Privacy. What Tangent keeps, and why.

Tangent has no ads and no third-party trackers, and it never sells or shares your data. You don’t need an account to browse. If you sign in with Google, Tangent keeps your name, email address and profile photo, along with the bookmarks you save, so they follow you from device to device. You can delete all of it yourself, at any time, in one step.

Everything on Tangent can be browsed without an account. There are no advertising cookies, no analytics scripts and no tracking pixels on the site.

When you open a listed site, Tangent adds one to that site’s visit count for the day. The count is just a number: it holds nothing about you, and it only helps Tangent see which sites people find useful.

To keep out spam and abuse, Tangent turns your IP address into a salted, one-way hash, a scrambled code that can’t be turned back into the address. It’s used to limit how often requests can be made from one place, and it’s deleted after about a day.

Some things never leave your browser at all: your light or dark theme, the sites you’ve recently viewed and the trails you’ve followed. Tangent’s servers never see them, and clearing your browser’s data for Tangent removes them.

You only need to sign in to save bookmarks and to follow the sites you’ve sent. Tangent uses Google to sign you in and asks Google for three things only: your name, your email address and your profile photo. Tangent never sees your Google password and gets nothing else from your Google account: no contacts, no files, no calendar.

Your name and photo show who’s signed in. Your email address tells your account apart from everyone else’s; Tangent doesn’t send marketing emails. You can change the name Tangent shows at any time from Account.

Signing in sets a few cookies that keep you signed in. They’re needed for your account to work, other sites can’t read them, and they’re removed when you sign out.

When you’re signed in, Tangent stores the sites and people you bookmark, the collections you make and any notes you add, so they’re the same on every device. They’re private to you: nobody else can see them, and Tangent only uses them to show them back to you.

If you saved bookmarks on a device before accounts existed, they move into your account the first time you sign in there, and the copy on that device is cleared when you sign out.

When you submit a site, Tangent keeps the link, the section you picked, anything you wrote about it and a hashed IP address to catch spam. The details are emailed to Tangent’s own inbox so a person can review them.

If you’re signed in, the submission is linked to your account so you can follow it on your Submissions page. If the site is added, its listing on Tangent is public like every other, but your name isn’t shown with it.

Tangent relies on a few services to run, and each gets only what it needs. Supabase stores Tangent’s database, including accounts and bookmarks. Vercel hosts the website. Resend delivers Tangent’s own emails, such as new-submission notices. They handle your data on Tangent’s behalf, to provide their service.

Google handles signing in, and what Google does with your Google account is covered by Google’s own privacy policy. Some of these services may process data outside the UK and EU; when they do, they use the safeguards data protection law requires.

Your account, bookmarks, collections and notes stay until you delete them or your account. Hashed IP addresses used for limits are deleted after about a day. Daily visit counts are kept as totals with nothing personal in them. Submissions are kept so Tangent has a record of where its sites came from; the ones linked to your account are deleted with it.

You can change your name at any time, and delete your account from Account, then Delete account. That removes your profile, bookmarks, collections, notes and linked submissions straight away, and it can’t be undone.

You can also ask Tangent for a copy of the data it holds about you, ask for something to be corrected or deleted, or ask anything about this page by emailing hello@tangent.directory. Tangent will reply within a month. If you’re in the UK or EU and aren’t happy with the answer, you can complain to your data protection authority; in the UK, that’s the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO).

Tangent is made for designers and developers and isn’t aimed at children. Please don’t create an account if you’re under 13.

If Tangent changes what it keeps or how it uses it, this page will be updated and the date at the top will change.