Privacy

The short version: your figures are yours. We do not sell data, share it for marketing, run ads, or track you across the web. The only people your numbers exist for are you and the site features you point them at.

Without an account, everything you enter lives in your browser's local storage on your device: your character, your savings and income figures, your expenses, your target county, your diary. None of it is transmitted to us. Clear your browser data and it is gone, which is also the honest warning: without an account there is no server copy to recover from.

An account is optional and exists to carry your character between devices. It stores your email address, a password hash we never see in plain form, and your journey data in a single database row. Access to that row is enforced by the database itself: each account can only ever reach its own data, and no other player can read yours. We look at your figures only when you ask us for help with your account, we build no profiles from them, and we share them with no one.

As with nearly every online service, the people who run it can technically access its database. Most services never say this out loud. We think you deserve to hear it said plainly.

Our rule is simple: we look at a player's data only when they ask us for help with their account, and we never sell it, share it, or use it for anything but running the site.

The rest of this page is the receipts. Other players are locked out by the database itself. The only analytics is cookieless and counts pages, not people. And you can use the whole site without an account at all: signed out, your character never leaves your own browser, and there is nothing on our servers to access in the first place.

If we ever add encryption that locks even us out of your data, it will be announced on the patch notes page before it happens, never slipped in.

Posts on the forums are public and carry your chosen display name, never your email. Write there the way you would write on any public board.

Two optional tools read a photo for you: the receipt and statement reader in the Treasury, and the listing drafter in the Marketplace. The photo goes to Anthropic's Claude API to be read, comes back as text, and is discarded. We never store it. What we keep is a usage ledger: how many scans your account has used and what they cost, so the per-player limits work.

The hourly scan limit works without keeping your IP address. The server turns it into a one-way scrambled fingerprint at the moment a scan arrives, holds that fingerprint in short-term memory for up to an hour to count your scans, and forgets it. The fingerprint cannot be turned back into your address, is never written down, is never tied to your account, and changes every day.

We count pageviews with Vercel Web Analytics, which uses no cookies and no persistent identifier; it tells us which pages are read, never who read them. Email exists for one purpose: account mail such as confirmation and password reset, sent from hearth@hestiasatlas.com. There is no newsletter, and your address is never used for marketing.

Four providers process data so the site can run, each for one job: Vercel hosts the site and counts pageviews, Supabase stores accounts and journey rows, Resend delivers account email, and Anthropic reads scan photos. Each receives only what its job requires. Nobody on that list, and nobody off it, buys, rents, or receives your data for their own use.

You can download everything your account holds from the account page as one JSON file: your character, the account's synced copy, your forum posts, and your scan-usage rows. The file is made in your browser, reading only your own rows over your own session.

You can delete your account yourself, on the same page. It asks for your password, states exactly what it removes, and takes effect immediately: the account, its email, the synced character copy, and every forum post and reply you wrote. Scan-usage rows are kept with the link to you removed, so the site's spending ledger stays true without naming anyone. If you would rather ask a person, email hearth@hestiasatlas.com from your account address and it will be done by hand.

Hestia's Atlas is a family-friendly place. We host no content that is gory, violent, sexually explicit, destructive or illegal, and the forums are moderated to keep it that way. The subject matter is real life: money, careers, and moving house. There will never be NSFW content on this site.

Changes to this policy are announced on the patch notes page before they take effect, the same place every other change is announced.