Privacy Policy

1. Who We Are

Penci.ly ("we," "us") operates penci.ly, a visual workspace application. For EU and UK users, Penci.ly is the data controller for your account and board data, as described in our Terms of Service.

2. What We Collect

What we deliberately do not collect: We do not run third-party advertising trackers or analytics that build cross-site profiles. Our analytics does not use autocapture, which would record every click on every element — it is a fixed list of a dozen named events chosen to answer specific questions.

3. How We Use It

• To provide the core product: rendering your boards, syncing changes in real time, and enforcing who can view or edit them.
• To authenticate you and manage your account through Clerk.
• To generate link previews when you paste a URL.
• To enforce fair-use and rate limits and prevent abuse.
• To process payments through LemonSqueezy once billing is live.
• To communicate essential service updates, including security notices and changes to these terms.

We do not use your data for advertising targeting or sell it to third parties.

4. Who We Share It With

We do not sell your personal data or board content.

We share data only with the collaborators you explicitly invite, our infrastructure providers as needed to operate the service, and legal authorities when required by valid legal process.

Each provider is contractually bound through its terms or data processing agreement to process data only as needed to provide its service to us.

5. Data Retention and Deletion

• Your content persists for as long as your account exists.
• Deleting a board removes it, every element on it, every board nested inside it, and the images and files uploaded to any of them. The storage they used is returned to your account.
• Deleting your account removes your boards and their contents, your uploaded files, your profile, and your subscription and usage records. It also removes you from boards owned by other people, including invitations sent to your address that you never accepted.
• We keep a record of security-relevant actions — who was added to or removed from a board, and when — for up to 180 days. When an account is deleted, its email address is removed from those records.
• Actions taken by our own staff on the service — granting a plan, exporting an account's data, deleting an account — are kept for up to 400 days, along with the reason given and the network address the action came from. That is longer than the 180 days above, deliberately: these are the records that make our own access to your account reviewable, and a period shorter than an annual review cycle would make them useless for that.
• Deletion of your content is immediate in our database; removing the associated files from our media provider runs straight afterwards and may take a few minutes.
• We do not currently apply an automatic deletion period based on account inactivity.

6. How We Protect Your Data

• In transit: Traffic to Penci.ly is served over HTTPS/TLS. Our infrastructure providers encrypt data in transit.
• At rest: Account and board data is encrypted at rest by Convex using AES-256. Uploaded media is encrypted at rest by Cloudinary.
• Access control: Boards are intended to be visible only to their owner and explicitly added collaborators. Clerk handles authentication, so we never see or store your raw password.

This is not end-to-end encryption. Penci.ly's backend and, in principle, our infrastructure providers can read board content under their access controls so the service can render it, synchronize it in real time, and provide features such as link previews and PDF export.

Our infrastructure providers are independently audited, including Vercel (SOC 2 Type 2 and ISO 27001), Convex (SOC 2 Type II), Clerk (SOC 2 Type 2), and Cloudinary (SOC 2 Type II).

7. Your Rights (GDPR / CCPA)

If you are in the EU, EEA, UK, or California, you may have rights over your personal data, including access, correction, deletion, portability, restriction, and objection to processing. See our GDPR Compliance page for more information. Account deletion is currently self-service; requests for a full data export beyond board PDF export are handled manually.

8. International Data Transfers

Our analytics provider is deliberately configured to its EU region, so that data stays within the EEA. Our other providers may process data outside your country, including in the United States. Where EU or UK personal data is transferred outside the EEA or UK, we rely on safeguards offered by those providers, such as Standard Contractual Clauses or equivalent mechanisms.

9. Children's Privacy

Penci.ly is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect data from them. Our Terms of Service describe the age requirements for creating an account.

10. Cookies and Local Storage

We use the minimum needed to run the application:

• Clerk authentication and session cookies.
• A light or dark theme preference stored locally.
• Your analytics choice, stored locally in your browser. It is a browser preference and is deliberately not sent to our servers — declining analytics should not itself create a record about you.
• PostHog's own identifier, and only if you accepted the analytics banner. Declining, or having Do Not Track set, means it is never written.

We do not use third-party advertising or cross-site tracking cookies.

11. Changes to This Policy

We will update the "Last updated" date whenever the practices described here change and make a reasonable effort to notify users directly of material changes.

12. Contact

For privacy questions or requests, contact privacy@penci.ly.