Privacy Policy
This policy explains what data Telescope ("we", "us") collects, why, and what your rights are. The short version: we collect what is needed to run a publishing platform and nothing more — no advertising, no tracking cookies, no selling of data. All data is stored in the European Union.
1. Data we collect about you (account holders)
- Account data: e-mail address, login, and a password (stored only as a bcrypt hash).
- Your content: the spaces, publications, drafts, and files you create.
- Billing status: your plan and subscription state. Payment details (card numbers, billing address) are handled entirely by Paddle, our merchant of record — we never see or store them.
- Support communication: e-mails you send us.
2. Data we collect about blog readers
Reader analytics is cookieless and contains no personal identifiers:
- Page views are counted with a visitor identifier that is a one-way hash of the date, IP address, browser signature, and the blog being visited. The identifier rotates every day and cannot be traced back to an IP address. The IP address itself is not stored.
- Per view we store: the page visited, the country (derived from the IP address at request time), the referrer website, and the device/browser class.
- Readers who subscribe to a blog provide their e-mail address (or connect via Telegram), confirmed by double opt-in. Subscriber lists belong to the respective blog; every e-mail contains an unsubscribe link.
Reading a blog on Telescope requires no cookies. A session cookie is set only when you log in to an account — it is strictly necessary for authentication, which is why there is no cookie banner.
3. What we use data for
- operating the Service (accounts, publishing, subscriber delivery, billing status);
- showing blog owners aggregate statistics about their own blogs;
- protecting the platform from abuse (rate limiting, bot protection, spam prevention);
- sending transactional e-mail (confirmations, password resets) and — with a working unsubscribe — occasional product news you can opt out of at any time.
We do not profile you, do not show ads, and never sell or share data for marketing.
4. Service providers (processors)
- Paddle — merchant of record for paid plans (checkout, invoices, taxes).
- Resend — sending transactional and subscription e-mail.
- Cloudflare Turnstile — bot protection on sign-up (when enabled, Cloudflare processes the request as described in their privacy policy).
- Sentry (EU region) — error diagnostics, so we can fix crashes; reports may include technical request context.
- Hosting in the European Union — all databases and uploaded files are stored on EU infrastructure.
5. Retention and deletion
- Account data and content are kept for as long as your account exists.
- Deleting your account permanently erases your data — spaces, publications, drafts, files, and API keys — from our systems.
- Blog subscriptions that are never confirmed are periodically pruned.
- Technical logs are short-lived and rotate automatically.
6. Your rights
Under the GDPR you can access, rectify, export, and erase your data, restrict or object to processing, and lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority. Most of it you can do yourself: edit your profile, export any space as a JSON backup, delete content or your whole account in the settings. For anything else, write to support@telescope.ac — we answer data requests within 30 days.
7. Changes to this policy
If we change what we collect or how we use it, we will update this page and announce material changes on the platform or by e-mail.
8. Contact
Privacy questions and data requests: support@telescope.ac.