Privacy policy
You pay a dollar. Your data isn’t for sale.
Because members pay for Level, there are no advertisers to serve and no reason to collect more than the product needs. Here is exactly what is stored, and why.
The short version
- We store what you give us to run your account: email, handle, profile, posts, photos and videos, audio posts, stories, comments, messages, likes, follows.
- We do not run ads. We do not sell or rent your data, and we do not track you across other companies' apps and websites. Level includes no advertising SDK and no standalone analytics SDK. If you choose Google Sign-In, Google's authentication SDK may process linked account, device, general-location, and usage information for authentication, fraud prevention, and service analytics. Its embedded privacy manifest declares no tracking. Level receives only the sign-in token and basic account claims required to connect the Google identity to your Level account.
- Apple processes iPhone-app payments and Stripe processes web payments. Level never receives your full payment-card or bank-account number.
- Delete your account and we actually forget you, subject to the narrow, honest exceptions described below.
What we store, exactly
Account. Your email address, your handle, display name, bio, avatar, account settings, and — if you sign in with Apple or Google — the identifier those services give us for your account. We never receive your Apple or Google password.
Identity providers. If you choose Apple or Google sign-in, that provider processes the sign-in request under its own privacy obligations. Level receives the provider identifier and basic account claims needed to connect the sign-in to your Level account; we never receive your provider password. Google's current disclosure guidance says its Sign-In SDK may collect a user identifier and an IP address that can estimate general location for fraud prevention. The exact SDK bundled in Level also declares linked, nontracking name, email, phone number, coarse location, user and device identifiers, other data, and usage data for authentication, service functionality, and analytics. Level does not request extra Google scopes or read phone, location, device, or generic usage or other-data fields from the sign-in result.
Content. Posts, photos, videos, audio posts, stories, comments, collections, and direct messages you create, plus the metadata that makes them work (when they were posted, who can see them). Messages are stored so they can be delivered and shown to you and your recipient; they are not end-to-end encrypted, but they are private to the conversation and we do not read them except as required for safety review of a report or by law.
Social graph. Who you follow, follow requests, and anyone you block or mute. Your follow lists and counts are not public by default — that is a product principle, not just a setting.
Activity and product health. Likes, reposts, story views, and read-position markers exist so the product can work (your feed remembers where you were; you can see who liked your post). We also retain a daily account-activity marker and the app version/build last used, then use those records in aggregate to understand whether Level is working, measure daily and weekly active accounts and retention, and plan reliability work. We do not use this information to rank or recommend posts, advertise to you, build a cross-company tracking profile, or create public popularity scores.
Membership state. Whether your Apple or Stripe subscription is active, which provider supplies the membership, when it renews, cancels, or lapses, and a record of those billing events. For a web purchase, we also store the Stripe customer, Checkout, price, and subscription identifiers and the Level account email supplied to Stripe for billing. We use that information to connect Stripe's events to the correct Level account. We use subscription and entitlement records in aggregate to understand membership and billing health. Apple or Stripe processes the payment; Level never receives your full payment-card or bank-account number.
Notifications. If you allow push notifications, we store the app-specific notification token Apple gives this installation, a stable Level installation identifier used to keep notification ownership safe when accounts or tokens change, and your notification preferences.
Safety records. Reports you file or that are filed about content, blocks, and moderation actions.
Technical basics. We process server logs and IP addresses to operate the service, rate-limit requests, prevent abuse, and debug failures. Most request logs and rate-limit counters expire on bounded operational schedules. For email sign-in challenges, we retain a one-way hash of the request IP and a bounded browser/app identification string with the challenge record for security and abuse prevention. We also retain the account-linked app version/build and daily activity marker described above. We do not turn IP addresses into location profiles; we do not collect your contacts, your precise location, or your photo library (you choose individual photos when you post).
What we do with it
Run the product. Specifically: authenticate and sync your account, deliver your posts and messages, deliver notifications you asked for, process your membership through Apple or Stripe, answer support email, keep the service reliable, measure aggregate product, membership, and billing health, prevent abuse, and enforce the community rules. There is no advertising use, no profiling for marketing, no sale or rental of personal data, no cross-company tracking, and no “sharing with partners” in the way that phrase usually means.
Who touches the data (our infrastructure)
Level runs on rented infrastructure, like nearly every internet service. These companies process data on our behalf, under their own security and privacy obligations, only to provide their service to us:
- Apple — subscription billing, push notification delivery, Sign in with Apple.
- Stripe — web subscription billing, payment processing, and the secure customer billing portal if you choose to purchase membership on the web.
- Google — Sign in with Google only if you choose it; Google processes the authentication and related security and service data described above.
- Railway — application hosting.
- Neon — database hosting.
- Upstash — short-lived counters and queues (Redis).
- Cloudflare — photo and video storage, video streaming.
- Resend — transactional email (sign-in codes, account notices).
We share data beyond this only if the law genuinely requires it, or if it is necessary to investigate serious abuse or protect someone's safety. If Level were ever acquired or wound down, this policy's promises would bind whatever happens to the data, and you would be notified first.
Deleting your account
Settings > Delete account. It is irreversible: profile, posts, stories, comments, likes, follows, messages you received, and your stored media records are erased from Level, with provider media cleanup allowed to finish shortly afterward.
The honest fine print:
- Messages you sent stay in the recipient's inbox with your identity removed — like a letter, a delivered message belongs to its recipient.
- Comment placeholders: if other people replied under your comment, the comment's text is erased and an anonymous placeholder keeps their replies readable.
- 30-day handle quarantine: we keep your old handle and a one-way cryptographic fingerprint of your email (not the email itself) for 30 days, so nobody can grab your name and impersonate you the day after you leave, and so rapid delete-and-return abuse is detectable. After 30 days this record erases itself.
- Backups and logs age out on their own schedules within a bounded window rather than being individually edited — this is standard and short-lived.
We send transactional email only: sign-in codes, account notices (like deletion confirmation), and replies to your support requests. No marketing lists, no newsletters you did not ask for.
Children
Level is not for children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect data from them. If we learn an account belongs to someone under 13, we delete it.
Your rights
Depending on where you live (for example California or the EU), you may have formal rights to access, correct, export, or delete your data. Level's answer is the same everywhere: your data is visible in the product, your account is yours to delete in Settings, and for anything else — including a copy of your data — email support@thelevelnetwork.com and a human will handle it. We do not discriminate against accounts that exercise privacy rights, and we do not "sell" or "share" personal information as those terms are defined in the California Consumer Privacy Act.
Changes
If this policy changes in a way that matters, we will tell you in the app or by email before the change takes effect — not after.
Contact
Operator: Fate Jacobson, Reno, Nevada, USA.