How Veil protects your data
Last updated: 11 March 2026
The short version: We built Veil to protect your privacy, not compromise it. Your personal data is encrypted at rest, never sold, never shared with advertisers, and never used to train AI models. We collect the minimum data needed to protect you, and nothing more.
What data we collect and why
Information you provide
- Account details — Your email address and name, used for authentication and to send you alerts. Authentication is handled by Clerk, a SOC 2 Type 2 certified provider. We never store your password.
- Monitored identities — Email addresses, phone numbers, names, and usernames you ask us to monitor. These are encrypted immediately upon storage using AES-256-GCM encryption and are only decrypted momentarily to perform scans on your behalf.
- Household members — Names and relationships of family members you add, so we can provide per-member monitoring and reporting.
Information we gather on your behalf
- Breach data — We check your monitored identities against known breach databases to alert you to compromised credentials.
- Public mentions — We search publicly visible social media posts and news articles for mentions of your name or handle. We store only a short snippet (up to 280 characters) of each mention, encrypted at rest. We do not store author profiles, engagement metrics, images, or full post content.
- Data broker listings — We track which data broker sites have your information and the status of removal requests.
Encryption and storage
All sensitive personal data is encrypted at rest using AES-256-GCM with unique encryption keys derived per household. This means:
- Your monitored emails, phone numbers, names, and alert snippets are stored as encrypted ciphertext in our database.
- Each household has a unique encryption key derived using PBKDF2 with 100,000 iterations.
- Even in the unlikely event of a database breach, your personal data would be unreadable without the master encryption key.
- Encryption keys are stored separately from your data, in Cloudflare's secrets management system.
How we use external services
To protect you, we interact with several external services. Here is exactly what data reaches each one:
Breach monitoring (HaveIBeenPwned, Dehashed)
Your email addresses are sent over encrypted connections (HTTPS) to check against known breach databases. No other personal data is shared. These services do not retain your query.
Social media monitoring (Apify)
We send your public name or social media handle as a search query. This is information that is already publicly visible. We never send your email, phone number, household details, or any private identifiers to social monitoring services.
AI-powered classification (Anthropic Claude)
When we find a public mention, we send only the short text snippet (up to 280 characters of publicly visible content) and the display name of the person being monitored to our AI classifier. This allows us to determine whether a mention is concerning (threats, impersonation, bullying) or routine (neutral press coverage). We do not send your email, phone number, or any encrypted personal data to the AI service. Your data is not used to train AI models.
Email notifications (Mailgun)
Your email address is used to send you security alerts and daily digest reports. We do not share your email with any other party.
What we never do
- We never sell or share your data with advertisers, data brokers, or any third party for commercial purposes.
- We never log personal data — our application logs contain only technical identifiers, never your emails, names, phone numbers, or alert content.
- We never use your data to train AI models — the snippets we classify are processed in real-time and not retained by our AI provider.
- We never store your password — authentication is handled entirely by our certified auth provider.
- We never access your social media accounts — we only search publicly visible content, with no authenticated sessions or cookies.
- We never monitor private messages, DMs, or non-public content.
Access control
Every query to our system is scoped to your household. It is architecturally impossible for one household to access another household's data. This is enforced at the database query level, not just at the application level.
Data retention
Your monitoring data is retained for as long as your account is active. Alert history is preserved so you can review past incidents and track resolution. If you close your account, all associated data — including encrypted identities, alerts, and household information — is permanently deleted.
Your rights
You can at any time:
- View all data we hold about you via your Veil dashboard.
- Delete any monitored identity, family member, or alert from your account.
- Export your data by contacting our support team.
- Close your account and have all your data permanently removed.
Infrastructure
Veil runs on Cloudflare's global network, which provides:
- HTTPS encryption for all data in transit (enforced at the network level).
- DDoS protection and edge security.
- Serverless compute with no persistent servers to compromise.
- Data processing at the edge, close to you, with no centralised data warehouse.
Changes to this policy
We will update this page if our data handling practices change. Significant changes will be communicated to active users via email. The "Last updated" date at the top of this page reflects the most recent revision.
Questions?
If you have questions about how we handle your data, contact us at privacy@veilprivacy.app.