Privacy

Your phone number is never shown to anyone

We ask for it once, to check you are a real person with a real number. That check is what keeps most fraudsters off a board like this.

It is never displayed on your profile, never included in a listing, never given to another user, and never sold. Other people see only the name you choose.

What we store

We do not ask for your address, date of birth, immigration status, identity documents, or payment details. We never will — Sefer handles no money.

• Your phone number, and the date it was verified.
• A display name, and optionally a city and neighbourhood, if you enter them.
• The listings you post, including photographs you upload.
• Messages you send to other users on Sefer.
• Reports you make, and moderation decisions about your posts.
• Basic technical records needed to run the site.

Who else processes it

Sefer is small and runs on other people's infrastructure. These companies necessarily handle some of your data:

Each processes data on our instructions to make Sefer work. None is given your data to use for their own purposes.

• Supabase — the database and accounts. Everything above is stored there.
• Vercel — hosting. Sees the requests your browser makes.
• Twilio — sends your verification code, and therefore receives your phone number.
• Anthropic — screens submissions. Receives the text of a listing and its cover photo, and returns a decision. It does not receive your phone number, your name, or your messages.
• Resend — will send email notifications if you provide an email address. Not currently active.

About the automatic screening

Every listing is read by an automated system before it appears, and messages are scanned for known scam patterns so we can warn whoever receives them.

For listings, what is sent is the title, description, category, price, city, and the cover photograph. For messages, the check runs on our own servers against a pattern list, and the message is not sent anywhere outside Sefer.

Nobody reads your conversations for any other reason.

What is public

Your listings and the display name attached to them are visible to anyone on the internet, including search engines. Assume anything you write in a listing can be read by anyone.

Messages between you and another user are private to the two of you. An administrator can access them only where investigating a report of harm.

How long we keep it

Listings expire after 30 days and can be renewed. A deleted listing is hidden immediately and its record is kept so that a moderation decision can be explained later.

If you delete your account, your profile and listings are removed. Some records connected to reports of harm may be kept longer, because deleting them would erase the evidence of what happened to someone else.

Cookies and measurement

One cookie, to keep you signed in. That is all we set.

We count page visits in aggregate to know whether the site is being used. That measurement is cookieless, does not identify you, and does not follow you to other websites. There is no advertising, and no advertising trackers.

Your choices

You can edit or delete any listing, and delete your account entirely, from your Account page. You can ask us what we hold about you.

You cannot remove your phone number while keeping the account, because verification is what the account is.

Law enforcement

We will provide information where the law genuinely requires it. We will not hand over information about our users voluntarily, and we do not collect immigration status, so we cannot disclose what we never asked for.

This is a draft

Sefer is new and this policy has not yet been reviewed by a lawyer. It describes the system accurately as built. If anything here matters to you in a serious way, ask us and we will answer plainly.