Privacy Policy

We use the information described above to:

• Create and authenticate your account.
• Store, display, and let you retrieve your photos and their verification status.
• Compute photo hashes and register them on the blockchain (Sections 1.3 and 4).
• Screen submitted content for policy violations before it is stored or made public, including manual human review of flagged content by a Notchd LLC administrator.
• Detect duplicate uploads: if a photo you upload has a hash matching content already uploaded by any user, the Service will surface the existing record instead of creating a new one.
• Enforce rate limits and prevent abuse of blockchain-registration and moderation resources.
• Respond to support requests and reports.
• Comply with legal obligations, including the mandatory reporting described in Section 6.

We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioral advertising, as defined by the California Consumer Privacy Act as amended.

For users in the EEA, UK, and similar jurisdictions, our legal bases are: performance of our contract with you (account, storage, hashing, and blockchain registration as a core, disclosed feature of the Service); our legitimate interests (security, rate limiting, abuse prevention, duplicate detection, and content safety); and legal obligation (mandatory reporting and lawful requests).

Some content you upload is publicly accessible, independent of your account.

• Each uploaded photo receives a public URL in our storage system. Anyone with that URL, or a link to its share page, can view the photo.
• Approved photos are viewable without sign-in on a public share page at notchd.io/photo/{id}, showing the photo, your caption (if any), the SHA-256 hash, and, once the blockchain transaction is confirmed, a link to it. These pages include metadata tags so the photo preview "unfurls" when shared on social media or messaging apps, which means preview copies may be cached by those platforms.
• Share pages are not currently configured to block search-engine indexing, so approved photos may appear in search results if discovered. Do not upload photos or captions you do not want publicly visible via a shared link, indexed by search engines, or unfurled in link previews.

You can limit exposure by not sharing photo links, but photos that pass moderation are stored with a public URL — and their hash is registered on the blockchain — regardless. There is no way to opt a photo out of blockchain registration (Section 4).

Every photo's hash is registered on the blockchain automatically as part of uploading it. This is not optional and cannot be turned off. Before your first upload, the app will remind you of this. Specifically:

• The hash is written to the Polygon network (mainnet) in a transaction that is, by the nature of public blockchains, permanent, publicly viewable, and cannot be edited or deleted — by you or by us — once confirmed.
• The blockchain record contains only the SHA-256 hash and transaction metadata, not the photo itself. Because the hash is deterministic, anyone who separately obtains a copy of the original photo can verify it matches the on-chain record.
• Deleting your account or requesting erasure of your data does not remove or alter any blockchain transaction already made on your behalf. We can delete our database record linking you to that transaction, but the transaction remains on the public ledger indefinitely.

By submitting a photo to the Service, you acknowledge and accept this permanence. If you do not want a photo's hash permanently and publicly recorded, do not submit that photo.

Every submitted photo is automatically analyzed by a third-party moderation service (currently Sightengine) for nudity, violence, weapons, and drug-related content before it is stored or registered on-chain.

• Photos that clearly violate our content standards are automatically rejected and are not stored or registered.
• Borderline photos are flagged for manual human review by a Notchd LLC administrator, who makes the final decision — meaning a person may view a photo you submit.
• We store the moderation classification and confidence scores with each upload.

If you believe a moderation decision was made in error, contact us using Section 14.

Each provider processes information on our behalf, subject to its own privacy and security practices. We do not share your personal information with third parties for their own marketing purposes.

We may also disclose information: if required by law or valid legal process; to protect the rights, safety, or property of Notchd LLC, our users, or others; in connection with a merger, acquisition, or sale of assets; and to report suspected child sexual abuse material or other unlawful content to law enforcement and to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC), preserving related information as the law requires.

• Account information and uploaded content are retained while your account is active.
• Moderation results and confidence scores are retained alongside the associated post record.
• Server and rate-limiting logs are retained for a limited operational period necessary for security, abuse prevention, and troubleshooting, after which they are purged or aggregated.
• Blockchain transactions are retained permanently on the public ledger and are outside our control (Section 4).

Depending on where you live — including under the EU/UK GDPR, the California Consumer Privacy Act as amended (CPRA), and comprehensive privacy laws of other U.S. states — you may have rights to access, correct, export, or delete your personal information, and to appeal our decision on a request. We will not discriminate against you for exercising these rights.

• Access & export: Request a copy of your data — photos, hashes, and blockchain records — from within the app's Settings, or by contacting us.
• Deletion: You can delete your account and associated data directly within the app (Settings → Account → Delete Account), or by contacting us. Deleting your account immediately and permanently removes your photos, captions, and database records from our active systems, except any hash already confirmed in a blockchain transaction, which no one — including us — can remove (Section 4). Copies others made while your content was public are outside our control.
• Correction: Contact us to correct inaccurate account information. On-chain records cannot be corrected or altered by anyone.
• No blockchain opt-out: Blockchain registration is mandatory for every photo submitted through the Service; there is no per-upload or account-level setting to disable it (Section 4). If you do not want a photo registered, do not upload it.
• Authorized agents: Where permitted by law, an authorized agent may submit requests on your behalf; we may verify your identity and the agent's authority.

To exercise these rights, contact us using Section 14. We may need to verify your identity before completing a request.

The Service is not directed to children under 13 (or a higher age where local law requires), and we do not knowingly collect personal information from children under that age. If you believe a child has provided us with personal information, contact us and we will delete it (subject to the blockchain limitation in Section 4).

We use industry-standard measures to protect your information, including authenticated API access, rate limiting, and hashed content verification. No method of transmission or storage is 100% secure, and content stored with a public URL (Section 3) is, by design, accessible to anyone with the link. We cannot guarantee absolute security.

Our service providers (including Supabase, Sightengine, and blockchain infrastructure providers) may process and store data in countries other than your own, including the United States. Where required, we rely on appropriate safeguards for such transfers, such as standard contractual clauses with our providers.

The notchd.io website may use cookies or similar local-storage technologies necessary for basic site functionality. We do not currently use cookies for advertising or cross-site tracking.

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. If we make material changes, we will notify you through the app or by other reasonable means before the change takes effect. The effective date above reflects the last update.