Last updated · 14 October 2026
Privacy
The short version. Furlough is a public record of what members say about each other. Your vouches, endorsements, badges, standing and the profile you write are meant to be seen — that is the product, not a side effect.
Everything else is yours. We do not sell anything to anyone, we do not run advertising, and we do not track you across other websites. Your birth details are stored and never published. The map knows your city and never your address.
Who we are
Furlough operates furlough.com and phidao.com. For questions about this policy, or to ask for a copy of your data or to have it deleted, write to joe@furlough.com.
What we collect
When you sign in
We never store a password — there isn’t one. You sign in through one of four doors, and each gives us a different, small thing:
| Door | What we receive and keep |
|---|---|
| Discord | Your Discord user ID, username, avatar, the date you joined the Furlough server and which roles you hold there. Signing in with Discord requires being a member of that server. |
| Your Google account identifier, your email address, and whether Google has verified it. Nothing else — no contacts, no Drive, no calendar. | |
| Email link | Your email address. The link is a signed token that expires in fifteen minutes; we store no verification table and no password. |
| Phantom wallet | Your public wallet address and a signature proving you hold it. We never see a private key or a seed phrase, and cannot move anything. |
What you tell us
The intake quiz and your profile are the bulk of it, and all of it is optional except where marked: your name and what to call you, your city, languages, role, company, industry, what you do, how long you have done it, links to your work, what you are looking for and what you offer, your availability, your work history, and your answers to the personality and values questions.
Your birth date, time and place are stored and never published. They exist so the quiz can work out a sun, moon and rising sign. Only the sun sign can ever appear on your profile, and only if you switch it on.
What other members do
Vouches, skill endorsements and event attendance are records of something somebody else did about you, and they carry that person’s name. Your φ reputation, Phi Power, standing and badges are computed from them.
Messages
We store messages between members so they can be delivered and read again. They are not end-to-end encrypted: an administrator with database access could read them, and we may read a specific conversation if we have to investigate abuse. Do not send anything here you would not want read in that circumstance.
Technical data
Our hosting provider records ordinary server logs — IP address, request path, timestamp, browser — for security and debugging. We set cookies to keep you signed in and to remember your theme. We do not use advertising or cross-site tracking cookies, and there is no analytics product following you around the web.
What is public
This is the part worth reading twice, because Furlough is a public record by design. Public means visible to anyone on the internet, not only to signed-in members:
- Your handle, display name, avatar and headline.
- Your standing, φ, Phi Power, badges and your position in the register.
- Who vouched for you, who you vouched for, and who endorsed you for what.
- The profile sections you have left switched on.
- Your city, as a dot shared with everyone else in that city.
You control a good deal of this. Your profile has per-section visibility switches, your standing can be hidden, your star sign is off unless you turn it on, and you can remove yourself from the map entirely while staying in the directory. What you cannot hide is the existence of a vouch somebody gave you — it carries their name as well as yours, and a reputation record you could quietly edit would not be worth anything.
Where your location comes from
You pick a city from a list. We store that city and the coordinates of its centre — never a street address, never a precise location, never anything read from your device. Everyone in a city sits on the same point on the map. The city list ships with the site, so searching it sends nothing to anybody: no geocoding service is contacted and no third party learns what you typed.
Who else sees your data
We do not sell personal data and we do not share it for advertising. We use:
| Who | What for |
|---|---|
| Vercel | Hosting and server logs |
| Neon | The database everything is stored in |
| Discord | Sign-in, roles, and the bot that posts in the server |
| Resend | Sending sign-in links, if you use the email door |
| Sign-in, if you use the Google door |
We may also disclose data where the law requires it, or where it is necessary to investigate abuse or protect members.
How long we keep it
While your account exists, and afterwards only as described below. Sign-in links expire in fifteen minutes. Server logs are kept by our host on their own schedule.
Your choices
Changing things
You can edit your profile and your answers at any time from your profile page or by retaking the intake quiz, and the visibility switches are in the same place.
Getting a copy, or getting deleted
There is no delete button yet. Write to joe@furlough.com and we will delete your account and the personal data attached to it, or send you a copy of it, within 30 days.
One honest limit: vouches and endorsements you gave other people are part of their record as well as yours. We will remove your name from them, but we will not delete the credential itself, because doing so would quietly change somebody else’s standing without their knowledge.
If you are in the UK or EU
You have the right to access, correct, delete, restrict and object to our use of your data, and to receive it in a portable form. Write to the address above and we will act on it. You also have the right to complain to your data protection authority.
Children
Furlough is not for anyone under 18. If you believe a child has an account here, tell us and we will remove it.
phidao.com
phidao.com is the same product with unfinished features switched on for testing. It is excluded from search engines, and data created in features marked as being in test may be reset. Your account, your profile and your reputation are shared between the two sites — they are one record, not two.
Changes
If we change this in a way that matters, we will say so in the Discord server rather than quietly changing the date at the top.