Yaarbal — Privacy Notice

1. Overview

This Privacy Notice describes how yaarbal processes personal data in connection with the Service. EU users are in scope of this notice. Yaarbal is committed to compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and other applicable privacy laws. This notice supersedes the prior privacy page at yaarbal.app/privacy.

Yaarbal is a peer-to-peer inference routing network. Prompts you submit are routed to independent peer operators (seeders) who run the model inference. The tracker (yaarbal's central component) handles peer discovery, credit settlement, and rate limiting — but does not store your prompt text. The peer operator receives and processes your prompts directly.

2. Data We Process

The following table describes the personal data elements processed by the yaarbal tracker and network, the purpose and lawful basis for processing, and the retention period for each element.

Data Element	Purpose	Lawful Basis	Retention
Prompt text	Inference routing to peer seeder	Contractual necessity	Not stored by tracker; visible to serving peer only during inference
Ephemeral peer ID (`yaarbal-ephemeral-peer-id-v1`)	Credit ledger; rate limiting	Legitimate interest (service operation)	Until localStorage cleared by user
IP address (request origin)	Rate limiting; abuse prevention	Legitimate interest	Hashed/truncated; ≤30 days
Credit balance	Service operation; payment settlement	Contractual necessity	Duration of service use
Ed25519 public key (`peer_id`)	Identity; settle-auth verification	Contractual necessity	Duration of seeder participation
Inference usage metrics (token counts, timestamps)	Service operation; billing	Legitimate interest	Aggregates only beyond 30 days

3. Data Retention Summary

Prompts and generations are never stored server-side. Your prompt text and the model's generated text are processed in memory by the serving peer operator and discarded when the request completes — they are never written to any log, metric, ledger, backup, or state file. This was verified end-to-end by a 15-surface canary sweep. The full, versioned policy is published at docs/privacy/data-retention.md.

What the network does keep, and for how long (all under the legitimate-interest lawful basis of service operation and abuse prevention):

Seeder connection logs (your IP + peer ID, operator-side): retained for a 30-day window, then rotated out.
Credit ledger rows (peers and escrow_events, keyed by your pseudonymous Ed25519 peer_id): no automatic expiry — the credit economy and reputation math require durable rows — but erasable on request under your right to erasure.
Abuse reports (operator-only): the reporter contact and free-text details are retained for 180 days, then anonymized. The origin IP is stored only as a truncated hash, never in raw form.
Your chat history stays on your own device in your browser's local storage under the yaarbal-chat-*-v1 keys. It is never sent to any server. You can wipe all of it at any time with the in-app “Clear all chat history” control.
Product analytics are cookieless and aggregate-only: the tracker counts anonymous product events (a Prometheus counter labelled only by event name and surface — never by user, session, or IP), and the landing page uses Cloudflare Web Analytics (no cookies, no consent banner, no personal data). Neither carries any way to identify you.

4. Your Rights

If you are located in the European Union or another jurisdiction with applicable privacy rights, you may have the following rights with respect to your personal data:

Right of access: You may request a copy of the personal data we hold about you.
Right to erasure: You may request deletion of your personal data, subject to our legal obligations and legitimate interests.
Right to data portability: You may request your data in a structured, machine-readable format.
Right to object: You may object to processing based on legitimate interest.
Right to lodge a complaint: You have the right to lodge a complaint with your local data protection authority.

To exercise your rights, contact us at privacy@yaarbal.app. We will respond within the timeframe required by applicable law (typically 30 days).

5. Contact

Questions about this Privacy Notice should be directed to privacy@yaarbal.app.