Living Thought public alpha

Privacy Policy

MVP draft. This page is intended to be reviewed and revised with legal counsel before broader public launch.

Living Thought collects and uses data to operate the site, save your answers and exploration progress, support account access, moderate submissions, and provide reflective profile features.

Data We Collect

• Account and login information, such as username, display name, password hash, compare ID, login/session state, and password reset requests.
• Answers you select, including top-level and follow-up answer history.
• Position stances, Argument responses, Worth exploring marks, and exploration progress.
• Thinking Profile information, including approved profile tags and experimental signals generated from selected answers or eligible Position/Argument responses.
• Position proposals, Argument submissions, evidence/source submissions, and related moderation status.
• Admin and security metadata, such as review actions, approval status, timestamps, safe audit events, and rate-limit records.
• Technical logs and security information used to troubleshoot, prevent abuse, and protect the service.
• AI usage metadata when AI-assisted features are used, such as model names, token usage, timestamps, and limited action context.

How We Use Data

• To operate the site and maintain login/session security.
• To save answers, question progress, Position exploration, profile details, and comparison features.
• To generate your private Thinking Profile, Thinking Journey recommendations, and Experimental Profile Signals.
• To show aggregate community distributions and same-stance reasoning comparisons after minimum response thresholds are met.
• To review intentionally submitted Positions, Arguments, evidence, questions, tags, and admin workflows.
• To prevent abuse, investigate errors, and secure the site.

What Is Private

Your individual canonical-question answers, Position stances, Argument responses, Thinking Profile, Thinking Journey history, reasoning comparison, and exploration progress are private from other users. They are not shown as a public personal voting or belief history.

Routine administrator account tools are designed to show operational participation counts, such as how many questions or Arguments an account has considered, rather than the private choices, votes, profile scores, or recommendations behind those counts.

Living Thought uses these responses for your account experience and for aggregate community statistics. Aggregate displays do not list usernames or individual histories and are gated by minimum response thresholds where distributions could reveal small-cohort behavior.

What May Become Public

Content you intentionally submit as a Position proposal, community Argument, evidence/source contribution, or similar publication-oriented contribution may become visible to other Living Thought users after moderation. Your private votes and answers remain a separate class of data from public contribution content.

Administrator Access

Living Thought does not claim that stored responses are cryptographically inaccessible to administrators. Administrators or database operators may access stored information when necessary to operate, secure, troubleshoot, moderate, or maintain the service. Individual belief histories are not intended for routine administrator browsing.

AI Processing

Some content may be sent to the OpenAI API when AI-assisted features are used. These features may support question review, tag suggestions, profile tag descriptions, audit workflows, or similar admin/profile assistance. AI suggestions can be incomplete or wrong. API keys are stored server-side and are not intentionally exposed to users.

Sharing

Living Thought does not sell personal data. Data may be processed by infrastructure, hosting, database, security, bot-protection, email, or AI service providers needed to operate the site.

Synthetic Test Users

Living Thought may use clearly marked sample or synthetic users for development and administrator testing. Normal public community statistics are designed to exclude sample users. Admin-only preview tools, when enabled, must be clearly labeled as synthetic previews.

Retention

Data is kept while your account exists or as needed for site operation, security, audit history, moderation, and troubleshooting. You can view or download a snapshot of your account-linked data from the My Data page.

If you delete your account, Living Thought deletes your private answer table, Position votes, Argument votes, Worth exploring marks, and login account. Pending account-linked submissions may be removed with the account. Approved public contribution content may remain in the reasoning system without your account attached, so other users' discussion is not broken. Some operational logs, moderation records, and backups may remain for security and maintenance.

Security

Reasonable safeguards are used, including session security, CSRF protection, rate limits, password hashing, and admin-only controls. No internet service can be guaranteed perfectly secure.

Contact

For privacy questions or requests, use the data request page or contact privacy@livingthought.net.