Privacy policy

This page explains, in plain words, what data beseen keeps about you, why, and for how long.

If you have an account

This is what we keep:

• Your account: your name, your email address and your password. The password is stored scrambled (as a hash), so nobody can read it, not even us. If you turn on two-factor authentication, we also keep its secret code and your recovery codes. We need all of this to run your account and keep it safe.
• Explore: Explore (beseen.bio/explore) is our public list of pages. A page is listed there only if you turn on the “List this page in Explore” switch in its editor; every page starts unlisted. A listed page shows its photo, name and handle, its category (if you pick one), the Verified badge (if we gave your account one), how many times it was viewed (your own visits never count) and when you last changed it. People can search its bio. It is listed only while the page is published, your email address is confirmed and your account is not banned. Turn the switch off and the page leaves the list at once. We do not keep what people search for.
• Pages you follow: we keep which pages you follow and since when, and show them under Following in your dashboard. You can unfollow at any time. The page’s owner is told that someone new follows them, but never who. They only see how many people follow the page, and can choose to show that number on it.
• Discord (only if you connect it): you can connect a Discord account in your settings. Discord then gives us only that account’s number and username (not your email, servers or messages), and we keep them with the time you connected. You can also log in or sign up with Discord. Then Discord also gives us the email address of your Discord account, if Discord has checked it. When you sign up this way, it becomes your account’s email address. When you log in, we only use it to check that it does not belong to another account (we never join accounts by email). Connecting can also add you to the beseen Discord server: Discord asks you first, we use that permission once, and we keep no access to your Discord account afterwards. Our own bot in the beseen Discord server gets your Discord number and username, your badges and one of your page addresses. It uses them to give you the matching roles and to make that address your nickname. You pick the address in your settings; if you do not, it is the address of your first published page. The bot also tells us, for your Discord account only, whether you are in the server, wear its server tag or boost it, how many people the bot counted you inviting and which of the badge roles you hold, so that you can claim the matching badges and we can take them back when you stop qualifying. We keep that with your account and delete it when you disconnect. If you put a Discord profile block on a page, it shows your Discord profile as Discord shows it: while you are in the beseen Discord server, the bot also tells us your status (online, idle, do not disturb) and what you are doing on Discord (for example a custom status, the song you listen to on Spotify or the game you play), and we may read your About me, pronouns, profile badges and profile colours from Discord. Visitors of that page see them. We keep only the latest of each with your account, show a status only while the bot keeps confirming it, and delete all of it when you disconnect or remove the block. If you disconnect, we delete your Discord number and username from your account and the bot takes the roles back. Discord itself is run by Discord Inc. in the United States, under its own privacy policy.
• Badges: our administrators can give an account official badges (such as Verified, Early Access or Bug Hunter), and you can claim others once you qualify for them (for example with Premium, a team role, a connected Discord account, a boost of our Discord server or the server tag). We check again when you claim, and we take a claimed badge back when you stop qualifying. We keep when each badge was given or taken away, how (by hand, claimed by you, or taken back because something changed) and which administrator did it. You choose which badges each of your pages shows next to your name. Official badges also become roles in the Discord server if you connect Discord. You can also make your own badges (a name, an icon from our library or one you upload, and a colour). They show only on the pages you put them on, and our administrators can check them and take one off your pages. The badge catalog shows how many accounts have each official badge, never who.
• Your pages: the name, bio, handles, photo, background, sound, colours and blocks you add. A published page is public: anyone with the link can see it, and search engines may show it. An unpublished page is visible only to you.
• Emails we send you: account emails (confirming your address, resetting your password, and a warning when your password is changed or reset, two-factor authentication is turned on or off, or your email address is changed; that last one goes to your old address). You cannot turn these off while you have an account. We also email you a copy of every message or drawing a visitor sends you. You can turn those copies off in your settings, or with the link at the bottom of each one. Your inbox keeps them either way.
• Notifications in your dashboard: the bell in your dashboard keeps a short note of each new message or drawing (whether it was a drawing, the name the visitor typed, and which page) and of the security events above (for an email change, the new address). Each note is deleted after 90 days.
• Coins and purchases: your coin balance and every change to it (what it was for, how many coins, when, its reference, and the note our team adds when it gives you coins as a reward); any request to buy coins you made before coins became rewards only (the package, the price, your email address, its reference, and our team’s notes); and what you buy by card (what it was, the price, when, whether it went through, and the numbers Stripe gives the checkout and the payment). We never get or keep your card details: Stripe does (see Who else handles data).
• Referrals: every account has a referral code and an invite link. If you sign up with someone’s code or link, we keep who invited you, what happened to the invite (waiting, rewarded or turned down, and why) and the coins both of you earned; the person who invited you sees only how many friends they invited, never who. The Referral field in the sign-up form can search pages: only public pages their owners listed in Explore appear, with their photo and address, and an owner can turn that off in their settings. To turn down invites between accounts made by the same person or from one connection, and so our team can check an invite by hand, sign-up keeps these with your account: the IP address you signed up from (IPv4 or IPv6), a scrambled code (a keyed hash) of the network that address belongs to, and a scrambled code of a random identifier in your browser (see Cookies); we cannot get the network or the identifier back from the codes. Only our administrators can see the address, on the page where referrals are reviewed. It is kept for as long as your account exists and deleted with it, it is in the data you can download, and it is used for nothing else.
• Where you sign in from: while you are signed in, we note the IP address you use (IPv4 or IPv6) and when we first and last saw it, at most once every few minutes. We keep the 100 most recent addresses of your account and delete older ones. We use them to keep accounts safe and to spot abuse, such as one person running many accounts. Only our administrators can see them. They are deleted with your account and are in the data you can download.
• Your page’s address by public ID: beseen.bio/id/number (your account’s public ID) opens your first published page. It never lists your other pages. If you have no published page, it shows the same “not found” page as an account that does not exist.

