Your curiosity is yours. So is your data.

1 · Who we are

The Door (thedoor.site) is a curiosity-driven learning movement. This policy covers the whole website: the homepage, the eight chamber pages, and the SEED experience (the Vaultlet, the Living Atlas, Maya and the challenges).

Questions or requests about your data — including access, correction or deletion: write to our contact form. A person answers.

2 · What lives on your own device

You can use this whole website without an account. If you do not sign in, SEED stores everything locally in your browser (a technology called localStorage). That includes:

• your first-impression answers and your compass;
• your notices, sparks, reflections and proof items (your Vaultlet trail);
• your interests and the doors you've explored in the Atlas;
• Maya's learned preferences — which kind of nudge lands with you.

Without an account, none of this is sent to us. It stays on your device, readable only by your own browser. It also means: if you clear your browser data or switch devices, your trail is gone — we could not recover it for you even if you asked, because we never had it.

That last part is exactly what an account solves. Nothing moves by itself. There is a page that shows you what is in this browser and asks whether you want to bring it across, and until you press that button we still have nothing. Section 5 describes what happens after you do.

3 · What we don't do

• No advertising and no advertising partners.
• No tracking pixels, no fingerprinting, no analytics profiles. We don't watch you browse.
• No selling or sharing of personal data with third parties for their own purposes.
• No scores published about you. What SEED learns about you is shown to you, in words — it is never a grade and never shared without your explicit choice.
• No AI training on your data. Conversations with Maya are not used to train models — not by us, and not by our AI provider.

4 · What your browser fetches from others

While you are reading: nothing. Every part of these pages — the two typefaces, the code that moves things on the page, every image — comes from this website itself. Your browser contacts no other company while you read here, so no other company gets to see your IP address.

When you sign in: two. Signing in is the one place where your browser does reach outside, and we would rather name both than round the answer down to zero.

• Cloudflare Turnstile, on the sign-in page only. It checks that a person and not a machine is filling in the form, in place of the puzzles that ask you to click on traffic lights. Cloudflare receives your IP address and a signal about how your browser behaves. Cloudflare states that it does not use either one to build a profile of you or to show you advertising.
• jsDelivr, on the handful of pages that need to know whether you are signed in. It delivers the code that talks to our database, and it receives your IP address and nothing else.

Neither one is loaded anywhere else. If you never make an account, your browser never contacts either of them — the whole website, including the map and all forty-eight rooms, stays exactly as described in the paragraph above.

Until 8 August 2026 two things did come from elsewhere: the typefaces from Google Fonts, and the animation code from a service called jsDelivr. Neither was told anything about you, but both could see the address you were connecting from. They are now stored on our own server instead. Two things got better at once: nobody outside sees you arrive, and an ad blocker or a strict company network can no longer strip the site of its typefaces.

The chamber pages used to add two more — an image service for the book covers and Google's advertising and analytics tags — and both are gone as well: the covers are served from this website now, and the tags are described in section 3. There are no comment forms, no embedded videos and no social buttons anywhere on this site, so nothing reaches out on your behalf while you read.

5 · What an account changes

An account is optional. It exists for one reason: so your trail survives a new laptop or a cleared browser. If you make one:

• Sign-in is by e-mail magic link — no passwords stored, no password to leak.
• Your data is stored in the European Union (Frankfurt, Germany) with our database provider, Supabase.
• Row-level security: the database is configured so each person can only ever read and write their own rows. Your Vaultlet is not visible to other users, and not browsable by us in day-to-day operation.
• What we store: your e-mail address and your trail (the same things listed in section 2). Nothing else. There is no way to upload files to The Door, and we hold none.
• Bringing your trail across goes one way and never deletes. We read from your browser and write to your account, never the other way round — so signing in on an empty laptop can never empty anything. Your browser keeps its copy afterwards. Doing it twice changes nothing.
• Sharing stays opt-in: nothing from your Vaultlet becomes visible to anyone unless you explicitly turn on sharing (for example your public Sigils page).

If you pay for membership

Payment runs through Stripe. We never see your card number. The payment page is Stripe's own page, not ours — your card details go straight to them and never touch this website.

• What Stripe receives: your e-mail address, your billing address, your card details, and your IP address. Stripe needs those to take a payment and to meet its own legal duties.
• What we receive back: whether the payment succeeded, what it cost, which tax applied, and a reference number. Enough for the bookkeeping and to know that your membership is open. Not your card.
• Where: Stripe is a company in the United States. For that transfer we use the European Commission's standard contract terms, the same as for Maya's words in section 6.

If you give something

A gift needs no account. It does need a name and an e-mail address, and we keep both. Not to sign you up for anything — we use them to send you a receipt, to thank you, and to keep our own books straight, which includes adding up what one person gave in one year. That last part is bookkeeping, and it is the reason we cannot let a gift be truly nameless to us.

• You decide what other people see. Three choices, and the middle one is already selected: your name with the amount, the amount without your name, or nothing but a line in the monthly total. You can change your mind afterwards — write to us and it is done, without explaining why.
• Your own name and the name on the ledger are two different things. We never take a name from your account and put it on a public page. If a name appears, it is because you typed it into that field yourself.
• Gifts come from people, not from companies. You confirm that before you pay, and we keep that confirmation. Organisations support The Door through the Alliance instead, so that nobody has to wonder what a gift bought.
• Stripe again. The payment itself runs the same way as a membership, one section up: their page, their form, and we never see your card.

If you join the Discord

Membership comes with an invitation to a Discord server. That is a separate company with its own terms and its own privacy policy, and joining is your choice — everything you pay for works without it. What you write there is on their servers, not ours, and it is not part of your Vaultlet.

