Privacy Policy

This policy explains what SquidSpark Inc. ("we") does with personal data in connection with Cachet Notes, a Markdown notes application with an optional sync service, and this website. It is written to be read, not to be survived.

The short version

• Personal notes stay in the folder you chose, on your own device. They never sync, signed in or not.
• Notes you put in a shared workspace are stored on our servers, because that is what lets the people you shared them with read and edit them.
• Those notes travel over an encrypted connection, but they are not end-to-end encrypted: our servers hold text we can read. That is what makes revision history, restoring an old version and live co-editing possible.
• We do not read your notes to build anything, we do not train models on them, and we do not sell personal data.
• There is no analytics, no advertising network and no third-party tracking in the application or on this website.

What stays on your device

Your personal notes are the folder you picked (or, in a browser, that browser's own storage). They are never uploaded, never indexed by us, and never sent anywhere — signed in or not, licensed or not. Nothing in the product changes that, and there is no setting that turns it on by accident.

The same goes for everything the application keeps about how you work on a particular device: the search index, which panes are open and how wide they are, your theme, your Vim and spellcheck preferences, the daily and templates folder names, and the bookmarks you keep in a personal vault.

What the sync service holds

When you sign in and put notes into a workspace, that workspace lives on our servers so the people you share it with can reach it. For each workspace we store:

• The notes themselves — the Markdown text, the frontmatter, the file names and the folder structure.
• Attachments: images you paste or drop, and other files under 50 MB, stored by their content hash.
• Revisions, each with the account that made it and when, so history, diffs and Restore work.
• Comment threads, their replies and what text they were anchored to.
• Who is in the workspace, their role, and invitations that have been sent but not yet accepted.
• Presence while a note is open live — who is in it and where their cursor is. This is relayed, not stored.
• Your own bookmarks in that workspace, which sync privately to your account and are never shown to other members.

Encryption, stated plainly

Everything between the application and our servers travels over an encrypted connection.

Notes in a workspace are not end-to-end encrypted. We hold them in a form our servers can read. That is not an oversight: it is what allows the revision history, the diff and restore, and the live session that merges several people's typing into one document. We are not willing to advertise a guarantee the product does not give.

What follows from that: anything you are not willing to store on someone else's server should stay in your personal vault, which never leaves your device. Per-note end-to-end encryption is designed and on the roadmap, where customers vote on what gets built first.

Your Cachet Notes account

Signing in is what makes sync, sharing and licensing possible. Depending on how your deployment is configured, you sign in through an identity provider using OpenID Connect, or with an email address and a password.

Either way we store an account identifier, your email address and the display name your provider gives us. Where email-and-password sign-in is used, the password is stored only as a salted hash. We do not ask for a telephone number, a postal address or a job title.

Organisations and licences

Cachet Notes is sold per seat, so we record which organisation you belong to, whether you are an Admin or a Member, whether you hold a licence, and when it was assigned. An administrator of your organisation can see that list — it is how they hand licences out.

When somebody invites you, we store the email address they typed, the role and licence they chose for you, and when the invitation expires. An invitation only works for the address it was sent to.

Email we send you

We send workspace and organisation invitations, a notice when a workspace you own is deleted with a link to restore it, a reminder a few days before that window closes, and the occasional message about your account or licence. There is no marketing list and no newsletter.

Deleting things, and when they are really gone

• A note you delete is tombstoned on sync so your other devices and the other members remove it too. Its earlier revisions go with it.
• A workspace you delete disappears for everyone at once, but it is not destroyed: its owners and your organisation's admins can restore it for 30 days, and then it and its attachments are permanently deleted from the server. Copies already sitting on members' devices are not touched — we cannot reach them.
• Your account. Ask us and we will delete it. Notes in a shared workspace stay, because they belong to that workspace and the other members are still working in them; your authorship on past revisions is removed.

What we never do with your notes

We do not read your notes, we do not scan them to build features, we do not use them to train a model, and we do not share them with anyone outside the workspace you put them in. There is no telemetry in the application: it does not report what you open, what you type or how long you spend doing it.

Buying a licence

Licences are bought through the SquidSpark Store and managed in the customer portal, which hold the name, email and billing details you give them. Card details go straight to our payment processor; we never see or store a card number. We receive a record of the subscription and the number of seats it covers.

Support

If you write to support we keep the correspondence and anything you attach, so that we can help and so there is a record of the problem. Please do not send a copy of a sensitive note when a description of what went wrong will do — we would far rather not hold your material at all.

