, under GitHub’s privacy policy rather than ours.

Why we are allowed to (legal bases)

• Consent — sending you a newsletter you signed up for. Withdraw it by unsubscribing; every email has an unsubscribe link.
• Contract — delivering and billing a paid subscription.
• Legitimate interests — anonymous traffic analytics, preventing abuse, and keeping the service secure and working.
• Legal obligation — tax and accounting records for a sale.

Who else processes your data

• Paddle — payments, invoicing and tax, as Merchant of Record.
• Resend — sends the email, and records deliveries, bounces and complaints.
• Amazon Web Services (US East, Ohio) — stores subscriber records and preferences.
• PostHog (United States) — anonymous site analytics.
• GitHub Pages — hosts the website.
• Cloudflare — sits in front of the website and blocks automated traffic, so it sees each visitor’s IP address. It also runs the check that a person, not a bot, is filling in the signup, sign-in and feedback forms.
• Anthropic — summarises public release notes. Your personal data is never sent to it; it only ever sees vendors’ published material.

Each is a processor acting on our instructions. We do not sell personal information, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising — under the CCPA or any other law.

Where it lives

Our systems run in the United States. If you are in the EU, the UK, or elsewhere outside the US, your data is transferred there, protected by the standard contractual clauses our processors operate under.

How long we keep it

• Your “Was this useful?” answers — the ones saved to your account stay there until you delete that site’s account. Deleting it deletes them.
• Subscriber record and preferences — until you delete your account or ask us to remove it. Deleting one site removes its preferences and account request history; the shared subscriber record and shared settings are retained. Deleting both removes the shared subscriber record too. Unsubscribing stops the email and marks your record as unsubscribed. It does not delete anything. Signing in does not turn your email back on. Subscribing again, buying a plan, or the button on your account page does. Unsubscribing does not cancel your paid plan or remove access for the period you have paid for. Explicit account deletion removes that access.
• Unconfirmed signups — we send one reminder about three days after you sign up. We do not delete an unconfirmed signup automatically, so email us if you want yours removed.
• Sign-in links — 1 hour when you ask for a sign-in link, 72 hours in the first confirmation email, 48 hours in its reminder, 12 hours in the link we send after a purchase and 15 minutes in the fresh link that billing and API keys ask for. Each is deleted automatically after it expires.
• Sign-in history — 400 days, including after an account is deleted.
• Deletion safeguard — after deletion, we retain a keyed fingerprint of the account, without its email address or preferences, so old credentials cannot regain access if you sign up again. This safeguard has no automatic expiry.
• Delivery records — until you ask us to delete your account. They have no automatic expiry today. They let us answer “did that issue reach me?”
• Suppression list — if an address bounces, or you mark one of our emails as spam, we keep it on this list so we never email it again, and a spam complaint also unsubscribes you. It is filed under the same fingerprint as your record, with the reason and the date, and it has no expiry.
• Billing records — Paddle retains records needed for its tax, accounting and other legal obligations under its privacy policy. Deleting your Toolchain account does not delete those records.

Delete your account yourself

Sign in, open your account page and choose Delete account. Select this site only or both Cyber Toolchain and AI Toolchain, read the consequences, then confirm. We may ask you to verify your email again before accepting this irreversible action.

Deleting this site removes its newsletter choices, Greps, delivery records and account request history and stops sign-in and email delivery for that site. Access on the other site is unchanged. Shared profile settings, API keys and feedback that is not associated with one site are retained, even if you delete each site separately. Choose both sites to remove the shared account too. Shared API keys no longer grant access to the deleted site. Deleting both sites removes the shared subscriber record, preferences, Greps, account feedback, request history and API keys.

We cancel subscriptions for the selected site before deleting its account data. A paid plan shared by both sites is cancelled even when you delete just one site, ending that plan’s paid access on both. A separate subscription for the other site is kept. Deletion does not automatically issue a refund; see our refund policy.

We send a final confirmation email after deletion. Existing sessions and sign-in links cannot restore access to the deleted account. You may deliberately sign up again, but deleted preferences and history cannot be restored. We retain a deletion timestamp with a remaining shared account so old credentials cannot reopen the deleted site.

Account deletion does not erase the security sign-in history described above, messages already delivered to our support mailbox, or records held independently by Paddle and our email provider. If you need help with those records, or cannot sign in, email info@cybertoolchain.io. Backups and security logs expire under their retention schedules rather than being edited individually. Limited hashed account identifiers and payment subscription references may remain to keep old credentials and delayed billing events from reopening a deleted account; these records do not contain your email address or newsletter preferences.

If deletion is interrupted, your selected account access remains blocked while you retry the same deletion. If your sign-in expires before you finish, contact us to complete removal.

Your rights

Wherever you live, you can ask us to show you what we hold, correct it, delete it, hand it over in a portable form, or stop a particular use. If you are in the EU or UK this is the GDPR; in California, the CCPA; in several other places, something equivalent. We apply the same answer to everyone rather than sorting people by jurisdiction.

Email info@cybertoolchain.io. We will respond within 30 days, and we will not charge you or make you create an account to ask. If you are unhappy with the outcome, EU and UK readers may complain to their national data protection authority.

Children

The service is not for anyone under 16, and we do not knowingly collect their data. If you believe we have, email us and it will be deleted.

Security

Traffic is encrypted in transit. Your email address is also encrypted where we store it, and your subscriber record is filed under a one-way keyed fingerprint of your address rather than the address itself. A copy of our database, taken on its own, is a set of tool preferences that cannot be tied back to a person without keys held separately from it.

We are not claiming we cannot read your data, because we can: the job that sends your newsletter decrypts your address to address the envelope, and Resend necessarily sees it in order to deliver. What this protects against is a leaked, exported or stolen copy of the database — which is the realistic risk, and the one where your filter list would otherwise name you.

Sign-in links are stored hashed, work once and expire within 72 hours. Opening billing, changing your plan and creating or revoking an API key each need a sign-in link you opened in the last 15 minutes, so a browser session that has been open longer cannot do any of them. Credentials live in a secrets manager, never in our source code, and the subscriber list is never handed to any system outside our own — including our own build and publishing automation. No system is perfectly secure, and if a breach affects you we will tell you and the relevant authority within the time the law requires.

Changes

If we change this policy in a way that materially affects you, we will email subscribers before it takes effect rather than quietly editing the page.

Related

• Terms of service
• Refund policy

Browser notifications

When you choose browser notifications, your browser sends its full push endpoint and encryption keys to our account service. We encrypt that material at rest and bind it to your account and the selected Toolchain site.

The browser’s push service receives encrypted notification content and delivers it to your device. Tool names are hidden from both the title and body unless you turn on lock-screen names. Endpoint and key material, your follow list and push delivery links never reach analytics.

Live subscriptions and delivery records expire after 90 days under our retention rules. Turning notifications off revokes this browser’s subscription. Deleting your account removes its subscriptions. Signing out suppresses the old account on this browser and attempts server cleanup. A disconnected device may receive a message its push service already accepted. After removal from the live service, encrypted backup copies can remain for up to 35 days.