Privacy Policy

What we never store

• Your query text. A query is hashed with HMAC-SHA256 using a secret only our servers hold, and only that hash is written to our database. We cannot read your queries back, and neither can anyone who obtains a copy of the database without that secret.
• Page content you fetch. /v1/fetch returns a page to you and keeps none of it. We record how many characters were returned, not what they were.
• Your IP address. It is used in memory to enforce rate limits and then discarded. It is not written to our database.

What we do store

Account

Your email address and/or phone number, held by our authentication provider; and, in our own database, your account identifier, a hash of each API key, and the key's first characters so you can tell your keys apart. We never store a key in a form we could show you again.

Requests

For each search or fetch: the hashed query, which key made it, response latency, how many results came back, and whether a sponsored result was included.

Result URLs

The URLs we returned for a search, so that the short /r/ links in the response can resolve. This is the one place we hold something close to browsing data, and we would rather say so plainly than bury it: a stored search row contains the hashed query, the account behind it, and the pages we offered.

Clicks

When a link is followed: the destination domain (not the full URL), the position it held, whether the request looked like a person or a program, and the hashed query it came from.

Who else sees your queries

We do not retain query text, but we do transmit it, and you should know to whom:

Our search provider

Receives your query text in order to return results. It is an independent third party governed by its own privacy terms, and we may change which provider we use.

Vercel AI Gateway

Receives your query text to classify commercial intent and compute an embedding, only while sponsored results are enabled. It is currently disabled.

PostHog

Our product analytics provider. It receives how you use the site and the API — pages viewed, clicks, errors, request outcomes, latency, result and sponsored counts — along with your account identifier and email once you sign in, and your IP address and device details, which it processes on our behalf. It also records browsing sessions on this site so we can see where the product confuses people. It does not receive your query text or the URLs we returned to you, and your API key is masked out of every recording.

Convex, Vercel, Clerk

Our database, hosting and authentication providers respectively. They process what is described above on our behalf, as infrastructure.

Advertising measurement and your choices

We use the X Pixel and X Conversions API to understand whether an ad led to a site visit or completed account signup, improve campaign delivery, and build an audience of people who completed signup. X may receive page and conversion details, its click identifier, your IP address and browser user-agent, and a one-way SHA-256 hash of your email address when you complete signup. We do not send your search queries or API activity to X.

You can opt out below. We also honor Global Privacy Control for this browser and stop loading the X Pixel or sending server-side X conversion events when that signal or our opt-out cookie is present. You can also review X's own advertising choices in its privacy settings.

How long we keep it

Row-level records — requests, result URLs, clicks — are deleted after 13 months. Aggregate statistics that describe no individual (daily totals, category counts) are kept indefinitely.

One practical consequence worth knowing: a /r/ link resolves through a stored row, so a link stops working once that row is deleted.

De-identified and aggregate data

We derive aggregate statistics from use of the service, and our Terms give us the right to publish and commercialise them. Alongside that right we make these commitments, and they bind us:

• We publicly commit not to attempt to re-identify any individual from de-identified or aggregate data, and not to link it against any other dataset for that purpose.
• We contractually require the same of any recipient, including a prohibition on linkage against other datasets, and we reserve the right to audit compliance.
• We do not sell raw queries, raw result URLs, or any row-level record of your activity — not de-identified, not pseudonymised, not at any price.
• Anything we publish or license is aggregated across many accounts, never a portrait of one.

We do not sell your data

Under California law, "sale" and "share" are broad terms, so we want to be exact about where we stand:

• We do not sell personal information, in the CCPA sense or any other.
• We share limited personal information with X for cross-context behavioural advertising unless you opt out. That sharing is limited to the advertising measurement data listed above. It never includes search queries, result URLs, API keys, or API activity. Our sponsored search results remain contextual: they are matched only to the query in front of us and are not affected by X advertising data.
• Our advertising opt-out and Global Privacy Control stop this X sharing for the browser that sends the preference.

Your choices

Write to alon@steelworks.software to get a copy of what we hold about you, correct it, or delete it. You can revoke any API key yourself from the dashboard, immediately, without asking us.

Deleting your account removes your row-level records. Aggregate statistics already computed cannot be unmade, because they no longer describe you.

Our role

We are an independent controller of the data described here. We are not acting as a processor on your behalf, and we do not offer a data processing agreement for this service — the decisions about what is collected and why are ours, and this page is where we account for them.

freesea is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect their data.

Changes

If we change this policy in a way that materially affects what we collect or how we use it, we will say so here and update the date at the top before the change takes effect. We will not apply a new use to data already collected under an older policy without asking you first.