Privacy Policy
This Privacy Policy explains how Kanto collects, uses, stores, and discloses information when you use the Kanto website, accounts, boards, threads, replies, moderation tools, and related services. Kanto is operated by Axel in Estonia. If you have questions about this policy, you can contact axeeeeeel@proton.me.
1. Scope
This policy applies to information processed through Kanto itself. It covers information you provide directly, information generated through your use of the service, and limited technical and operational information needed to run the service. It does not cover third-party websites, services, or communities that may be linked from posts, profiles, or moderation notices.
2. Age Requirement
Kanto is intended for adults. The current recommended minimum age is 18 years old. Because Kanto may host broad, blunt, or controversial speech and community-created discussion, the service is not designed for children. If you are under 18, you should not create an account or use the service.
3. Information Kanto Collects
Kanto collects only the information needed to provide the features the app currently offers, plus limited operational telemetry.
Account and profile information
When you create or maintain an account, Kanto may process your email address, username, password-based authentication records, verification status, profile picture, avatar color, biography, display settings, and account timestamps.
Content you create
Kanto processes the content you submit to the service, including communities you create, threads, replies, reports, moderation actions, votes, follows, notifications, profile settings, uploaded images, and messages sent through in-app moderation or account workflows.
Technical and session information
Kanto processes session data needed to keep you signed in and secure your account. This may include session identifiers, expiration data, IP address, and user agent information associated with sessions and security checks. Kanto also stores request-throttling and rate-limit events needed to slow down spam, brute-force behavior, and abusive automation.
Operational analytics and crash information
Kanto itself does not currently run a large custom analytics program. However, infrastructure providers may generate limited analytics, performance, request, and crash information needed to host and stabilize the service. At the moment, that operational telemetry may come from Vercel (hosting and edge runtime) and Supabase (database infrastructure). Both providers operate under their own privacy and data processing policies. Where request-throttle or rate-limit events are recorded by Kanto itself, those records are kept for operational abuse control rather than for advertising or behavioral profiling.
What Kanto does not currently claim to collect beyond existing features
Kanto does not promise extra categories of tracking beyond the features the app currently provides and the operational logs reasonably generated by the hosting stack. If a new category of tracking or processing is introduced later, this policy may be updated.
4. Why Kanto Uses Information
Kanto uses information for the following purposes:
- To create and maintain user accounts.
- To provide communities, threads, replies, voting, follows, search, moderation, and profile features.
- To verify email addresses and send important service-related messages.
- To store and deliver moderation requests, privacy requests, correction requests, and related replies inside the service.
- To protect the service from abuse, spam, fraud, rate-limit evasion, and account misuse.
- To investigate reports, enforce site rules, and respond to moderation or legal issues.
- To debug errors, review outages, and improve reliability and security.
- To comply with applicable law where required by law.
5. Emails and Notices
Kanto sends verification emails as part of account activation. Kanto may also send occasional serious service-related notices when reasonably necessary, such as account security alerts, important policy or service changes, or critical account and moderation communications. Kanto does not currently operate paid marketing subscriptions or product-newsletter programs.
6. Legal Bases and Processing Position
Where applicable, Kanto generally processes information to provide the service you asked to use, to pursue legitimate interests in keeping the service running and safe, and to comply with legal obligations. Some processing is also based on your direct actions within the product, such as creating content, joining a board, editing a profile, or requesting account support.
7. Sharing and Disclosure
Kanto does not sell your personal information. Kanto may disclose information in the following limited situations:
- To infrastructure and hosting providers that help operate the service.
- To the email provider used to send verification or operational messages. Kanto currently supports Resend or Brevo depending on configuration.
- To infrastructure and database providers that process operational logs, crash information, or hosting telemetry. Current providers include Vercel and Supabase Postgres.
- When disclosure is required by law, subpoena, court order, or another lawful process.
- In connection with a business transfer, acquisition, restructuring, or asset sale involving the service.
Kanto does not state that third-party providers “read everything,” but data sent to those providers necessarily passes through their systems to perform the service they provide.
8. How Kanto Handles Data Internally
Kanto’s application code talks to the database server-side only. Database credentials are not exposed to browsers or public client code. Account settings and similar mutating endpoints also use request parsing, input normalization, and body-size limits to reduce malformed or abusive payloads. This does not eliminate all application risk, but it does change how and where personal data is processed compared with a browser-direct database model.
