Privacy Policy.

This site was built to know as little about you as possible. No accounts, no cookies, no analytics, no trackers, no ads. Reading is anonymous. Three features send something you type off your device: the Manifest guide and the Companion to an AI model, the email subscription (your address only) to a mailing provider. This page lists, completely, what leaves your device where, and what is stored for how long. The Companion can also, if you say yes, keep a few short memory notes between conversations – notes you can read, delete, and switch off at any time.

The controller for the processing described here is the operator of thewayofcreation.com, based in Switzerland. For privacy matters, use the contact address on the About page. Personal data is processed in accordance with the Swiss Federal Act on Data Protection (FADP) and, for visitors in the EU/EEA, the GDPR.

The site is hosted on Google Firebase Hosting (Google Ireland Ltd., Gordon House, Barrow Street, Dublin 4, Ireland). When you visit, Google processes technical access data (IP address, time, requested URL, user agent) in server logs to deliver the site and keep it secure. Legal basis: our legitimate interest in operating the website (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR). Transfers to Google LLC in the USA are covered by the EU–US and Swiss–US Data Privacy Frameworks.

The site itself sets no cookies and uses no analytics or tracking – which is also why there is no cookie banner. Fonts are served from this site, not from a third party. The light/dark theme follows your system setting and is not stored.

One optional feature uses your browser's local storage: marking texts as read. That progress is saved only on your device, only when you use the feature, and is never transmitted anywhere.

When you use the Manifest guide, the text you enter (your intention, and the blockages you select) is sent to our server functions in Zurich, Switzerland (Google Cloud, region europe-west6) and from there to the AI model that generates the responses. The model runs on an Azure OpenAI endpoint in the EU, reached via OpenRouter, Inc. (USA) as routing provider. The request is pinned to that EU endpoint: your input is not used to train models and is not retained there (zero data retention).

We store nothing: your input and the generated responses exist only for the duration of the request. Nothing you type in the guide is linked to you – there is no account and we do not record who asked what. Legal basis: the processing is necessary to provide the feature you are actively using (Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR).

The Companion is a chat conversation on Telegram, currently accessible by invitation. Telegram itself is an independent service with its own privacy policy; note that Telegram bot chats are not end-to-end encrypted.

When you talk with the Companion, we process: your Telegram user id, first name, username and language (to run your account); your messages (to generate replies); and usage counters per account (cost and token counts – never the content of what you wrote).

Conversations are deleted by default. A conversation is kept only while it is open, so the Companion remembers the context, and is deleted when it ends – when you send /new, delete it with /delete, or stay away for seven days. Exception: if you attach feedback with /feedback, the conversation is saved together with your notes and exported to the operator to improve the Companion.

Memory notes – only if you say yes. The Companion asks you in the conversation whether it may remember a little between conversations. The question quotes the note it would keep, so you decide on the real thing; you can say yes, decline for good, or set that one note aside and be asked again in a later conversation. If you agree, that note is saved right away, and from then on one short narrative note may be written when a conversation ends (at most about ten notes in total): what you brought, what you found together, what was handed over. The conversation itself is still deleted – the note is what remains. The notes are stored in our database in Zurich, are shown to you in full with /memory, and are deleted immediately with /forget; /memory_off stops the writing and the use of notes at any time. Notes of readers who stay away for about three months expire on their own. Legal basis: your consent (Art. 6(1)(a) GDPR), revocable at any time. Without your yes, nothing is remembered between conversations.

Replies are generated over the same model chain as the Manifest guide: an Azure OpenAI endpoint in the EU, reached via OpenRouter, pinned so that your words are not used for training and are not retained by the model provider.

Invitations: every user has a personal invite link. If you join through one, we record which account invited you, and the inviting person is notified with your Telegram first name. The operator is notified as well – that is how access is managed while the Companion is invite-only.

Waiting list: if you open the Companion without an invitation, you can ask to be told when it opens for everyone. We then store your Telegram user id, first name, username and language for exactly that one message – nothing else. You can take yourself off the list in the chat at any time, and joining or deleting your account removes the entry as well.

