Privacy

Who runs this

Paper Reef is an independent personal project. Questions and requests: [email protected]. It is free, it has no accounts, and it never asks for your name, email or address.

What we keep

• Your drawings. The cut-out picture you add to a tank, the name you gave it, when and to which tank. A drawing is kept while it swims and rests — up to 30 days after its last swim — and deleted after that. Drawings people keep sending swimming become keepers and stay. A drawing you remove with ✕ is deleted at once. Drawings in the main tank are public: anyone can see them in the tank, in the gallery and on a drawing's own page. Drawings in a private tank are visible to anyone who has that tank's code.
• A device token. A random code your browser makes and keeps, so that your drawings show as yours on your phone and so that someone who is banned stays banned. It is not tied to you as a person.
• A device record. Against that token: when the device was first and last here, how many visits, how long it watched, how many drawings it added, which features it used, its country (two letters, from the network), its type (phone, computer, TV) and screen size. Kept 60 days after the last visit, then deleted.
• Chat messages (in tanks that turn chat on) are held in memory only, never written to disk, and gone after 12 hours or when the tank clears them.
• Feedback you send from the feedback button, with a way to reach you only if you type one in.
• Nothing else. No IP addresses, no names, no emails, no exact location, no cookies. Your browser's own storage keeps your token and your preferences (sound, background, theme, a tank PIN you entered).

What leaves your phone

When you photograph a drawing, the photo stays on your phone. Your phone cuts the drawing off the paper itself and sends only the cut-out. The one exception is the ✨ Cut it out with AI button: if you tap it, a reduced copy of the photo is sent once to OpenAI to cut the drawing out, and is not stored by us or shown to anyone.

Every drawing and every chat message is checked by OpenAI's moderation before anyone sees it, and a fast model looks at each drawing once to decide how it should move and, if you gave it no name, to suggest one. If you ask the AI artist to draw something, your description goes to OpenAI. OpenAI's API does not use this data to train its models.

Who else handles data

• Cloudflare sits in front of the site as the network layer and cache; it sees connection details the way any network does.
• OpenAI, as above: moderation, the AI cut-out, the AI artist, the look that picks a gait.
• DigitalOcean hosts the server, in the European Union.
• Google Fonts and cdnjs serve the fonts and the QR-code library, so those services receive the usual web request from your browser.

Children

Paper Reef is made for children drawing in a room with grown-ups — a classroom, a library, a living room. It asks for no personal information. The name you type for a drawing is shown on the screen and, in the main tank, in public: please use a nickname or the creature's name, not a child's full name. Anyone running a private tank can remove any drawing or message; in the main tank, viewers can report a drawing and three reports remove it.

Your choices

• Remove any drawing of yours from your phone's list with ✕.
• Ask us to delete everything held against your device by emailing [email protected] from the device, or with the code shown in its ⚙️ Admin link if you have one.
• Clearing your browser's site data for paperreef.com forgets your token; your old drawings then no longer show as yours.
• If you are in the EU or UK you have the usual rights to access, correct and erase your data and to complain to your data-protection authority.

Changes

If this page changes in a way that matters, the date at the top changes with it. The terms say what you agree to when you add a drawing.