We keep your account data for as long as you have an account. You can download a copy at any time in your settings (Your data), as a file other services can read. When you delete your account, we delete your pages and everything on them: media, blocks, inbox and statistics. We keep only three things: your account’s random key (a code made for it when you signed up), its account number and the date it was deleted, so that key is never given to anyone else. The one exception is the record of money and coins: your purchases, coin requests and coin balance changes stay, no longer linked to your account (a purchase or a coin request keeps the email address it was made with), so we can still answer refund requests, chargebacks and accounting questions. Nothing else about you stays.

When our staff look at an account

To answer a support request or deal with a report, our administrators can open an account, change it, and see the dashboard the way its owner sees it. While they do, the owner’s password-protected settings stay locked, and administrators cannot do this to each other’s accounts. If an administrator changes your email address, we send a confirmation link to the new address.

Everything an administrator changes on an account goes into a log: its name, email address or its confirmation, Premium, extra slots, badges, handles, turning off two-factor authentication, sending a password reset, a ban, or deleting the account. So does every time they start or stop viewing it. The log keeps which administrator, which account (its number and email address), what changed from what to what, the administrator’s IP address, and when. It never holds passwords or two-factor secrets. Only administrators can see it, and each entry is deleted after 730 days. When an account is deleted, its entries keep its email address, so the record of what was done stays complete.

If an account breaks our terms, we may ban it, for a while or for good. We then keep when the ban started, when it ends, and a short note from the administrator saying why. While an account is banned, its owner cannot log in, and its pages and forms are hidden from everyone except our administrators, who can still open them to see what was banned. The owner sees how long the ban lasts, and can ask us why at any time.

If you visit a page

Statistics for the page owner

When you open a page or click one of its links, we note it, so the owner can see how their page is doing. We note: the time, which page, which link (for a click), the website you came from (just its name, such as instagram.com) or, when you opened a link the owner copied for one place, that place (such as their Instagram bio; the link says so with ?via=, and it says nothing about you), your country, and whether you use a phone, a tablet or a computer.

We do not store your IP address or your browser’s identifier, and we set no cookie for this. To count each visitor only once a day, we mix your IP address and browser identifier with a random value that changes every day, and turn the result into a short code. The random value is deleted after two days; after that, the code cannot be traced back to anyone. Your country is worked out from your IP address on our own server, and the address is not sent to anyone. Bots and the owner’s own visits are not counted. Statistics are kept for 395 days.

Messages and drawings you send

Some pages have a message form or a drawing canvas. What you send (your message or drawing, and your name and email address if you choose to give them) goes to the page’s owner. We keep it in their inbox for 90 days and, unless they have turned these copies off, email them a copy. If you give your email address, the owner can reply to you. What happens to it after that is up to the owner. To stop abuse, we limit how often one IP address can send; that address stays only briefly in our rate limiter and is never stored with your message.

Content from other services

Spotify, YouTube, Twitch and SoundCloud cards never embed a player: a page shows a still picture and a Play button, and nothing loads from those services. Links on a page lead to other websites, which have their own policies. Pressing Play, or any button or link on an integration card that leads to another service (Join, Watch, View, Open), first asks whether you want to leave beseen.bio and open it on that service; only if you say yes does your browser go there, in a new tab, and then that service’s own privacy policy applies. We store no answer to that question.

Pictures in these widgets (album covers, SoundCloud artwork, video stills, a Discord server’s icon, a Twitch channel’s picture, a Bluesky, Mastodon, Roblox, Chess.com or GitHub profile picture, a Minecraft skin drawn by mc-heads.net, a game server’s icon) are fetched by our server and passed on to you, so your browser does not contact those services to show them. To show a server’s name and Discord’s approximate member counts, a video’s title, whether a Twitch channel is live, or a profile’s public details (ratings, counts, a latest public post), our server asks Discord, YouTube, Spotify, SoundCloud, Twitch, Bluesky, the Mastodon server the owner named, Mojang (Minecraft), Roblox, Chess.com, Lichess or GitHub about the link or name the page’s owner added, and to show whether a game server is online and how many play, mcsrvstat.us (Minecraft) or the FiveM server list, which your browser asks us for while the page is open; those requests carry nothing about you. Cards for X, TikTok, Pinterest and Telegram are only a link: nothing is asked of those services. For a website card our server reads the start of that website’s page to find its icon, and for a custom card it fetches the pictures the page’s owner chose from an image host; you get them from us, so your browser contacts neither.

