Privacy Policy

1. Scope

This Privacy Policy explains how Shellbook collects, uses, shares, retains, and protects information when you use the Shellbook website, terminal client, rooms, direct messages, invites, profile cards, and related services.

Shellbook is a social product. Some information you provide is meant to be seen by other people, including your username, public profile, public room messages, and public or friend-visible coding signals.

2. Information You Provide

Account information: username, password credentials handled through our authentication provider, account identifiers, signup date, invite relationships, and settings.

Social content: room messages, direct messages, friend requests, accepted friendships, profile information, invite links, reports, moderation context, and support messages.

Privacy settings: metric visibility choices, muted sounds, blocks, and other preferences you configure in Shellbook.

3. Information Collected From The Client

Presence and activity: online state, coding state, active agent sessions, current room, last prompted time, session start time, and heartbeat timestamps.

Coding metrics: coding minutes today, coding minutes this week, total agent time, longest session, daily streaks, active agent sessions, commits, repos worked in, and similar social stats generated by the Shellbook client.

Technical information: Shellbook client version, command mode, terminal integration state, device and network metadata, logs, error signals, IP address, user agent, and timestamps collected by Shellbook or our infrastructure providers.

4. Information From Third Parties

Shellbook may receive limited information from infrastructure providers, authentication providers, hosting providers, analytics or logging tools, package distribution services, Git hosting tools, or invite links.

Shellbook does not control third-party coding agents, terminal applications, operating systems, browsers, package managers, or X/Twitter share flows. Their privacy practices are governed by their own policies.

5. How We Use Information

We use information to create and secure accounts, authenticate users, show rooms and DMs, deliver invites, display presence and profile cards, calculate coding stats, sync state across terminals, send notifications, provide support, debug issues, prevent abuse, enforce rules, and improve Shellbook.

We may use aggregated or de-identified information to understand usage, monitor reliability, plan features, publish community-level stats, and explain how Shellbook is used.

6. How Information Is Shared

With other users: usernames, profile cards, public room messages, public stats, friend-visible presence, friend-visible stats, and direct messages are shared according to the product surface where you post or connect.

With service providers: we share information with vendors that host, store, authenticate, transmit, monitor, secure, or support Shellbook, only as needed for them to provide services to us.

For safety and legal reasons: we may disclose information to investigate abuse, protect users, protect Shellbook, respond to legal process, enforce our Terms, or prevent harm.

Business transfers: if Shellbook is involved in a merger, acquisition, financing, reorganization, or sale of assets, information may be transferred as part of that transaction.

7. Public Visibility And Direct Messages

Public rooms and public profile information may be visible to other users and may be copied or screenshotted by them. Think before posting sensitive material.

Direct messages are limited to the participants in the conversation in the product UI, but they are not end-to-end encrypted. Shellbook may access DMs for operations, safety, legal compliance, abuse investigation, and support.

8. Cookies, Local Storage, And Similar Technologies

The Shellbook website and client may use cookies, local storage, cached settings, invite identifiers, session tokens, and similar technologies to keep you signed in, remember preferences, route invites, prevent abuse, and operate the service.

At launch, Shellbook does not sell personal information or use third-party advertising cookies for cross-context behavioral advertising.

9. Retention

We keep information for as long as needed to provide Shellbook, maintain security, comply with law, resolve disputes, enforce agreements, preserve audit records, and protect users.

Some information may remain after deletion requests where retention is necessary for safety, legal compliance, backups, abuse prevention, financial records, or legitimate operational needs.

10. Your Choices

You can choose what to post, who to friend, which rooms to join, which invite links to share, and which supported metrics to hide or show.

You can request access, correction, deletion, or export of account information by contacting privacy@shellbook.co. We may need to verify your account before completing requests.

11. State Privacy Rights

Depending on where you live, you may have rights to know, access, correct, delete, or receive a copy of personal information, and to appeal certain decisions. You may also have rights to opt out of sale, sharing, or targeted advertising.

Shellbook does not sell personal information and does not share personal information for cross-context behavioral advertising at launch. If that changes, we will update this Policy and provide required choices.

12. Security

We use reasonable technical and organizational measures designed to protect Shellbook, including authenticated access, provider security controls, client version controls, and operational monitoring.

No online service is perfectly secure. You are responsible for protecting your terminal, machine, repositories, credentials, Shellbook password, agent sessions, and invite links.

13. Children

Shellbook is not directed to children below the minimum age required by applicable law, and they may not use Shellbook. If we learn that we collected personal information from someone who is not old enough to use the service, we will take reasonable steps to delete it.

14. International Users

Shellbook is operated from the United States. If you use Shellbook from outside the United States, your information may be processed and stored in the United States or other countries where our providers operate.

15. Changes To This Policy

We may update this Privacy Policy as Shellbook changes. If changes are material, we will try to provide reasonable notice through the website, client, or service. The updated date shows when the latest version took effect.

16. Contact

Privacy requests and questions can be sent to privacy@shellbook.co. Abuse reports and general support requests can be sent to support@shellbook.co.