trothos

Legal

Privacy Policy

Last updated July 2026

trothos is built on restraint. We collect as little as the service needs to work, we don't sell your data, and we don't run ad trackers. This page explains what we collect, why, and what your rights are.

1. Information we collect

Directly from you:

  • Your email address, to sign you in and to send verification requests you initiate.
  • The facts you record (what you did, what you made, and the outcome, plus optional company/period context).
  • The email addresses of witnesses you name, and any optional note you add for them.
  • Your display name and handle, if you set one.
  • Optional profile details you choose to add: location, organization, position, birth date, phone number, and a separate contact email. Every one of these is opt-in and defaults to private; each has its own toggle deciding whether it appears on your public ledger.
  • If you use search: which fields you searched by, logged against your account so the person you searched for can see it (a trothos Max feature, described in section 2 below).
  • If you use a watchlist (a trothos Max feature): who you've added. This is private and one-way, used only to notify you when someone you're watching verifies a new fact.

Automatically:

  • A session cookie, so the service knows you're signed in (see our Cookies Policy).
  • If you consent on the cookie banner, aggregate, anonymized analytics about how the site is used. This never loads before consent.
  • Standard technical logs (such as IP address, timestamps, and request paths) kept briefly for security and reliability, not for profiling.

2. What is public

Your ledger, meaning your display name, handle, and verified facts, is public at your trothos.com URL by design; that's the point of the product. A witness's email address is never shown publicly, only a masked form (e.g. j***@gmail.com) or, for peer verifications, their trothos handle. Disputed facts are hidden from your public ledger, and so is any fact you've chosen to hide yourself, whether or not it's been verified. Any reason a witness gives for a dispute or retraction is shown only to you, the ledger owner. The optional profile details described above are shown publicly only for the specific fields you've turned on; everything else about your account stays private. Fields you've made public, along with your name, handle, and verified fact count, can be found by other signed-in users through search. Search activity and watchlist entries are never public: a trothos Max subscriber can see who searched for them and what they searched by, and can privately watch specific people, but none of this is ever visible to anyone else, including the person being searched for or watched.

3. How we use it

We use the information above only to:

  • Authenticate you and maintain your session.
  • Dispatch the witness requests and resolution notices you trigger.
  • Display your public ledger and your private dashboard.
  • Enforce the handle and content rules in our Terms & Conditions.
  • Understand aggregate site usage, only if you've consented to analytics.

We do not use your data for advertising, we do not build behavioral profiles, and we do not sell or rent your data to anyone.

4. Who else sees it

We rely on a small number of trusted service providers to run trothos, for things like sending email, storing data securely, and hosting the application. Each is contractually permitted to use your data only to provide that service to us, never for their own independent purposes, and none of them are permitted to sell your data or use it for advertising. We don't use any advertising or data-broker services of any kind.

5. Email

We send transactional email only: sign-in links, witness requests, and resolution notices. Witnesses are emailed once per request (plus a limited number of resends if the owner triggers them), and are never added to a mailing list or contacted again unless they're named as a witness again. We do not send marketing email.

6. Data retention & deletion

You can reset your ledger or delete your account at any time from your dashboard, which permanently removes your facts, verifications, and account record. One exception: if you delete your account, your handle is retained internally on a retired-handles list, with no other personal data attached to it, solely so it can never be reclaimed by someone else to impersonate you on an old witness link. If you witnessed a fact on someone else's ledger and later delete your own account, that verification remains on their ledger; it is automatically re-labeled to reflect that it was made by an email address or company domain rather than a linked trothos account.

7. Children's privacy

trothos is not directed at children, and our Terms & Conditions require you to be at least 16 to create an account. We do not knowingly collect information from anyone under that age; if we learn we have, we'll delete it.

8. International users

Our service providers operate primarily in the United States. If you use trothos from outside the US, your information will be transferred to and processed in the US, which may have different data protection laws than your own country.

9. Your rights & choices

You can reset your ledger or delete your account at any time from your dashboard. To decline analytics, choose “Reject” on the cookie banner. For a copy of your data, a correction, or any other data request not covered by the dashboard's existing controls, email us and we'll respond promptly.

10. Security

We use reasonable technical and organizational measures to protect your information. No method of transmission or storage is perfectly secure, and we can't guarantee absolute security.

11. Changes to this policy

If we make a material change to this policy, we'll update the date at the top of this page. Continued use of trothos after a change means you accept it.

12. Contact

Privacy questions or data requests: hello@trothos.com.