Privacy.

1What we collect

Now, before accounts open: what you put in the hold or sponsor form — your email address, the facility, your relationship to the person inside, and which lane you chose. Payments run through Stripe; we see that you paid and the last digits of the card, never the full card number.

Once accounts open: the case number, the public filings we retrieve against it, the Bureau of Prisons records you send us — the categories are listed in the terms, section 8, and the list is closed — the kites the person inside sends, and the answers that go back. Also the emails you send us; a person reads those.

What we do not collect, at all: anything the prosecution produced in discovery, the presentence report, material under a protective order, and photographs, video or audio. We do not accept these, and our own court access cannot reach sealed or restricted filings. There is no setting that turns this on.

Always: the minimal technical logs any web host keeps — IP addresses and requests, held briefly for security. This site sets no advertising cookies and runs no analytics trackers.

2The case record

The record is the most sensitive thing anyone will ever hand us, and it is treated that way. It is used for exactly one purpose: indexing and answering questions about that case, for that seat. It is not browsed by staff out of curiosity, not shared between seats, not used for marketing, and not sold — to anyone, ever. Staff access is limited to what is needed to run the service and to help when you ask for help.

Documents are turned into text when they arrive, and the original is discarded along with any images embedded in it. What we hold is what the pages say, not the pages.

None of it is used to train AI models — not ours, not anyone's. Documents pass through AI infrastructure to be read and answered (section 4), under agreements that forbid the provider from keeping or training on them.

3What the facility sees

Kites travel through the messaging system the facility already uses. The facility monitors its own system. Assume everything sent through it — questions and answers alike — is read by the facility. That is outside our control, it is stated on every page of this site, and no part of Kite Slip claims or implies otherwise. Nothing sent through the service is privileged or confidential.

The case record itself does not pass through the facility's system. We retrieve the filings, you send the Bureau of Prisons records, and both stay on our infrastructure; only the questions and answers travel as messages.

4Who touches the data

No one buys it and no one rents it. A short list of providers process it so the service can exist, each bound by contract to use it only for that:

• Stripe handles payment. Your card details live with them, not us.
• Our hosting provider serves the site and stores the data, encrypted.
• An email provider delivers receipts and the queue updates described on the hold page.
• AI infrastructure providers process documents and questions to produce answers, under terms that bar them from retaining or training on the content.
• The facility's messaging vendor carries the kites. It is the facility's vendor, not ours, and its own rules and monitoring apply to everything it carries.

Citation checks run against public court records; checking a citation sends the citation, not your file.

5Sponsors and families

Sponsors are told the facility and the month a seat was placed. Never a name, a case, or a story. A sponsored family is never told who funded their seat, and a sponsor is never told whose seat they funded. There are no exceptions to this, including in sponsor reporting, marketing, and thank-you notes.

6If someone demands your data

This audience has earned the right to a straight answer here. If we receive a subpoena, court order, or other legal demand, we disclose only what we are legally required to disclose, we push back on demands that are broader than the law requires, and we tell the account holder what was demanded and what was produced unless a court forbids us from doing so. We do not volunteer information to law enforcement or to facilities.

Worth saying plainly, because it cuts both ways: almost everything we hold is already public or already the government's. The filings come out of the public court record, and the Bureau of Prisons records come from the Bureau of Prisons. A demand aimed at us is asking for material the government can mostly get without us. We still push back, and we still tell you.

The part that is genuinely ours to protect is the questions — what the person inside chose to ask, and when. Those travel through the facility's monitored system and are visible to the facility already (section 3), which is exactly why we will not pretend to you that they are private.

7How long we keep things

Questions and answers: 30 days after the last message in a conversation, then deleted. Not "deleted" in the sense of hidden from you — removed from the database by a job that runs every day. The clock runs from the last time you added to a conversation, not from when you started it, so a conversation you are still having does not disappear out from under you mid-thread; when you stop, the whole thread goes 30 days later. We chose a bounded window rather than keeping nothing, so you can come back to an answer you have not sent yet; we chose 30 days rather than forever, because this is correspondence about someone's case and the safest amount of it to be holding is the least that is still useful.

They are encrypted before they reach our database. The question you type and the answer we write are encrypted by the application, with a key the database does not have. Encryption "at rest" protects against a stolen disk; this protects against anyone holding a database connection, which is the more realistic risk and the one most companies quietly do not cover.

Your account: kept while the seat is active. Close it and it is deleted within 30 days — sooner if you ask. Ask by email; no form, no reason required.

What we never keep: we do not store a projected release date, even though the Bureau's public locator returns one. We discard it the moment we see it, because this product must never assert a release date and the safest way to keep that promise is to not hold the number at all.

Copies you send onward are not ours. Once you paste an answer into your own message to your person, that copy lives in the facility's system on the facility's schedule. We cannot delete it, and it is monitored. That is true of everything sent through those systems and Kite Slip does not change it.

7.1If someone demands your records

Be clear-eyed about this, because the alternative is a false sense of safety. There is no privilege here. Kite Slip is not a law firm, you are not our client, and nothing you type is protected the way a conversation with your lawyer would be.

If we receive a subpoena, court order, or other lawful demand for your records, our posture is: we require legal process rather than handing anything over on request; we tell you before we produce anything unless we are legally barred from doing so; we produce the narrowest set of records the demand actually reaches; and we cannot produce what we no longer have, which is the practical reason the retention window above is 30 days rather than indefinite.

8Your choices

Email hello@kiteslip.com to see what we hold about you, correct it, export it, or delete it. We honor these requests for everyone, in every state — not only where a privacy statute makes us. Some states give you specific rights with specific names; whatever your state calls them, the address is the same and the answer is yes.

Every email we send about queue movement or updates has a working unsubscribe. Receipts and refund notices still go out — those are about your money, not marketing.

9Security

Data is encrypted in transit and at rest, access is limited to the people who need it to run the service, and payments never touch our servers. No one gets to promise perfect security, so we will not. If a breach ever affects your data, we will tell you what happened, what was exposed, and what we are doing about it — promptly and in plain language.

10Who this service is for

Accounts are opened by adults, 18 or older, outside. The service is not directed at children and we do not knowingly collect information from them.

11Changes

If this policy changes in a way that matters — especially anything in sections 2, 5, or 6 — account holders get an email at least 30 days before it takes effect, saying what changed in plain language. We will not weaken what this policy promises about a file we already hold.

12Questions

hello@kiteslip.com. A person reads it and a person answers it.