Privacy policy

Last updated 13 November 2026.

Haystack is a personal bookmarking app that Schalk Neethling runs for his own use. Only the Google accounts he has invited can sign in. This page says what Haystack and its browser extension collect, where it goes, and how long it stays.

The browser extension

The extension does something only when you click its toolbar button. It then reads, from the tab you are on: the page's address, its title, its description, its canonical link, and its Open Graph title, description and site name. It reads no other tab, nothing in the background, and not your browsing history, and it stores nothing.

It sends what it read to Haystack and nowhere else, by opening Haystack's save form in a new tab with those details in the form's address. An address that looks as if it holds a secret, such as a sign-in or password reset link, is refused, and never leaves your browser.

The link is saved only when you choose Save on that form, but Haystack receives the details as soon as the form opens. It then asks TypeSafe, described below, whether the link might be private, so that the form can warn you. If you aren't signed in, Haystack keeps the details while you sign in, so that the form can open afterwards, and deletes them within about an hour.

What Haystack stores

• Your account: the ID, email address and name your Google account gives Haystack when you sign in. Signing in goes through Google, so Google knows when you sign in to Haystack.
• Your sign-in: a cookie that keeps you signed in for 30 days. Using Haystack in the last 15 of those days renews it for another 30. It is the only cookie Haystack sets, apart from one that lasts 10 minutes while you sign in.
• Each link you save: the details listed above, and the description Haystack writes for it so that you can find it again. When you save a link by pasting its address into Haystack instead, Haystack requests the page once to read the same details.
• Your searches: what you searched for, whether you typed or spoke it, how each saved link was judged against it, which links were shown, and which one you followed.

Haystack shows no ads and uses no third-party analytics or trackers. It doesn't sell your data, and shares it with no one other than the services below.

Who else receives it

Haystack runs on Cloudflare, which hosts the app and its database. To describe and search your links, it sends some of their details to these services. A link that Haystack judges might be private is held, and none of its details go to Anthropic, GitHub or TypeSafe's second question below until you confirm that it isn't private.

• Anthropic, through Cloudflare's AI Gateway: each saved link's details, so that its model, Claude, can write the link's description. Anthropic does not train its models on them. It deletes them within 30 days, except content its safety systems flag, which it can keep for up to 2 years. The gateway logs that a request was made, but not what it held. See how long Anthropic keeps data.
• TypeSafe, whose model checks and ranks links. To judge whether a link might be private, it gets the page's title and a description of the address with anything that could be a secret removed, never the address itself. Once a link is saved, it gets the link's details, address included, to tell what kind of page it is. For each search, it gets what you searched for, with the titles and the descriptions Haystack wrote for the links it is compared with. TypeSafe does not train its models on them, and its policy gives no fixed period for keeping them. See TypeSafe's privacy policy.
• GitHub, for a link to a GitHub repository, or to a page inside one: the repository's owner and name, to read its description and README. GitHub's privacy statement allows it to use data about requests, such as when they were made, to train its models. See GitHub's privacy statement.

If you search by voice, your browser turns your speech into text. In some browsers, including Chrome, that sends a recording to the browser maker's servers. Haystack receives only the text.

Deleting what you saved

You can delete any saved link. That removes it from Haystack at once, with its description and its place in past search results. It doesn't recall what was already sent to the services above, which keep it as their own policies say.

Your past searches themselves are kept, and Haystack has no way to delete them yet. Haystack's database can be restored to how it was at any time in the last 30 days, and Schalk keeps weekly copies of it with no set end date, so a deleted link can remain in those backups.

Questions and changes

Haystack's code is public at github.com/schalkneethling/haystack, where you can ask a question by opening an issue. Issues are public, so don't include links you have saved. When this policy changes, this page changes with it, and so does the date at the top.