The Ember List (“we”, “us”) operates theemberlist.com, a personalized Bay Area events digest. This policy explains what we collect, why, and your choices. Questions: privacy@theemberlist.com.
Information we collect
- Account information you provide or that your sign-in provider shares: your email address, name, and (if you sign in with Google) your Google profile name and picture.
- Preferences you set: your home and watched cities, age groups, interests, saved/watched events, and email + schedule settings.
- Usage information created as you use the service: events you click, thumbs/ratings and any comments you leave, onboarding and sign-up steps, and days you’re active. Some of this includes your browser’s User-Agent string.
- Email engagement: whether our emails are delivered, opened, and which links are clicked.
- Analytics: we use Plausible Analytics, which is privacy-friendly and does not use cookies or collect personal profiles. In addition, certain server-side events (sign-in, clicks on links in our emails) are forwarded to Plausible with IP address and User-Agent so they can be counted; Plausible derives an anonymous daily identifier and doesn’t store the raw values, and neither do we.
- Cookies: a login session cookie (required to stay signed in), city/age/day filter preference cookies, and cookies that measure sign-up/onboarding and support A/B experiments. See “Cookies” below.
How we use it
To create and send your personalized digest; to operate and secure your account; to measure and improve the product and our sign-up funnel; and to communicate with you about the service.
How we share it
We don’t sell your personal information. We share data only with service providers that help us run the product, under contract:
- Google — sign-in (OAuth).
- Resend — email delivery.
- Neon — database hosting.
- Google Cloud — application hosting.
- Plausible — cookieless analytics.
- Sentry (Functional Software, Inc.) — error monitoring; on errors it captures diagnostic data about your session.
- OpenRouter, Groq, DeepInfra — event scoring models. These receive the text of candidate events and a summarized description of your interests to rank events; they do not receive your name, email, or account identifiers.
We may also disclose information if required by law.
Cookies
| Cookie | Purpose | Category |
|---|---|---|
__Secure-authjs.session-token | Keeps you signed in | Strictly necessary |
el_cities | Remembers your city filter | Functional |
el_ages | Remembers your age filter | Functional |
el_days | Remembers your day filter | Functional |
sv_onboarding_session | Measures sign-up funnel | Analytics |
el_signup_src | Attributes where sign-ups come from | Analytics |
el_exp_anonfeed | Runs homepage experiments | Analytics |
Your choices and rights
- Email: unsubscribe from the digest any time via the link in every email, or in Settings → Notifications.
- Access / correction: view and edit your preferences in Settings.
- Deletion: email privacy@theemberlist.com to delete your account and associated data.
- Depending on where you live (e.g. California/CCPA, EEA/UK GDPR), you may have additional rights to access, delete, or restrict processing; contact us to exercise them. We do not sell or “share” personal information for cross-context behavioral advertising.
Retention
We keep account and preference data while your account is active and delete it on request. Behavioral logs are retained only as long as needed to operate and improve the service.
Security
Data is stored with reputable cloud providers; sessions use secure, HttpOnly cookies. No method is perfectly secure.
Children
The service is not directed to children under 13, and we don’t knowingly collect their data.
Changes
We’ll update this page and revise the “Last updated” date when this policy changes.
Contact
privacy@theemberlist.com
Smarter Town, LLC
2010 El Camino Real #2466, Santa Clara, CA 95050