This policy is updated when any of this changes, and the change is dated at the top of the page.

6 · Maya and AI

Maya is an AI companion. Here's exactly how she works — no fog.

• What notices things about you is not AI. The patterns Maya reflects back are worked out by plain, fixed rules from your own saved trail. No model is guessing at who you are.
• Her words may come from AI. When enabled, one message at a time — plus a short summary of your saved patterns — goes to Anthropic (makers of the Claude model) through our own server, so she can phrase her reply. Your message travels to the United States for that. We use the European Commission's standard contract terms for that transfer. Your browser never talks to them directly, and our keys never leave our server.
• Never used to train AI. Your words are used to write the reply back to you. Nothing more.
• Your conversations are kept, for you to read back. Each question and her reply are stored with your account. Only you can read them — there is no policy on that table that lets an administrator see what they say, only that they exist. Questions you ask on the same day about the same step are kept together as one conversation. You can open any conversation and carry on with it, delete a whole conversation, delete all of them, or download the lot as a spreadsheet, whenever you like and without explaining why. A conversation older than a year is removed automatically, the same clock as the rest of your trail.
• She reads back the conversation you are in, and nothing more. While a conversation is open, the last few questions and replies from that same conversation travel with your next question, so you can keep talking instead of starting over. Nothing else does. Another conversation is never pulled in on its own — not one from another day, and not one from another step.
• You decide which conversation comes back. If you open an older conversation from your list and carry on with it, then that one is the conversation you are in, and its last few turns travel with you again. That only happens because you chose it. Start a new conversation, and the previous one stops travelling with you from that moment on.
• What else travels: a handful of short notes from today. The time, the step you picked, and the first words you wrote — so she knows what you were working on this afternoon. Tomorrow those are gone. Her memory is the trail you saved on purpose, not an endless chat.
• If the AI is unavailable, Maya falls back to built-in replies. Nothing breaks, and nothing extra is kept.
• You can always see what we hold, including what the system worked out about you, and take it with you or delete it. Write to our contact form.

Exactly what gets written down about a hard moment

If Maya ever points you toward a real person, one row is saved. This is the whole row — there is nothing else in it:

• Which kind of moment it was — one word out of six: burden, isolation, shame, substitution, rumination or acute.
• Which step she took — a number from 1 to 3, from a gentle mention to stepping back entirely.
• When it happened, and that it was you.

There is no column for your words. The table is built so a sentence cannot physically be stored in it — not by us, not by accident. We look at these rows for one reason: to check whether Maya's judgement about when to step back is set right. There is no file about your state, and no one reads your Vaultlet to build one.

What Maya remembers between visits

Deliberately little, and all of it derived from what you saved yourself:

• Which kinds of nudge tend to land with you — the name of a rule and a number that goes up or down.
• Whether a theme keeps returning without anything new happening around it — a marker for the theme, a count, and a date.
• A summary of the patterns worked out from your own trail: your interests in order, what's growing, a word that keeps coming back.

7 · The people you meet on the map

Each district on the Living Atlas has occupations attached to it. Because that is the one place where what we know about you touches something about work, here is exactly how it functions.

Where the occupations come from

They come from ESCO, the European Commission's public classification of occupations and skills. It is open data, published by the EU, and nothing about you was used to build it. We derive which district each occupation belongs to, and that derivation is the same for every visitor — it does not change per person.

You are shown people because of where you walked

The list you see in a district is filtered by that district, never ranked by your profile. If your compass exists, it is used for one thing only: to write the sentence explaining why something there might resonate with you. It never chooses what appears, never reorders it, and never removes anything.

Nothing about you travels outward

No employer, recruiter, school or partner receives your profile, your interests or a list with you on it. There is no candidate ranking, no targeted vacancy, and no way for a third party to browse people. Those features do not exist in the product — not switched off, simply not built.

No number is ever attached to you

There is no match percentage, no fit score, no ranking and no "best career for you". What you see is a sentence in words, naming two real skills. If we ever cannot say something honestly in words, we would rather say nothing.

What we save

If you mark something with "this pulls me", we save that you did. Marking something as not for you is equally worth saving — finding out what you don't want is a real result, not a failure. Both stay in your own trail.

8 · Cookies

This website sets no cookies at all. Not one — not for the homepage, not for the chambers and their rooms, not for SEED. There is no cookie banner here because there is nothing to ask you about.

SEED uses localStorage as described in section 2. That stays in your browser and, unlike a cookie, is never sent along with your requests — we could not read it from our side even if we wanted to.

If you sign in, one more thing is kept there: the proof that you are signed in, so you do not have to type your password on every page. It is not a cookie, but it is a lasting mark of you on this device, so we would rather say so here than leave you to find out. Signing out removes it, and so does clearing your browser data.

Until 3 August 2026 the chamber pages ran on WordPress and could set its standard cookies. They are static files now, and the cookies went with them.

9 · Your rights

Under the GDPR (and simply because it's right), you can always:

• See what we hold about you — without an account there is nothing to ask for, because it is all on your own device;
• Export your data in a portable format;
• Correct anything that's wrong;
• Delete everything — account deletion removes your rows, except the minimum we're legally required to keep (which, for The Door, is very little);
• Complain to your data-protection authority (in the Netherlands: Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens) if you believe we've handled your data badly.

Age. The Vaultlet and Maya are built for people of 18 and older, and we ask once before you start. The rest of The Door — the chambers, the map, everything you can read — stays open to anyone, because none of it keeps anything about you. If you're a parent or guardian and something is here that shouldn't be, write to our contact form and we'll remove it. You don't need to explain.