Privacy Notice
Effective: 5 September 2026
Do not post names, contact details, precise addresses, medical records, passwords, or anything that could identify you or another person.
What the browser stores
UNKNOWN uses browser storage for your chosen alias, preferences, locally saved beacons, notifications, cooldowns, hidden content and blocked aliases. You can remove this local information by clearing this site's browser data.
A necessary, signed session cookie identifies this browser to the relay without registration. In production it is HttpOnly, Secure and SameSite=Strict, expires after 30 days and is renewed when the browser reconnects. It is used for ownership checks and traffic limits, not advertising. Clearing or losing this cookie prevents you from managing posts created with it. Aliases are not verified identities.
What becomes public
When you publish or enter a public room, your text, chosen alias, approximate city location, reactions and timestamps pass through Cloudflare and the site's relay and may be displayed to other visitors. Public posts and rooms are not end-to-end encrypted. HTTPS protects transport; the relay operator can access stored content. Recipients can retain copies.
Sealed bottles hide their text from public listings. The author can preview a bottle, and the first other session to claim it receives its text; the relay then removes the bottle. This cannot prevent that recipient from copying or sharing the text. An interrupted connection after claiming can lose delivery. Private one-to-one messaging is not currently available.
Location
The publishing interface reduces selected coordinates to approximate city-level precision before sending them. UNKNOWN does not need your device's GPS permission.
Translation
Embedded translations are shown locally. If no embedded translation exists, UNKNOWN asks before sending the selected text to an external translation provider. That provider may receive the text and ordinary network metadata under its own terms. You may decline and keep the original text.
Feedback and suggestions
The current interface sends the suggestion text only. The server adds a generated identifier and submission time; compatible clients may also supply optional alias, city, country and flag fields. Suggestions are kept in the private relay administration store and are not shown on the public map. Do not put personal, medical or contact information in feedback.
Local controls
“Hide locally” and “Block this soul” affect only this browser. They do not send a report, alert an operator, or ask anyone to review the content.
Infrastructure
Hosting, relay and network providers may process IP addresses, security logs and request metadata to deliver and protect the service. UNKNOWN does not promise absolute anonymity.
Retention and control
Public map posts last 7 days; each confirmed reaction or comment adds 48 hours, capped at 14 days from creation, sky lanterns for up to 48 hours, and public room history for up to 24 hours. The running relay removes expired entries every 30 seconds and during writes. An offline relay, failed storage writes and restricted backups can retain them longer. Simulation does not extend visitor posts. Connected-session counts deduplicate tabs using the anonymous session cookie; they do not identify or verify people. Suggestions are bounded to 500 entries. Browser copies remain until cleared or expired. Deleting your post requires the original session and removes it from the active relay; deletion identifiers remain for 14 days to prevent replay. Recipient copies, backups and infrastructure logs are separate and cannot be erased by a browser action.
Security
No internet service is risk-free. UNKNOWN limits input sizes, validates network messages and applies browser security controls, but you should still treat anything you publish as public.
Unmonitored network
UNKNOWN has no verified identities and no operator reviewing conversations. Participants choose what they publish and what they hide locally. Technical security systems may limit abusive traffic, but they do not judge the meaning of conversations.