Subscription: the Companion has an optional paid subscription. Payments are handled by Polar Software Inc. as merchant of record – you buy from Polar, Polar handles payment data, invoices and VAT under its own privacy policy; we never see your payment details. What we store is only your subscription status (active or not, linked to your Telegram user id) to unlock the paid allowance, and Polar tells us when that status changes.

Consent and deletion: before your first conversation you are asked to agree to this policy and the terms; the time of your consent is stored. You can delete the current conversation at any time with /delete, and your entire account – conversations (including those saved with feedback), memory notes, usage counters, your invite link, consent record – with /delete_account; an active subscription is canceled with it. One exception, so deletion cannot be used to sidestep the free allowance: the current month's usage total (a cost figure, never content) is kept after account deletion and expires at the end of the month. For feedback conversations already exported, use the contact address on the About page and they will be deleted as well.

You can subscribe to The Way of Creation by email: about once a month you get one mail with what was published here since the last one – letters, Care of Souls posts, articles – and one older text from the site. Nothing else: no reminders, no extra mailings. The mails are sent through MailerLite Limited, 88 Harcourt Street, Dublin 2, D02 DK18, Ireland, under a data processing agreement with us; the data is stored in the EU (Google Cloud, Netherlands). MailerLite's own sub-processors are Google Cloud EMEA Ltd (Dublin) and Vercom S.A. (Poznań); its privacy policy is at mailerlite.com/legal/privacy-policy.

What leaves your device: the email address you enter and the language you are reading the site in. The address goes from your browser to our server function in Zurich, Switzerland (Google Cloud, region europe-west6), which passes it on to MailerLite and keeps no copy. The only thing that function holds is a short-lived counter per IP address, in memory, to limit how many requests one address can send – it exists only in the running instance and is gone after at most ten minutes.

What MailerLite stores: your email address, your language group (English, German, or Russian), your subscription status with its timestamps, and MailerLite's own delivery records. We store nothing on our side.

Double opt-in: after you sign up, MailerLite sends you one confirmation mail. Until you click the link in it, your address is stored as unconfirmed and receives nothing. Every mail carries a one-click unsubscribe link. The mails contain the site's own texts and a link back to the site. Open tracking is switched off – we do not see who opens what. Click tracking cannot be switched off at MailerLite: the links in a mail pass through MailerLite's redirect, which counts clicks on its side; we do not read those counts. Legal basis: your consent (Art. 6(1)(a) GDPR), revocable at any time via the unsubscribe link.

The donation links on this site lead to external services (Buy Me a Coffee, DonationAlerts). If you follow them, those services process your data under their own privacy policies – nothing about your visit there flows back to this site.

No accounts on the website – the email subscription is an email address, not an account. No analytics, no advertising, no tracking of any kind on the site. In the mails, open tracking is switched off; MailerLite counts link clicks on its side, and we do not read them. No sale or sharing of data. No hidden profiles of readers: the only thing the Companion remembers across conversations are the memory notes described above – written only with your consent, shown to you in full, deletable at any time. Nothing is collected about you that you cannot see. The AI features work without knowing who you are beyond what is described above.

Website: nothing is stored about you beyond the hosting provider's standard server logs. Manifest guide: nothing is stored. Subscription by email: your email address, language group, and subscription status at MailerLite until you unsubscribe, or on request; nothing on our side. Companion: open conversations only until they end (at most seven days of silence, longer only while you keep writing); conversations saved with /feedback until they have served their purpose or you ask for deletion; memory notes until you delete them, until you delete your account, or until they expire after about three months of inactivity; the waiting-list entry until the one message it exists for, or until you remove yourself; subscription status for as long as the subscription runs; usage counters and account data until you delete your account – except the current month's usage total, which expires at the end of the month (it keeps a deleted-and-returning account within the same free allowance).

Under the FADP and (where it applies) the GDPR you have the rights of access, rectification, erasure, restriction, data portability, and objection, and the right to complain to a supervisory authority – in Switzerland the FDPIC, in the EU/EEA your local data-protection authority. The fastest paths to erasure are the Companion's own commands (/delete, /delete_account); for everything else, use the contact address on the About page.

If a feature ever gains a data flow not listed here, this policy is updated first, and Companion users are asked for fresh consent where it concerns them. The complete-list promise above is the point of this document.