Privacy policy

1. Who we are

Leyden & Beam is a writing application and its website: leydenandbeam.com, and the application at app.leydenandbeam.com. It is run by KRDL Solutions, in Virginia, in the United States ("we", "us"). We decide what the service collects and how it is used. The service is offered in the United States.

2. Information we collect

Your account. Your email address; the name you choose to show; your writing level, which sets the words the application uses; an ORCID iD if you give one; whether you have said you teach; and, if you ask for a free instructor account, the school and the subject you name, and our answer.

Signing in. There are no passwords. You sign in with a six-digit code sent to your email address. We keep a code only as a one-way hash, and delete it a day after it was made. A signed-in session is kept on our server with the time it began, and, while it lasts, the network address and browser it came from. When the session ends we erase the address and the browser. We keep the date it began, which is how a campus license counts its seats.

Your plan. Which plan you are on, its dates, how many seats you bought, and the identifiers Stripe gives your customer record and subscription. If you ask for a student plan, we record whether your school address was verified, its domain and, if you asked for a review, the school you named. We never ask for a student card or any document.

What you write and keep. Your projects: the cards, their order, links, notes, versions, comments and suggestions, and the event log that your record of work is built from. The attachments you add to cards and the files you keep in Your files, with their names, types, sizes and a fingerprint of their contents. If you connect Zotero, your Zotero user number and API key; the key is encrypted before it is stored.

What you share. Share links you make, with how many times each was opened and when last. Decks you publish. The name an advisor types when they comment through a link you gave them.

Courses, campuses and shops. The courses you teach or join, the assignments in them, and the confirmations and notes students send. For a campus license, the school's name, its email domains, its seats, its term and its contacts. For an editor's or a publication's shop, its staff, engagements, passes, queries and referrals.

Server logs. Like any web server, ours writes a line for each request it answers, with the network address it came from. Share-link tokens and email addresses are taken out of these lines before they are written. Our host keeps these logs for a limited time; we do not copy them anywhere else.

3. Information we never collect

• No password. There is none to collect, store or leak.
• No card number. Payments are entered on Stripe's page and never reach our servers.
• No analytics, advertising or tracking. No analytics script, advertising tag, tracking pixel or third-party script runs on the website or in the application. Our pages may load only our own scripts.
• No location, contacts or microphone. The application does not ask for your location or your contacts. A voice memo is recorded only when you press record, and it goes only to your project.
• Nothing for artificial intelligence. Nothing you write is sent to a language model or any other model, and nothing is used to train one. The application contains none. Our pledge says how to check this for yourself.

4. How we use information

We use what we collect only to run the service for you:

• to sign you in and keep you signed in;
• to keep your projects on your devices and in step between them, and with the people you invite;
• to apply your plan, check student eligibility, and bill you through Stripe;
• to send you the email the service needs: sign-in codes, invitations you or others send, notices about your plan and your attachments, and messages about deleting your account;
• to look up a citation when you ask for one, and to sync with Zotero when you connect it;
• to keep the service working and secure: to limit repeated sign-in attempts, to find faults, and to restore from a backup;
• to answer you when you write to us.

We do not use what you write for anything else. We do not read it, except to fix a problem you ask us to fix, or where the law requires it. We do not build profiles of you, and we do not sell, rent or trade information about you.

5. Where your work is stored

On your device. Every project you open is kept whole in your browser: its cards, its order, the attachments you have opened, and the event log. Writing, checking and exporting need no server. If you choose a folder for automatic backups, the application writes a copy of each project there and keeps the last seven. When you sign out you choose whether this device keeps your work or clears it.

On our servers. The same projects are kept in a database at Railway, our host, in the eastern United States, so that a second device can open them and the people you invite can join you. Attachments and files are stored in Cloudflare's object storage.

Backups. Every night the whole database is copied to Cloudflare's object storage. We keep the last thirty nightly copies and the copy from the first of each month for a year. Each attachment and file also has a second copy, kept thirty days after the file itself is deleted, so that a mistake can be undone.

Secure Works. A sealed project is encrypted on the devices of the people in it, under keys only they, and the escrow they chose, hold. Our servers store it only as ciphertext, on a separate service with its own database, storage and backups, and cannot read it. The main service keeps only the project's name, who is in it, and that it is sealed. Backups made before a project was sealed still hold it as it was then, until they age out.

6. Payments

Payments are made through Stripe. When you choose a plan you go to Stripe's checkout page, where you enter your card. We send Stripe your email address, your account's identifier and which plan you chose. Stripe sends back whether payment succeeded and the identifiers of your customer record and subscription, which we keep. Stripe calculates sales tax where it applies. Changing your card, viewing invoices and canceling happen in Stripe's customer portal, reached from Your account. Stripe's own privacy policy covers what Stripe does with your payment details.

7. Email

We send email through Resend. Each message goes to the address it is for, and Resend handles it to deliver it. We send only what the service needs: sign-in codes; invitations, which carry the inviting person's name and the project's title; notices about your plan, your trial and your attachments; and messages when you ask to delete your account and when it is done. We send no newsletters and no marketing. Mail you send to contact@leydenbeam.com reaches us through Cloudflare's email routing.

