Privacy policy

Last updated 25 October 2026

In short: we keep what Bateson needs to run your team's signoffs, in the EU, and nothing to track you. No analytics, no advertising, no AI reading your work, and nothing sold.

This page covers Bateson Cloud, at app.bateson.app, and the site at bateson.app. If you run Bateson on your own servers, we never see your data, and this page does not apply.

Who we are

Bateson Cloud is run by Jonas Fenger, a private person in Denmark, until a company takes it over. Write to hello@bateson.app about anything on this page.

Two roles

Your account (your address, your name, how you sign in): we decide what is kept and why, so for this we are the controller.

Your workspace's work (items, versions, comments, decisions, rules, workflows): your team decides what goes in, so for this the team's organisation is the controller and we are its processor. We use it only to run Bateson for that team. A data processing agreement is available on request.

What we keep, and why

• Your email address and name, so you can sign in and your team sees who did what.
• Your workspace's work: items and every version of them, comments, suggestions, decisions, rules, workflows, who belongs and who invited whom. Bateson keeps this as a record of what happened, who did it and when, because that record is what a signoff is.
• Who is looking and typing, so others see it live, and what you have already seen, so Bateson can show what changed since.
• A one-time link and code when you sign in, kept only as hashes and valid once, for 15 minutes.
• The IP address that asked for a sign-in email, so we can limit how often they are sent. Deleted after two days.
• Keys you make for your agent or a script: a label, when it was last used, and a hash of the key, never the key itself.
• Request logs at our host, including IP addresses, kept for a short time for operations and security.

What we don't do

• No analytics, advertising or tracking. Our emails are plain text, with no tracking pixels and no rewritten links.
• No selling or renting data, to anyone.
• No AI. No model reads your work, and we do not train models on it. The patterns Bateson suggests as rules come from matching words in a reviewer's own comments.

Cookies

One cookie, bateson_session, keeps you signed in for 30 days. Bateson does not work without it, so we do not ask for consent to it. The site at bateson.app sets no cookies at all.

Legal bases

• Providing Bateson to you and your team, under our Terms: GDPR article 6(1)(b).
• Keeping it secure and stopping abuse, such as limiting sign-in emails by IP address: article 6(1)(f), our legitimate interest.
• Meeting legal obligations, such as bookkeeping once plans are paid: article 6(1)(c).

Who helps us

Your data is stored and processed in the EU, by these companies, under data processing agreements:

• Vercel (USA) runs the application, in Frankfurt, Germany.
• Neon (USA) hosts the database, in Frankfurt, Germany.
• Brevo (France) sends Bateson's emails: sign-in links, invitations and notices about your work. A notice can include an item's title and a comment.

Vercel and Neon are US companies. Where data could be reached from outside the EU, the transfer is covered by the EU–US Data Privacy Framework and the European Commission's standard contractual clauses. We tell workspace owners before we add a company to this list.

Security

Every connection to Bateson is encrypted. The database is encrypted at rest. Sign-in links, codes, sessions and keys are kept only as hashes, so a copy of the database would not let anyone sign in.

How long we keep it

• Your account, as long as you have one.
• A workspace's work, as long as the workspace exists. When a member is removed, the work they did stays in the workspace's record, under their name, because it is part of what the team signed off.
• Sign-in IP addresses, two days. Sessions, 30 days, or until you sign out.
• When you ask us to delete your account or a workspace, we do it within 30 days. Copies in the database's backups expire within 30 days after that.

When someone asks us for your data

We hand data to authorities only when the law requires it, and we tell the workspace's owners first unless the law forbids it.

What you can ask

You can ask to see what we keep about you, to correct it, to delete it, to limit or object to how we use it, and to have it in a file you can take elsewhere. A workspace's owner can export the whole workspace as files at any time. Write to hello@bateson.app and we answer within a month. For work inside a workspace, we may pass your request to the team it belongs to.

If you think we handle your data wrongly, you can complain to the Danish Data Protection Agency, Datatilsynet, or to the authority where you live.

Children

Bateson is for work. It is not meant for anyone under 16.

Changes

When we change this page in a way that matters, we email account holders before the change takes effect. The date at the top says when it last changed. This page is part of Bateson's open-source code, so every change to it is public in the code's history.