If you report a page

When you report a page with its Report button (see Copyright and reports):

• We keep what you send (the reason and what you wrote) in our reports inbox, with your account and a copy of its name and email address, so the report still shows who sent it if the account is deleted later.
• The Report button needs an account. Without one, you report by email, and we keep your email.
• We do not store your IP address with a report. To stop abuse, each account can send only a limited number of reports.
• Only our staff (people we give the staff role) and our administrators can see reports.
• We send a confirmation to your account’s email address, and tell you there what we decided. Our staff can also answer you once by email from our site; we keep that reply (what it said, who on our staff sent it, and when) with the report.
• We tell the page’s owner what was reported, but give them your name only if you agree, or if a copyright dispute cannot be settled without it.
• We keep a report until it is decided, then for 365 more days, so we can answer questions and disputes about it. Reports sent by email are kept for as long as we need them for the same reasons.

Cookies and storage

We use only the cookies below. None of them tracks you, none is used for ads, and none is shared with anyone. That is why there is no cookie banner: the law does not ask for one when cookies are needed for the site to work, or only remember a choice you made.

• Session and security cookies (beseen-session, XSRF-TOKEN): keep you logged in and protect forms from forgery. Needed for the site to work; deleted when your session ends.
• Remember me (remember_web_…): only if you tick “Remember me” when you log in, so you stay logged in on that device. Deleted when you log out.
• Sound settings (profile_volume, profile_sound): remember how loud you like pages’ sound, and the pages where you turned the sound off. They stay in your browser for a year, and our server never reads them.
• Invite link (beseen_ref): only if you open someone’s invite link (beseen.bio/r/…). It holds that person’s referral code for 30 days so the sign-up form can fill it in, and our server reads it when you sign up.
• Sign-up browser check (beseen_device): a random identifier the sign-up page sets, for a year, only so we can turn down invites between accounts made in one browser. Our server reads it when you sign up and keeps only a scrambled code made from it.
• Announcement (beseen_announcement): remembers that you have seen our latest announcement in your notification bell, so it no longer shows as new. It holds only which announcement it was, and lasts a year.
• Your browser may also remember display choices (light or dark mode, a hidden sidebar, whether you stopped a page’s motion) in its own storage. These never leave your device.

We embed no players, so Spotify, YouTube, Twitch and SoundCloud set no cookies on this site; if you open one of them from a page, that service’s own cookies are its own.

Who else handles data

• Hosting: Hetzner Online GmbH, in Germany, runs our servers and database, and keeps short-lived server logs (including IP addresses) for security.
• Email delivery: the company that sends our emails for us.

They use data only the way we tell them to, under a data processing agreement.

Payments: Link, Stripe’s payment service, sells what you buy by card on beseen as the merchant of record (Stripe Managed Payments). When you choose to pay by card, we send you to Stripe’s own checkout page. You give your payment details, email address, country and billing address to Stripe there, and Stripe and Link use them under their own privacy policies (Stripe, Link), as separate controllers: they decide how to handle them, for example for fraud checks and taxes. We send Stripe only what you are buying, its price, a reference to the purchase and the email address of your account (so the checkout is filled in for you); Stripe tells us whether the payment went through and the numbers it gives the checkout and the payment. Stripe’s checkout page runs on Stripe’s servers, which get your IP address and may set their own cookies.

Stripe may handle your payment data outside the European Economic Area under the safeguards its privacy policy describes. Apart from that, we do not send data outside the European Economic Area ourselves.

Why we are allowed to use your data

• To give you what you asked for (our contract with you, Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR): your account, your pages, connecting Discord, your coins and what you buy.
• Because the law requires it (Art. 6(1)(c) GDPR): acting on reports.
• To run a safe service that works (our legitimate interest, Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR): statistics for page owners (their interest too), our staff tools, the administrators’ log, bans, keeping illegal content off the service, and keeping the record of purchases and coins to answer refunds, chargebacks and disputes.

Your rights

You can ask to see your data, to correct it, to delete it, to limit or object to how we use it, and to get a copy you can take elsewhere. You can do most of this yourself in your settings: change your details, download your data, or delete your account with everything in it. For anything else, email support@beseen.bio, or talk to us on our Discord server (open a ticket, or send a message to an owner). You can also complain to the data protection authority in your country.

If you visited a page and sent something to its owner, you can ask the owner to delete it. Or email us the page’s address and roughly when you sent it, and we will delete it.

Children

beseen is not for children under 16, and they may not create an account: everyone confirms their age when they sign up. If you think a child under 16 has an account, email support@beseen.bio and we will delete it.

Changes

If we change how we handle data, we update this page and its date. For important changes, we tell account holders by email.