Security
Your experiences, protected.
AlignedContact holds records of personal experiences. That only means something if the private part is real. Here is how your data is protected — plainly, without the fine print.
How your data is protected
The same standards we hold ourselves to as custodians of other people's records, applied to every layer of the platform.
Passkeys only
There are no passwords to phish, reuse, or breach. Signing in uses device-held passkeys, with one-time recovery codes as the backup path.
Encrypted in transit
Everything between your device and the service travels over encrypted connections, enforced at the network edge.
Encrypted at rest
The databases holding your experiences are encrypted on disk. Losing a physical drive does not mean losing the data on it to whoever holds it.
In the EU
Your data resides in the European Union, on dedicated servers with Hetzner — a declared data processor in our privacy policy.
Least privilege
Internal access is scoped. The application runs under granular database roles, and the admin surface sits behind a separately authenticated gateway.
Encrypted backups
Database backups are encrypted off-site and purged on a fixed 90-day schedule. Nothing keeps a copy forever.
Metadata hygiene
Uploaded photos and videos are re-processed before storage, so location and device metadata never make the trip. Audio can be stripped from videos as well — for camera recordings and uploads alike — removed during transcoding.
Watched, and disclosed
The platform is monitored continuously, with a public status page and a published disclosure policy for security researchers.
Your rights, your data
Your records belong to you. These aren't promises we make only when it's convenient — they're built into the product.
Export
Download your experiences at any time as structured JSON, straight from the app. No request forms, no waiting period.
Delete
Deleting your account starts a 90-day soft-deletion period, kept for compliance and legal reasons. After it elapses, your data is removed from the live systems, and backups age out on the same fixed schedule.
Research on your terms
Research participation is opt-in and decided per entry — a setting sets your default, and each entry can differ. If you withdraw, the link between you and the data is severed and no new contributions are made; data you already contributed remains part of the anonymized dataset.
What we don't do
- We don't sell your data, and we don't run advertising or third-party trackers.
- We don't bury the details. Our privacy policy and terms are written to be read, not skipped.
Security questions
The questions people actually ask us.
Is my data encrypted?
Yes — at every stage. Data is encrypted while it moves between your device and the service, while it sits in storage, and on the disks that hold the databases themselves. Backups are encrypted with separate keys, held apart from the data they protect.
Where is my data stored?
In the European Union. The application and its databases run on dedicated servers in a German data center operated by Hetzner, and encrypted backups replicate to Cloudflare storage in the EU. Both are declared sub-processors in our privacy policy.
Who can see my experiences?
You decide, entry by entry. New experiences are public when you first install the app — shared experience is how collective understanding grows. Once you set an entry to private, the form remembers, and your next entries start private too.
Private entries are visible only to you, with narrow exceptions: if you ask support for help with an entry, or if an entry is causing a system stability issue, trained staff can view it. Every staff access to a private entry is audited, and a reason must be recorded at the time. Automated moderation never places a private entry in the review queue — the privacy policy details exactly what is screened and when.
What happens when I delete my account?
Deletion begins with a 90-day soft-deletion period, kept for compliance and legal reasons. Once it elapses, your data is removed from the live systems. Platform backups age out on a fixed 90-day schedule, so no copy survives indefinitely.
Do you hand data to outside researchers?
No. Research is conducted in-house, on the anonymized dataset, using only entries where the author granted consent. Nothing is sold and nothing is handed to outside parties; where extra capacity is needed, contractors are engaged directly under confidentiality and data-processing agreements, with the dataset staying under platform control. The outcomes feed back into the platform itself.