foolscap back to the front
Your book is yours, nobody here reads it, and you can take all of it away or delete yourself at any moment. The rest is detail.
Foolscap is run by one person, not a company. The data controller is David Draguta, reachable at atugard@proton.me. Write about anything on this page and you will get a person, usually the same day.
| What | Why | How long |
|---|---|---|
| Your email address and the name on your account | So you can sign in, and so you can be told if something breaks | Until you delete your account |
| Your password, as a salted scrypt hash | To check it without ever being able to read it | Until you delete your account |
| A session cookie — a random string, nothing about you in it | So you stay signed in | A year, or until you sign out |
| What you write | So your books are there on your phone as well as your laptop | Until you delete them, or your account |
| Which features you used: a time, your name, one word from a fixed list (opened, dictated, asked, respeak, heard, read, exported, stuck), and a number — seconds of speech, or a count | To find out which parts are worth keeping, and to see when something failed in front of somebody | 400 days, then deleted automatically |
| Anything you type into “Something wrong? Tell me” | Because you chose to say it | 400 days |
| A daily count of tokens spent on your instructions | To cap what any one person can run up in a day | Reset every day |
There is no advertising, no tracking pixel, no Google Analytics, no third-party script of any kind on the writing page. Nothing is sold or shared for marketing, ever. There is no profiling and no automated decision-making about you.
No record of what you wrote is kept in the usage records. The list above is the whole list — a row says “dictated, 94 seconds”, never a word of the sentence. The person who runs Foolscap does not read your drafts, and nothing in the dashboard shows them.
Foolscap does not transcribe speech, answer a question, send email or take a payment by itself. Five companies do that work. Two of them handle your words, and the one that handles your money never sees them.
| Who | What they get | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Hetzner Online GmbH | They rent the machine everything runs on. They do not use any of it. | Germany |
| AssemblyAI, Inc. | The sound of your voice while you dictate, so it can come back as words. Not your account or your email. | United States |
| Stripe Payments Europe, Ltd. | Your email address and your card, if you pay for something. The card details are typed on Stripe’s own page and never reach this machine, which has never seen a card number and is not built to. Nothing you have written is sent to them, ever. | Ireland |
| Resend, Inc. | Your email address, and the words of any message sent to you — a way in when you have forgotten your password, or a notice that something here has changed. Never your writing. | United States |
| Anthropic PBC | When you ask Tiro to do something: your instruction, an outline of the draft, and any passage he reads. While you dictate, each finished sentence, to have the punctuation put in. Not your account or your email. | United States |
Three of those are in the United States, so those are transfers outside the EU, made under the standard contractual clauses in each company’s data processing terms. They are engaged as processors: none may use your words to train anything, and each keeps them only as long as the request takes.
Stripe is the exception, and not because of where they are. They are the seller of record for anything you buy here, which means they are not acting on our instructions when they handle your payment — they decide for themselves what to keep and for how long, as the law about keeping financial records requires. For that part they answer to you directly, under their own privacy policy. What reaches this machine afterwards is only that somebody paid, and which plan it was for.
Fewer is better, and the number is meant to go down. The punctuation pass can be switched off for your account if you would rather have plainer full stops and one company fewer; just ask. Running the transcription on our own machine, so the audio never leaves it, is the next thing being built.
Storing your writing, transcribing your speech and answering your instructions are the service you asked for, so the lawful basis is performance of a contract (Article 6(1)(b) GDPR). Keeping the count of which features were used rests on a legitimate interest in knowing whether the thing works (Article 6(1)(f)); it holds no content, and you can ask for yours to be removed and still use everything.
Everything travels over HTTPS. Passwords are salted and hashed with scrypt and cannot be read back, by anybody. The session cookie is HttpOnly, so no script on the page can read it. Five wrong passwords lock an address for ten minutes. The database is backed up daily. There has been no breach; if there ever is one, you will be told what happened without being asked.
Foolscap is not for under-16s and no account should be made for one.
It will say so here, and anything that changes who sees your words will be emailed to you before it takes effect, not after.
Last changed 23 October 2026.