What this website collects

This site is a product website with a public roadmap. Most of it can be read without an account and without being tracked. The processing below happens only when you choose to take part.

Your account

Voting on the roadmap and posting a suggestion both require an account, so that one person counts once. Creating one stores your username, your email address and a hashed version of your password. We do not ask for a real name, a company or a telephone number, and there is no profile for other visitors to see.

Suggestions you post

When you submit a suggestion we store the one-line summary, the description of the problem, the area and type you selected, and the email address on the form. Suggestions are reviewed before they appear publicly.

If a suggestion is approved, its summary and description become public on the roadmap board. Your email address and account name are not shown there. Please do not put confidential information into a suggestion — the board is public, and we cannot un-publish something you have already told other readers.

Votes

A vote records your account against the item you voted for, so the board can show a total and so you can take your vote back. Votes are not shown per person.

Automatic collection

• Server logs. Our web server records requests in the ordinary way, including IP address, timestamp, the page requested and your browser’s user-agent string. These are kept for 90 days, then deleted or aggregated, and are used to keep the site running and to investigate abuse.
• Rate limiting. After you post a suggestion we keep a short-lived marker against your account for a few minutes, to stop the form being submitted repeatedly.
• Web fonts. This site loads its typefaces from Google Fonts. That means your IP address and browser details reach Google’s servers when a page loads. If that is not acceptable for your deployment, the fonts can be self-hosted instead.

What we do not do

There is no analytics, no advertising network and no third-party tracking script on this website. We do not sell personal data, and we do not profile you or make automated decisions about you.

No cookies are set for visitors who are not signed in. Signing in sets the standard WordPress session cookies, which keep you signed in and are removed when you sign out.

Legal bases for processing

• Contract. Running your account, and supplying and supporting Cachet Notes if you are a customer.
• Legitimate interests. Keeping the site available and secure, preventing abuse of the suggestion form, and understanding what customers are asking us to build.
• Consent. Anything you volunteer, such as posting a suggestion. You can withdraw it by asking us to remove the suggestion.
• Legal obligation. Keeping records we are required to keep, such as those relating to a purchase.

How long we keep things

• Account records: until you ask us to delete the account.
• Suggestions and votes: for as long as the roadmap item is relevant. A published suggestion may remain on the board after an account is deleted, with no account attached to it.
• Server logs: 90 days, then deleted or aggregated.
• Purchase and tax records: 7 years from the end of the relevant tax year, as Canadian law requires.
• Support requests, and any files attached to them: 24 months from the last message in the thread.

Who else is involved

We share personal data only with the suppliers needed to run this site and our business, and only as far as they need it:

• SquidSpark’s own servers — this website, the SquidSpark Store and the licence server run on hardware we own, housed in a colocation facility in Canada. The facility provides space, power and connectivity; it does not administer our systems or use the data on them.
• SendGrid, a Twilio company — sending all account, licence and notification email.
• Stripe — taking payment through the SquidSpark Store. Card details go straight to Stripe; we never see or store them.
• Twilio — sending SMS verification codes when you sign in, and SMS notifications, where you have given us a mobile number.
• Microsoft Azure Storage — holding product downloads and release packages, and any files you attach to a support request.
• Google — serving the web fonts described above.

We do not sell personal data or share it for anyone else’s marketing.

International transfers

Our suppliers may process data outside your country. Where information leaves Canada or the European Economic Area, we use providers who commit to comparable protection by contract, including the European Commission’s Standard Contractual Clauses where they apply. You can ask us for more detail at privacy@squidspark.com.

Your rights

Depending on where you live, you may have the right to see the data we hold about you, to correct it, to have it deleted, to restrict or object to how we use it, to receive a portable copy, and to withdraw consent.

To exercise any of these, write to privacy@squidspark.com. We will respond within the period the law allows. If you are unhappy with our answer you may complain to your data protection authority — in the UK the Information Commissioner’s Office, in the EU your national supervisory authority.

Children

This site and Cachet Notes are business tools and are not directed at children. We do not knowingly collect personal data from anyone under 16. If you believe a child has given us data, write to privacy@squidspark.com and we will delete it.

Security

We take reasonable technical and organisational measures to protect the data described above, including encrypted transport for this website and hashed password storage. No system is perfectly secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security.

Changes to this policy

If we change how we handle personal data we will update this page and change the date at the top. Where the change is significant we will say so on the site.

Contact

SquidSpark Inc.

7030 Woodbine Ave, Suite 500, Markham, Ontario, L3R 6G2, Canada

privacy@squidspark.com