Privacy First

Privacy isn’t a feature we bolt onto Onetime Secret — it’s how the service is built. That shows up less in what we add than in what we leave out. This page covers the practices we deliberately avoid, why we avoid them, and how you can check that we mean it.

Industry Standards We Skip

We don’t use the tracking and marketing tools most services treat as table stakes:

• Analytics packages that track user behavior
• Social media integration buttons
• Advertising networks
• A/B testing frameworks
• Marketing automation tools
• Third-party tracking pixels

Minimal Email

The same restraint applies to your inbox. We send no marketing newsletters, promotional offers, or re-engagement campaigns — you’ll only hear from us for the service you’re using, a notice we owe you, or news you opted into. No email we send contains tracking pixels or click-tracking links, so we don’t know whether you opened it or what you clicked. Our Communication Philosophy breaks down exactly what we send and why.

Why This Matters

These choices come down to three things we care about deeply:

• Your data is yours. We don’t treat user information as a resource to mine.
• The tool should just work. When you need to share something sensitive, reliability matters more than anything else.
• Trust is earned by what we choose not to do. Every tracker we skip, every campaign we don’t send, is a small proof of where our priorities lie.

Trust Through Transparency

Any service can claim to respect privacy. We’d rather make our claims checkable:

• Open source. The core service is open source — you can read the code that handles your secrets, or run it yourself.
• Plain-language policies. Our Privacy Policy states what we collect and why, in words you don’t need a lawyer to parse.
• Documented security practices. Security & Trust explains our security model, how we protect data, and how to report a vulnerability.
• Direct dialogue. Questions, feedback, and criticism are welcome — contact us and a person will read it.

The Real Impact

Skipping these practices isn’t just philosophy — it changes the product:

• A leaner, faster service with fewer moving parts
• A smaller attack surface with fewer third-party dependencies
• Your data stays under your control instead of scattered across ad networks
• Our engineering time goes to the product, not to conversion funnels

Looking Forward

We’ll keep choosing simplicity and privacy over marketing reach. That means we may grow more slowly than services that optimize for engagement — and we’re fine with that. A privacy tool earns its reputation through consistent, quiet reliability.