System Prompt

Privacy

System Prompt writes essays for you from what you tell it about your views. This page says what that takes, where it goes, and how to take it back.

01The short version

  • We keep what we need to write and send your essays, and nothing more.
  • Nothing is sold. There are no ads and no third-party trackers. When you sign up or sign in, Cloudflare checks that you are a person, not a bot.
  • You can download everything, stop the emails, or delete everything at any time.

02Before you give an email address

While you pick topics, answer the questions, and mark thinkers, your answers are kept in your browser. To choose your questions and thinkers and to place you on the map, the site sends our server your topics, your answers, and the thinkers you marked, as ids and numbers. The server works out the result and keeps none of it.

If you add a person by name, that name is sent to Anthropic’s API so the person can be looked up. Nothing else about you goes with it.

03What we collect when you sign up

  • Your email address, and how often you want essays.
  • Your topics, your answers to the questions, the thinkers you marked, and any people you added by name.
  • What you tell us about essays: the paragraphs you marked as landed or not, and what worked and what did not.
  • The essays written for you, and when you first opened each one on the reading page.

Your answers are about what you believe, which is sensitive. We ask for your consent before you start, and we use them only to write for you.

We also use your IP address to apply rate limits and to check the country you connect from. It is not stored as it is: the day’s counts are kept under a keyed hash of it.

04Why

To choose your questions and thinkers, work out where you land, pick the stories to write about, write and send your essays, let you respond to them, and keep the service working and safe from abuse.

05What the writing model sees

Essays are written by an AI model through Anthropic’s API. For each essay it receives the story and its sources, the side to argue, the names of up to four thinkers you liked (only for essays from your side), and your most recent responses to earlier essays: what worked, what did not, and the passages you marked. It never receives your email address or your answers to the questions.

06Where it is kept, and who helps

  • Vercel hosts the site and runs its server code. Vercel Web Analytics counts page views without cookies, and the address it records stops before any # or ?, so private links never reach it.
  • Upstash is the database that holds your account.
  • Resend sends the emails. They carry no tracking pixels, and link and open tracking are off. We count a read when an essay opens on the reading page.
  • Anthropic provides the AI model that writes the essays and looks up people added by name.
  • Cloudflare Turnstile checks that a person, not a bot, is signing up or signing in. It runs only on those two forms, and it sees your IP address and some details about your browser.

Server logs record what happened, such as an essay being sent, never your email address or anything you wrote.

07How long

Until you delete it. If you stop the emails, your account and your essays stay, so you can still read them and start again later. If you delete everything, we remove your account, your answers, your responses, and every essay written for you.

08Cookies and your browser

One cookie: after you use a sign-in or confirmation link, it keeps you signed in for up to 30 days. There are no advertising or analytics cookies. While you answer the questions, your browser keeps your answers in its own storage; “Delete what this browser holds” on the start page clears it.

When you sign up or sign in, the form loads Cloudflare Turnstile’s check from Cloudflare (see 06). It sees your IP address and some details about your browser, to tell a person from a bot. No other page loads anything from outside this site.

09Your choices

  • Download everything we hold about you, as a file, from your account.
  • Change your topics, answers, and thinkers from your account.
  • Stop the emails from your account, or from the page every essay email links to.
  • Delete everything from your account, or from the page every essay email links to.

10Where it is open

System Prompt is not open in the European Union, the EEA, or the United Kingdom yet. We check the country you connect from, and readers there are not served.

11Age

System Prompt is for people 18 or older.

12Changes

If this page changes, the date at the top changes too. If a change affects what we do with your data, we will tell you by email first.

13Contact

You can download, change, stop, or delete everything yourself, from your account or from the page every essay email links to.