This policy describes what Telephone collects, why, and how it’s handled. Telephone is a small experimental project—not a social network, not a data broker. Last updated August 16, 2026.
When you participate, we may store: a display name you choose; the text you type when passing a message; coarse location derived from your request (city, region, and country—never GPS); an optional phone number if you ask to be texted about your turn; a device-local token in your browser to enforce once-per-day limits and streaks; and technical logs needed to run the service (timestamps, queue state, error reports).
We use this information to run the queue, deliver and archive messages, show the public journey map and weekly reveal, send transactional SMS when you opt in, enforce participation limits, moderate content, and keep the site reliable. We don’t sell your data or use it for advertising.
Location is inferred from your connection (for example, IP-based geolocation from our host). We don’t ask for precise device location and we don’t prompt for location permission in your browser.
If you provide a phone number, it’s used only to notify you about an approaching or active turn. It isn’t a login, isn’t shown to other participants, and isn’t used for marketing.
Once-per-day limits and streak counts rely on a token stored in your browser. Clearing site data or switching devices resets those counters unless you restore from an optional backup code you saved yourself.
Telephone runs on third-party infrastructure, including hosting (Vercel), database and realtime services (Supabase), voice synthesis (ElevenLabs), language models for moderation and translation (Anthropic), SMS delivery (Twilio when enabled), and map rendering (Mapbox when enabled). Those providers process data on our behalf to deliver the service.
Completed cycles are published in the archive: message text, display names attached to passes, coarse locations, route visualizations, and journey statistics. Don’t participate with a display name or message you aren’t comfortable seeing preserved publicly.
Archived journeys are kept for the life of the project so others can browse past cycles. Operational logs are retained only as long as needed for security and debugging.
We may update this policy as the experiment evolves. The date at the top will change when we do.
Questions about privacy? Email telephone@bysam.fun.