Privacy

We know very little about you

We never ask for your email address, phone number, or real name: an account is just a username and a password. Your password and recovery code are stored only as one-way hashes, so nobody — including us — can read them. Your username is visible to other signed-in members, so they can find you when sending Gratitoonies.

Emailed cheques

When you email someone a cheque, the email goes from your own email account. Their address never touches this site. We store only a one-way hash of the cheque’s code, so we can’t read the link either; anyone who has the link can claim it, so send it only to the person it’s for. When someone joins with a cheque, we record who sent it.

Your expressions are private by default

Only you can read what you write here. Nobody else using Gratitoonie is ever shown your text, and assessment explanations never reveal other people’s expressions.

How your words are assessed

To assess an expression, its text is sent to OpenAI’s API, along with up to a few similar expressions already accepted (from anyone) so the model can judge novelty. Only the words are sent — never your username or account. Under OpenAI’s API terms, this data isn’t used to train their models, but it may be kept by OpenAI for a limited time (for abuse monitoring) before deletion. If that isn’t acceptable to you, please don’t submit anything you wouldn’t want to leave this site.

Exact copies and very close rewordings of earlier expressions are recognized on our own server and never sent anywhere.

Protecting other people

Expressions often mention other people, so each one is also checked for damaging claims about someone and for someone else’s private details (such as their health or contact information). Ones that seem to include them aren’t accepted, so they’re never published. If you see a shared expression that crosses the line, use its Report link. It’s hidden everywhere straight away (including in other members’ wallets), until we review it and either restore or remove it. Reports are anonymous; we keep only the reason and any note you add.

Publishing is your choice

You may choose to publish an accepted expression. Its text then appears on its public record page and in the shared gratitude feed, alongside your username. Anything public can be copied, cached, or indexed by others. You can make it private again, which removes it from this site, but that cannot recall copies made while it was public.

The ledger

Gratitoonies are recorded in a ledger kept by this site — not on a public blockchain. It records which accounts earned or sent Gratitoonies and gratitude records, but never the words of your expressions. Each entry is hash-chained to the one before it, so past entries can’t be quietly altered.

Anyone can download the ledger to check it. The download shows each entry’s kind, amount, record number, and time, but accounts appear only as fingerprints that differ in every entry, so it doesn’t reveal who earned, sent, or received anything. One small exception: if you publish an expression, its record number is public, so the download shows when that record later changed hands (but not to whom).

What we keep

• Your username, password hash, and recovery-code hash.
• Your expressions, their assessments, and a numeric representation used for similarity (computed on our own server).
• Ledger entries for what you earn, send, and receive.
• Cheques you write (amount, status, and who claimed them), and who invited you, if anyone.

Logs record identifiers and decisions, never the text of your expressions.

No recovery without your code

Because we hold no contact details, we can’t verify who you are. If you lose both your password and your recovery code, the account can’t be recovered.

Deleting your account

You can delete your account yourself, any time, from the Account page. That erases the words of everything you wrote and makes the account unusable. The ledger keeps its history (amounts and dates) under an anonymous placeholder, because removing entries would break its hash chain. Backups taken before you deleted it are kept for up to two weeks and then discarded.

Messages you send us

Messages sent from Report an issue are stored with their topic and the time they were sent, and read only by the person who runs the site. If you’re signed in, your username is attached only if you choose to include it. There’s no email, so we can’t reply.

Who runs this

Gratitoonie is a personal, non-commercial project, run by one person on a single rented server. Whoever runs the server can technically read what’s stored on it, including private expressions; we only look when we must (for example, to review a flagged submission). Nothing is sold, shared, or used for advertising.