Hephaestus privacy policy

Hephaestus is software for products, materials, and recipes, built and operated by tlsc (tlsc.io). tlsc hosts and runs Hephaestus for each of its customers, and the people a customer invites sign in with Google to use it.

This policy explains what Google user data Hephaestus accesses, how it is used, shared, protected, kept, and deleted, and what other information Hephaestus handles. Questions go to [email protected].

Hephaestus signs you in with Google through Google Cloud Identity Platform, which requests the openid, email, and profile scopes. From Google it receives:

• Google account ID: the identifier for your Google account.
• Email address: the address on your Google account.
• Email verified: whether Google has confirmed you own that address.
• Name and profile picture: part of the basic profile that Google sign-in includes.

Hephaestus does not request or receive your contacts, calendar, files, or mail, and its servers do not keep Google access tokens or refresh tokens.

Each item is used only to sign you in:

• Google account ID: ties your Hephaestus account to the Google account that first signed in with your invited email, so no other Google account can use it.
• Email address: matched against the people your company invited.
• Email verified: sign-in is refused if Google has not verified the address.
• Name and profile picture: not used. They stay in the sign-in record that Identity Platform keeps, and are not copied into Hephaestus.

Hephaestus does not use Google user data for anything else. It never uses Google user data for:

• targeted or any other advertising
• selling to data brokers or anyone else
• training AI or machine learning models
• determining creditworthiness
• lending purposes

Hephaestus’s use and transfer to any other app of information received from Google APIs will adhere to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements.

tlsc does not sell, rent, or trade Google user data. It is shared, transferred, or disclosed only as follows:

• tlsc staff can see your email address and role to run and support the service.
• Google Cloud Identity Platformkeeps your sign-in record (Google account ID, email address, name, and profile picture) in tlsc’s Google Cloud project.
• Railway, tlsc’s hosting provider, stores the database that holds your email address and Google account ID.
• When the law requires it, tlsc may disclose data to comply with a valid legal request.

Google user data is never given to advertisers or other third parties.

• Your email address and Google account ID are stored in your company’s own database, separate from every other company. Each customer has its own hosting, run by Railway in Singapore.
• Each customer has its own sign-in space in Identity Platform, and a sign-in from another customer’s space is rejected.
• The only way in is Google sign-in. Hephaestus has no passwords to leak or guess, other sign-in methods are refused, and only people your company invited can sign in.
• Every request checks the sign-in token and the account again, so an expired token or a removed person is refused.
• Request logs record an internal user ID, never the contents of a request.

• Your email address and Google account ID are kept for as long as you have access to Hephaestus.
• When your company asks tlsc to remove you, your account is deleted and access ends on your next request. The change history still records which account made past changes.
• Deleted data can remain in backups for up to about 4 weeks.
• When a customer stops using Hephaestus, tlsc hands the service over or gives the customer a full export, then deletes its own copies.

To have your Google user data deleted, including the sign-in record in Identity Platform, email [email protected] from the address on your account. You can also remove Hephaestus’s access at any time in your Google account settings. After that you can no longer sign in to Hephaestus.

Business data. Products, materials, recipes, categories, and company details such as legal name, tax ID, and address belong to the customer. tlsc keeps them only to run their Hephaestus, for as long as the company uses it.

Change history. Hephaestus records who changed which record, when, and what changed.

Request logs. Each request logs an internal user ID, the company, the action requested, and whether it worked. IP addresses are not logged. An IP address is held in memory for a moment to stop anyone flooding the service with requests, then forgotten.

Browser storage. Your browser keeps a sign-in session so you stay signed in between visits.

If this policy changes, the new version is posted here with a new date. If Hephaestus changes how it uses Google user data, people who use Hephaestus are notified before the change takes effect.

Hephaestus is operated by tlsc. Questions or requests about privacy go to [email protected].