Privacy Policy

The End Effector (“we,” “us,” or “our”) respects your privacy. This policy explains how we collect, use, and protect information when you use our website at endeff.com and related services.

Information We Collect

We collect information you provide directly, such as your email address when you subscribe to Telemetry or create a membership account, your phone number if you opt in to SMS messages through TEE Conduit, and your shipping address if you order merchandise. We also collect standard usage data through analytics (Vercel Analytics) to understand how visitors use the site.

How We Use Your Information

We use your information to deliver the services you request — sending newsletters, providing access to content, and processing membership transactions. We do not sell your personal information to third parties.

SMS & Mobile Information

If you opt in to receive SMS messages through our community platform (TEE Conduit at conduit.endeff.com/subscribe), we collect your phone number and use it solely to send you messages about research updates, events, and community engagement.

• No sharing: Your mobile phone number and any information collected as part of SMS opt-in will not be sold, rented, or shared with any third parties for their promotional or marketing purposes. We do not share mobile information with third parties/affiliates for marketing/promotional purposes.
• Frequency: Message frequency varies; approximately 2–4 messages per month.
• Rates: Message and data rates may apply. Check with your wireless carrier for details about your messaging plan.
• Opt-out: You may opt out at any time by replying STOP to any message. You will receive a confirmation and no further messages will be sent.
• Help: Reply HELP to any message for assistance, or email hello@endeff.com.
• Consent: Consent to receive SMS messages is not a condition of any purchase or membership.

Payment Information

When you purchase a membership, payment is processed by Stripe. We do not store your credit card details. Stripe’s privacy policy governs payment data handling. We receive your name, email, and subscription status from Stripe to manage your membership.

Authentication & Account Security

Account authentication is provided by Clerk, which is SOC 2 Type II certified. Clerk stores your email, name, and session data. We store your membership tier in Clerk’s public metadata to control content access.

Calendar Preferences (Downrange)

If you use Downrange, we store your professional preferences (role, sectors of interest, urgency preferences) in our database to personalize your event feed. Calendar feed URLs contain access tokens. Treat them like passwords: anyone with the URL can access your personalized feed.

Your Effector ID Profile

When you earn a credential, we store your name, the credential details, and a cryptographic signature at id.endeff.com. Your public profile at id.endeff.com/u/<username> shows your name, username, membership tier, member-since date, profile photo, and the credentials you have chosen to publish. Badge, embed, and QR endpoints render the same information. You control per-credential visibility in your member settings. Your email address is never shown publicly.

Profile photos are stored on Vercel Blob and their file URLs are public — anyone holding a URL can fetch the image. Uploaded photos are screened automatically for prohibited content by Anthropic’s Claude before they go live.

Merchandise Orders

Cross & Check at store.endeff.com is ours. When you order, we collect your name, email address, and shipping address, and we keep the order record in our database. Stripe processes the payment. We give the shipping address to the carrier so it can deliver. We keep order records for tax and accounting.

Who Else Handles Your Data

• Clerk — sign-in. Your email, name, and session. Membership tier in Clerk’s public metadata, which is how content access is controlled.
• Stripe — payments. Stripe holds your card details; we never see them. On merchandise orders Stripe also collects your shipping address.
• Supabase — our application database, hosted in the United States. Membership records, course progress, calendar preferences, orders, analytics events.
• Sanity — published content, hosted on Google Cloud. It holds no personal data about ordinary readers, but if you submit a Principal inquiry or a Scramble request, that submission is stored there as a record — your email, name, organization, role, and what you wrote, plus any files you attached.
• Vercel — hosting and analytics. Vercel Blob stores uploaded files, including Effector ID profile photos. Those files are readable by anyone who has the file URL.
• Google — Google Analytics, described below.
• Beehiiv — the Telemetry newsletter. Beehiiv gets your email address, where you signed up from, and, if you were signed in, your membership tier.
• Resend — transactional email: receipts, credential notices, course mail.
• Telnyx — SMS delivery for Conduit. Telnyx gets your phone number and the message.
• Inngest — scheduled and background jobs. Member events pass through it.
• Cloudflare — bot protection on our forms, and CDN in front of store.endeff.com. It sees your IP address.
• Anthropic — two places. Claude classifies and enriches public event listings for the Downrange calendar; no personal data goes into that. Claude also screens uploaded Effector ID profile photos for prohibited content, so an uploaded photo is sent to Anthropic’s API. Under Anthropic’s commercial terms those inputs are not used to train models.

Deleting and Exporting Your Data

Signed in, you can do both yourself from Your data rights on your membership page. Export gives you your account and billing details from Clerk and Stripe, plus your entitlements, calendar tokens, Downrange dispositions, and course progress. It does not yet include analytics rows, merchandise orders, or your Effector ID records — email us for those. Delete cancels your subscription, deactivates entitlements, revokes your calendar feed tokens, clears your Downrange dispositions and course progress, strips your account ID from analytics events, deletes your daily analytics aggregates, removes your Effector ID username, endorsements and profile photo, and queues your Clerk account for deletion. You can also email jmill@endeff.com and we will do it within 30 days.

Some records outlive the account. The ones we know you would care about:

• Your credentials. They stay verifiable at their public URLs and keep showing the name they were issued under, because employers and organizers rely on those links. Email jmill@endeff.com if you want a credential revoked outright.
• Stripe invoices. We keep them for tax.
• A dated record that a deletion happened.
• Analytics events, with your account ID stripped off.
• Merchandise orders, which keep the name, email and shipping address the order was placed with, because we need them for tax and accounting.
• Some notification and feed preferences still keyed to the account. We are working through these; email us and we will clear them by hand.

If any part of the automated erasure fails, the confirmation you get back says so rather than reporting success. Email us and we will finish it.

Analytics and Cookies

Three systems measure how the site is used.

• Google Analytics 4 runs on every page of endeff.com. It sets the _ga cookies, which Google expires after two years by default, and it sends Google your IP address, your browser’s user agent, the page you are on, and the page you came from. What Google does with that is covered by Google’s privacy policy.
• Vercel Analytics counts page views. It sets no cookies.
• Our own event system records page views, scroll depth, and time on page in our Supabase database. When you are signed in, those rows carry your account ID — that is how the “Continue reading” card on your membership page knows where you left off, and how team dashboards count usage. Deleting your account strips the account ID from those rows.

Clerk, our authentication provider, sets cookies on every visit, not only when you sign in. __client and __client_uat tell the site whether you have a session. Clerk’s edge also sets Cloudflare’s __cf_bm and _cfuvid cookies on its own domain.

To switch off Google Analytics measurement and our own event tracking, set tee_analytics_opt_out to 1 in your browser’s localStorage. Vercel Analytics is not covered by that flag; it is cookieless.

Children

The site is not for children. We do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 16. If you believe a child has given us information, email jmill@endeff.com and we will delete it.

Changes to This Policy

When this policy changes we update the date at the top of the page. If a change materially affects how we handle your information, we will tell members by email before it takes effect.

Contact

Questions about this policy? Email us at jmill@endeff.com.