Privacy policy

Draft for legal review. Takes effect when Channel opens.

Channel is a network of verified people, so we ask for more than most apps do before you can reach anyone. This page says what we collect, why, and what we leave alone.

What we collect

• Your account. Your handle, name, email and phone number. Your email and phone are never shown to other people and never sold. We use your phone to keep Channel to one account per person.
• Your passkey. The public half only. The private half stays on your devices, and Channel has no passwords.
• Your identity check. A verification provider checks your government ID and selfie. We keep the result, not the raw documents or biometrics, unless we can’t avoid it.
• What you make. Your profile, posts, pictures, video, voice note, signature, messages, and email you send or receive through Channel.
• What you watch. One record for each story you view, such as how long it played and how far you got. It helps rank the optional Feed and measure both feeds. Nobody else can see it. It’s kept for 90 days. A copy goes to our analytics store at Amazon Web Services under a scrambled ID instead of your account, and is deleted there after 90 days too. Turn it off in Settings › Privacy and safety: we stop recording on every device at once and erase what we had.
• Your contacts, if you ask us to find people. Your phone scrambles each number and email before anything leaves it. We match those once and don’t store them. Turn off “Find me by contacts” and nobody finds you that way.
• What changed on your account. So your other devices can catch up, we keep a list of what changed (a post, a follow, a setting) for 30 days. It holds IDs, not content.
• Payments. Business pages subscribe through Apple. We receive the subscription’s status, not your card.

Claiming a handle on this website

If you claim a handle here, we save the handle, your email, the time, and a scrambled copy of your IP address that we use to limit abuse. We use your email to hold the handle for you until December 31, 2026 (when you sign up in the app with the same email, the handle is yours) and to tell you when Channel opens. If nobody signs up with it by then, we delete the reservation. We don’t sell it, and nobody else can see who asked for what. To have it removed, write to [email protected].

What we leave alone

• No ads, so nothing about you is used to sell ads.
• We remove location and camera details from pictures before anyone else sees them.
• We add no tracking pixels to your email and don’t rewrite its links for tracking.
• Message and email bodies, identity details and passkey secrets stay out of our analytics and general logs.
• This website sets no cookies and runs no analytics.

What other people see

Your profile, your handle, your public posts and your signature are public. Your signature can be seen and copied by anyone, so a nickname or a squiggle is fine. Messages go to the people you send them to.

Messages and encryption

Messages are encrypted on their way to our servers and where we store them, but they are not end-to-end encrypted. Content people report, and content our safety systems flag, can be reviewed by automated tools and by people on our team.

Most moderation decisions are made automatically: whether something you reported breaks our guidelines, whether a post we held can be shown, and whether to reverse a removal you appeal. When you report a message, the automated system reads that message. You’re told when something of yours is removed and why, and you can appeal it; anything the system can’t decide goes to a person. If we find child sexual abuse material, we report it to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC), as the law requires.

Email from outside

When you email someone outside Channel, that person sees your address and what you wrote, and their reply comes back into that thread. Their address and reply are stored with the conversation.

Who helps us run Channel

Service providers handle your information only to do this work for us:

• Amazon Web Services hosts our servers, database, email and the analytics store described above.
• Cloudflare stores and delivers photos, video and voice notes, and runs this website.
• Hive checks every photo and video before anyone else sees it, including against lists of known child sexual abuse material.
• Anthropic reviews signatures, public posts after they’re published, and content that’s reported or appealed, for content that breaks our guidelines.
• An identity verification provider, and Twilio for text messages.

We don’t sell your information or share it for advertising.

Deleting your account

Delete your account in the app: Settings › Account › Delete account. You confirm it’s you, then it happens straight away. Your profile, posts and messages disappear for everyone at once, and every device is signed out. Within 7 days we erase the rest:

• your posts, replies, photos, video and likes, and who you follow, block and mute;
• your viewing activity, here and in the analytics store, and your contact matches;
• notifications to and about you;
• your identity check, apart from the fact that a decision was made and when.

Messages you sent in group chats are replaced with “Message from a deleted account”. Replies other people wrote to your posts stay, because they’re theirs.

We keep only what the law or safety requires:

• reports you made, reports about you, and our decisions on them;
• material we must preserve for law enforcement, for one year;
• a log of text messages we sent, for 90 days, to stop fraud;
• records of App Store purchases for a page you ran.

Your handle is held for 30 days so nobody can pose as you, then released. You can also deactivate instead. That hides your profile and posts until you sign back in, and deletes nothing.

Your choices

Turn off viewing activity and “Find me by contacts” in Settings › Privacy and safety. Choose what reaches your lock screen in Settings › Notifications. To ask what we hold about you, or to have it corrected or removed, write to [email protected].

Age

Channel is for people 18 and older.

Questions

Write to [email protected]. Report abuse to [email protected], and security problems to [email protected].