blurt.trade collects as little as it can. No email address, no real name, no phone number. No analytics, no ads, no tracking, and nothing loaded from other sites.
Who is responsible
Lars-Erik Bruce is responsible for the site and its data (the controller under the GDPR). To reach him: the contact on the About page.
blurt.trade runs on a server owned and operated by a private individual in Norway, who hosts it on Lars-Erik's behalf and has access to it only to keep it running.
What is stored
For each account:
- Your username, a hash of your password (Argon2id: the password itself is never stored), and when you signed up.
- The profile fields you fill in: bio, homepage and social links, your avatar's settings, the colour theme and share card colour you picked.
- Only if you set it: a coarse location, a 1° by 1° square, about 111 km across. Only you see it, but it puts your blurts in "Near you" for people nearby.
- Your blurts and replies, with when you posted them, and for each one an embedding: numbers describing what it's about, for related blurts and "You might like". It's computed on our own server; your text isn't sent anywhere.
- If you attach one, a blurt's picture: only a rough drawing of it, made on our own server. The photo you upload is never stored.
- Who you follow.
- Blurts you like, and when. Only the number of likes on a blurt is public: nobody else sees who liked it.
- Blurts you reblurt, and when. Reblurts are public: they show on your profile and in your followers' feeds. A quote is a blurt of your own, with the quoted blurt under it.
- Your invite codes, and who signed up with them. Who invited you shows on your profile.
- Blurts you report, with your reason and when.
- Your sessions: one record per login, with when it started and was last used. No IP address and no browser details.
The waitlist stores only the username you'd like, whether you've signed up since, and when you joined it.
For deleted accounts, only the username is kept, in lower case and with nothing else, so it can't be taken again.
Public: your username, profile, avatar, blurts, reblurts, follower, like and reblurt counts, and who invited you. Everything else is private, though admins see who reported what.
What is not stored
- No email address. So we can't contact you, and there's no password reset: a lost password can't be recovered, and neither can the account.
- No IP addresses in the database or in the app's logs. Rate limiting counts requests per IP address in memory only, until the limit has refilled (an hour at most), and never writes them down.
- The web server's access log, though, does keep the full IP address, time, method and path of each request for 14 days, to spot abuse. It doesn't name your account, but together with the app's logs it could be linked to it.
- The app's logs hold what was asked for and how it went (method, path, status, time), never what you posted, your password or your cookies. They are kept only until they are rotated out: they are capped by size, so roughly days to weeks.
Cookies
Three, all strictly necessary for things you ask the site to do, none for tracking or analytics, so there's no cookie banner. Visitors who aren't logged in get none. All three are HttpOnly, Secure and SameSite=Lax, and only sent to blurt.trade. The site uses no JavaScript, so nothing is stored in your browser in any other way.
| Cookie | What it's for | Lasts |
|---|---|---|
__Host-access_token | Shows you're logged in, with your colour theme, time zone and language | 5 minutes |
__Host-refresh_token | Keeps you logged in and renews the one above | Until you close the browser, or, if you ticked Keep me logged in, 400 days without a visit. Gone when you log out. |
recent_write | After you post or change something, makes sure you see your own change straight away | 10 seconds |
Why we may use your data
- Your account, posts, follows, likes and the rest, to provide the service you signed up for (contract, GDPR Art. 6(1)(b)).
- The optional coarse location, because you chose to set it (consent, Art. 6(1)(a)). Clear it to withdraw.
- Rate limiting and the web server's access log, to protect the site from abuse (legitimate interests, Art. 6(1)(f)).
Backups
There are no backups. If the server's disk fails, the data is gone, and deleting your account removes it everywhere.
Deleting your account
Settings has "Delete my account", which asks for your password. It deletes at once, in one go, everything above that belongs to the account: your profile, avatar and location, the text of your blurts and their embeddings, your reblurts, who you follow and who follows you, your likes (and the likes on your blurts), your invite codes, your reports, your sessions and your waitlist entry. You're logged out everywhere.
What stays: an empty record of the account, with no username, password or profile, and an empty row for each of your blurts, with no text, which shows nowhere and names nobody. A blurt someone replied to shows as an empty placeholder, with no text and no author, so the thread still reads. The invite code you signed up with stays marked as used, with nothing linking it to you. Your username goes on the list of retired names, with nothing else, so nobody can sign up as you later. The count of sign-ups so far doesn't go down.
Your rights
You can ask what is stored about you, and have it corrected, deleted or handed to you in a form you can reuse (data portability), and you can object to how it is used:the contact on the About page. You can also complain to the Norwegian Data Protection Authority, Datatilsynet.