9. Public Content and Visibility
Communities, threads, replies, usernames, and other social signals may be visible to other users and visitors depending on the feature and your settings. If you post publicly, you should assume that other people can read, quote, screenshot, copy, and discuss that content. Privacy settings may limit some visibility in some places, but no social product can guarantee complete invisibility once you share content with other people.
9a. Anonymous Posting
Communities can optionally allow anonymous threads and anonymous replies. When you post anonymously, your username and profile are not shown to other users on that post. Instead, you are identified only by a short session-scoped anonymous code visible within the thread (e.g. "Anon#4f2c"). This code does not persist across separate threads or sessions.
Anonymous posts are not fully invisible to Kanto. Your account is still linked to anonymous content server-side for moderation, rate-limiting, and abuse-prevention purposes. Site moderators and the service operator can associate anonymous posts with accounts when necessary for safety or legal reasons. Anonymous posting is a display-level privacy feature, not a guarantee of true anonymity.
If you post anonymously, you may also receive a one-time deletion token that allows you to delete your own post without logging in. That token is shown once and is not stored in a recoverable form by Kanto after that initial display.
10. User Rights and Requests
Kanto intends to support the following account-holder rights, subject to legal and technical limits:
- Request a copy of your account data.
- Request correction of inaccurate account information.
- Request deletion of your account and related data.
- Request review of privacy-related concerns.
- Appeal certain moderation actions.
Kanto now provides in-product tools in Settings for data export and for submitting privacy, correction, and moderation appeal requests. Those requests are stored as in-product request records so they can be reviewed and answered inside the moderation workflow. Email notifications about those requests are limited to the configured privacy-handling audience rather than the full moderator pool. You can also contact axeeeeeel@proton.me.
11. Deletion and Retention
Kanto’s default position is that account and content deletion is intended to be permanent in the overwhelming majority of cases. When an account is deleted, Kanto aims to remove the user and related service data rather than keep long-term archives. Kanto does not intentionally promise indefinite moderation-log retention for deleted users where that is not needed.
Time-bound operational records are also subject to scheduled retention enforcement rather than being left in the database indefinitely by default. Session rows are purged after expiry, verification artifacts are purged after expiry, and selected abuse-prevention telemetry is purged on defined short retention windows.
The current deletion flow is broader than a profile-only delete. It is intended to remove the user record together with linked sessions, account records, verification rows, follows, votes, community profiles, notifications, owned communities, authored threads, authored replies, direct messages, personalization data, saved-community state, labs participation and preferences, and directly associated moderation/report records that are tied to the deleted account.
That said, no deletion system can honestly promise perfect erasure from every transient cache, backup snapshot, or provider log immediately. Some short-lived operational traces may persist temporarily as part of normal infrastructure behavior. Kanto will still treat deletion requests as permanent deletion requests, not as soft-hiding requests, unless clearly stated otherwise in a specific workflow.
12. Security
Kanto uses reasonable measures intended to protect account data and reduce abuse, including password-based authentication, email verification, session handling, server-side database access, request normalization, request-throttle and rate-limit controls, moderation tooling, and hosting-layer operational protections. More detail appears on the Security page. No service can guarantee absolute security, and you use the service understanding that determined attackers, software defects, provider failures, or human mistakes can still create risk.
Direct messages are currently encrypted at rest in Kanto’s application database and are no longer copied into notification previews, but they are not end-to-end encrypted. Kanto’s server can still process message content to deliver the feature. Users who require cryptographic sender-to-recipient confidentiality should not treat Kanto direct messages as an end-to-end encrypted channel.
13. International Processing
Kanto is operated from Estonia, but infrastructure providers may process data in other countries depending on hosting, delivery, and support architecture. By using Kanto, you understand that your information may be processed in jurisdictions outside your home country.
14. Changes to This Policy
Kanto may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. Updated versions will be posted on this page with a revised “Last updated” date. Material changes may also be communicated through the service or by email when appropriate.
15. Contact
Operator: Axel
Service: Kanto
Country: Estonia
Email: axeeeeeel@proton.me
This document is provided for operational transparency and product use. It is not legal advice to you, and it is not a promise beyond what the service can reasonably provide in practice.