8. Cookies and similar technologies

The application sets one cookie, and only when you sign in. It holds your session. It is marked httpOnly, so no script on the page can read it, and SameSite=Lax, so your browser will not send it with requests from other sites. It lasts thirty days, or until you sign out. It is strictly necessary to keep you signed in, which is why you are not asked to accept cookies. The website sets no cookies.

The application also keeps your work in your browser's own storage (IndexedDB, local storage and the origin's private file system), as described above. That storage stays on your device; it is not a tracking technology and nothing reads it but the application.

9. Sharing and disclosure

We do not sell or share personal information for advertising. Others receive information only in these ways:

People you choose. The people you invite to a project see the whole project, its history, comments and suggestions, as their role allows. A share link shows what you chose to show to anyone who has its address, but never your record of work, versions, or who wrote what. An editor on an engagement reads only what you attached to it. If you write for a publication's shop, its projects belong to the shop, and its managing editors and staff see them as the shop's own.

Your instructor and your school. An instructor sees the courses they teach, how many have joined, and, for each assignment, the names, email addresses, times and notes of the students who confirmed it. An instructor never sees your projects, your writing or your record of work unless you hand them over. A school with a campus license sees counts only: seats in use, accounts waiting for a seat, instructors, and sign-ins by month.

The services that run Leyden & Beam. Each handles only what its job needs:

• Railway hosts the application and its databases.
• Cloudflare is our network. All traffic between your device and our servers passes through it, so it sees the connection your browser makes. It also stores the attachments, files and backups, serves the website, and routes our incoming email.
• Stripe processes payments.
• Resend delivers email.

Lookups you ask for. When you look up a citation, what you typed goes to the service that answers it: an identifier to Crossref, Open Library, Google Books, PubMed or arXiv; a reference pasted as rough text to OpenAlex; an author's name to the Library of Congress. When you connect Zotero, your bibliographic entries go to and from Zotero under your key. Each happens only when you do it.

When the law requires it. We disclose information when the law requires it. If we are compelled to, we will tell you first unless we are prohibited from doing so. If the business is ever sold, this policy goes with it, and you will be told before anything changes.

10. Data retention and deletion

• Your account and projects are kept while your account exists, including after a plan ends: you can always read and export what you wrote.
• When a plan ends, everything keeps working for fourteen days. After that the account reads and exports but does not write. The contents of attachments are deleted 120 days after the plan lapsed, with emails at thirty days and at seven days before; their names stay on the cards, and the cards and writing stay.
• Deleting a project takes it off your list and stops it syncing; it can be restored. Deleting your account is what deletes it.
• A file you remove from Your files is deleted from storage within minutes; its second copy, thirty days later.
• Sign-in details: a session's network address and browser are erased when it ends; a sign-in code is deleted a day after it was made.
• Deleting your account. On Your account, Delete this account asks you to type your address. Thirty days later the account is erased: every project it owns with everything in it, your files, your plan, your courses, your shop, your published decks and your sign-in records. In projects other people own, the work you did stays with them, without your name; suggestions you had not had answered are removed. Until the day, Keep my account takes the request back. A plan that renews by card has to be canceled first, so that you are not charged for an account that no longer exists.
• Backups are not rewritten. An erased account leaves the nightly backups as they age out: the last monthly copy holding it is gone a year after the erasure. The second copies of its files go thirty days after the files.
• Records we must keep. Stripe keeps payment records as the law requires. We keep a log of what our administrators change, such as a plan granted or an account closed, with the account's address, so that every change can be accounted for.

11. Your rights and choices

Wherever you live, you can:

• see and take your work: the full archive exports everything in a project, in open formats, at any time, on any plan or none;
• correct your name and other details on Your account, or ask us to;
• delete your account, as described above;
• ask what we hold about you, or for a copy of your account's details, by writing to us from your account's address. We answer within thirty days.

If you live in California, the California Consumer Privacy Act gives you the right to know what personal information we collect and why, to delete it, to correct it, and to opt out of its sale or sharing. We do not sell personal information or share it for cross-context behavioral advertising, and have not in the past twelve months, including for anyone under sixteen. There is nothing to opt out of. Using any of these rights will never get you worse service.

If you live in another state with a privacy law, you have the rights it gives you, and we honor the same requests in the same way.

12. Security

• Every connection is encrypted. The session cookie cannot be read by scripts and is not sent by other sites.
• There are no passwords to steal; sign-in codes are stored only as hashes, expire after ten minutes and allow five tries.
• Repeated sign-in attempts from one address or for one email are slowed down.
• Your Zotero key is encrypted before it is stored. Sealed projects are encrypted on your devices and cannot be read by us.
• Every upload is checked as it arrives and stored under its own name, and is never overwritten.
• There is no screen in the application that shows an administrator your writing. The people who run the service can reach the database to keep it running; they do not look at your work except as this policy says.
• Our hosts encrypt stored data and backups.

No system is perfect. If you find a security problem, please write to us. If a breach affects your information, we will tell you as the law requires.

13. Children

Leyden & Beam is not for children under thirteen, and we do not knowingly collect information from anyone under thirteen. Students from thirteen to seventeen may use it with a parent's or guardian's permission. If you believe a child under thirteen has given us information, write to us and we will delete it.

14. Changes to this policy

When this policy changes, the date at the top changes with it. If a change affects you materially, we will email account holders before it takes effect. We will never apply a change that loosens these protections to what you wrote before it without asking you.

15. Contact us

Leyden & Beam
contact@leydenbeam.com