Your email address, used only to send your sign-on codes and account notices and to recognize your account. Other members never see it. You can change it from My Profile; a code goes to the new address first.

Your birthday, used only to decide which rooms you can join and who can message you. Other members never see it.

Your screen name, your profile (including any picture you add), your mail signature, your text style, your settings, your status line, your Friends list and friend requests, and the people you’ve blocked.

Your profile location is a US city you pick from a list. It shows on your profile and sets the weather on your Welcome page.

If you choose “Use Current Location,” your device’s approximate location (rounded to about a kilometer) is used once to look up the weather where you are. We don’t store it, and you can switch back to your profile city anytime.

Mail you send and receive, including pictures. Deleted mail waits in your Trash for 30 days, then it is gone from your side; the other person keeps their copy until they delete theirs.

Your Instant Messages and Group Chats, so you can pick up a conversation on any device. Clear History removes a conversation from your view; the other people keep their copies until they clear them. Messages sent while you are away wait for you for up to two weeks.

Your Feed posts, moods, comments, and reactions, until you delete them.

Alerts (friend requests, comments, reactions, event reminders), the room events you ask to be reminded about, and your invite link and how many people used it.

Pictures you send or post are rebuilt by our server before they are stored, which removes hidden information such as the location where a photo was taken. Pictures sent to chat rooms are deleted after about two hours.

Reports you file or that are filed about you, including the lines or mail they quote, so staff can review them.

When you are signed on: a sign-on token (stored only as a scrambled hash on our side), your online status, the kind of device you signed on from (“Chrome on Mac,” “56k app on iPhone”), and when it was last used. You can see and sign off your devices from My Profile → Devices.

If you turn on notifications on your phone, a push token for that phone, so we can tell you about Instant Messages and friend requests while the app is closed.

Chat rooms keep only the last hour of conversation (up to 30 lines), so people who walk in can catch up. Nothing older is kept.

No passwords, because 56k doesn’t use them.

No advertising identifiers, no usage analytics, and no crash reports sent to third parties.

Each room has an automatic host (like Ashley or Leigh). The host is software, not a person. It welcomes newcomers, stars out swear words, slows floods and spam, keeps phone numbers and email addresses out of public rooms, and answers when you talk to it.

Messages in public rooms, and Instant Messages to or from members under 18, may also be checked by an automated system for harassment, hate, threats, sexual content, grooming, and self-harm. The check happens after a message is sent. Anthropic, the company that makes the Claude AI, processes these messages only to run this check for us, and to write the room host’s replies and conversation starters. Anthropic does not use them to train its models.

Pictures you upload (to mail, the Feed, your profile, or a chat) are checked by the same kind of automated system before anyone can see them, and refused if they show nudity, sexual content, gore, or hate symbols. A picture that may sexually exploit a minor is refused, kept privately as evidence, and reported to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children as the law requires.

If a message is flagged, it may be hidden, its sender may be muted for a few minutes, and a copy (with a few lines before it) is saved in a report for 56k staff to review. Only people decide on suspensions. If someone seems to be in crisis, the room host shares where to get help.

When you send a link, our server fetches that page’s title and description to show a small preview. The page’s owner sees our server, not you.

If you check “Stay signed on,” your sign-on token is saved on your device (the secure keychain on phones, the browser’s storage on the web) so you don’t have to enter a code every time. Signing off removes it.

Also kept only on your device: the people you’ve muted in chat rooms, your saved away messages, your favorite and recent rooms, sound and text-size settings, and whether you’ve dismissed Getting Started.

These companies process data only to run 56k for us, under their own privacy terms: Neon (our database), Vercel (our app host and private picture storage), Upstash (who’s online right now), Resend (sends our email), Expo (delivers push notifications to phones), Anthropic (the chat and picture safety checks and the room hosts), Open-Meteo (the weather, given a location but never your identity), Wikipedia (the headlines on the Welcome page; nothing about you is sent), GIPHY (GIF search, when it is turned on; your search words go to GIPHY), and, on the web sign-on screen, Cloudflare’s bot check.

We do not share your information with anyone else, except when the law requires it, to respond to a valid legal request, or to protect the safety of members. Law enforcement requests go to support@56k.app with “Law Enforcement Request” in the subject.

56k is not for children under 13, and we don’t knowingly collect their information. If someone under 13 tries to sign up, we keep only a scrambled (hashed) form of the email address so it can’t sign up again before their 13th birthday, and nothing else. If you believe a child under 13 has an account, contact us and we will delete it.

Members aged 13 to 17 get extra protections, described in the Terms of Service.

Edit your profile, change your email, and see your signed-in devices anytime from My Profile.

Download My Data (My Profile) gives you everything above as one file.

Delete Account (My Profile) deletes your account right away: profile, Friends list, blocks, mail, Instant Messages, Group Chats, posts, comments, alerts, and devices. Pictures are removed from storage; reports filed about you may be kept for safety.

Wherever you live, you can ask us to correct or delete your information, or ask what we hold, by writing to support@56k.app. We answer within 30 days and never treat you differently for asking.

If we change this policy in a way that matters, we will tell you when you sign on. If 56k is ever sold or handed to someone else to run, your information goes with it under these same promises, and we will tell you.

56k is operated by Michael Freeman, an independent developer in Florida, United States. Privacy questions: support@56k.app.