Personal Information Handling

The only piece of personal information Teample ever asks for is an email address, and only when you choose to contribute to the catalog or sign up for an account. We do not ask for your name, location, date of birth, or any other identifying detail unless you offer it. Everything else the application knows about you is information you generated yourself: your teas, your brews, your preferences. That belongs to you.

When your email address enters our systems, it is immediately transformed. For lookups and session management, we derive a one-way cryptographic hash of it: a fingerprint that identifies you without revealing who you are. For situations where we need to reach you (such as sending a notification), we store an encrypted form, protected by a key that lives outside the database. Your email address in its original form is used only at the moment of sending, and never written to disk in that state.

If you submit to the catalog as a guest, without creating an account, your session is temporary by design. Your access token expires automatically, your session record is deleted when you leave, and your identity in our systems is represented only by a one-way hash, not by anything traceable back to you. Guest status does not mean reduced privacy; it means a lighter footprint.

Your teashelf, your brew history, your purchases, your rotation schedule: none of this is visible to other users, shared with third parties, or used to build any kind of profile beyond what you see on your own screen. Teample does not serve advertisements. There is no analytics pipeline harvesting your behaviour. The data you enter is for your use, and it stays that way.

When something goes wrong and our systems log the event, we are deliberate about what enters those records. Email addresses are anonymised before they appear in any log. Sensitive fields in error reports are encrypted before being written. We have automated tests that specifically check for personal information leaks in our backend, because privacy guarantees that are not tested are not really guarantees.

Teample is not a company with a legal team and a compliance department. It is a personal project, built with care, by one person. That means this philosophy is not a document produced to satisfy a regulator; it reflects the actual decisions made in the actual code. If you ever have a question about how your information is handled, you can ask, and you will get a real answer.