Terms & Privacy

The gist

• Tangent is free, and you can use all of it without ever making an account.
• If you do sign in, the only things stored are your email, your synced interests, and any passkeys you add — and you can delete the whole account, and everything in it, whenever you want.
• No ads, no tracking cookies, no selling your data. Usage stats are anonymous.
• The writing is Wikipedia's, used under its license; please don't abuse the service.

Using Tangent

Tangent is provided free and as-is, with no warranty of any kind. It's a reading toy; it may change, break, or go offline at any time, and we're not liable for anything that follows from using it. The article text, summaries, and images come live from Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons under their own licenses (see About for the attribution) — that content is theirs, not ours, and its accuracy is on Wikipedia.

In return, just be reasonable: don't hammer or try to overwhelm the service, don't use it to break the law or infringe others' rights, and don't attempt to attack, probe, or scrape it in bulk. If you sign in, keep your email and devices secure — anyone who can read your email or use your passkey can reach your account.

What's yours, and what we store

By default Tangent keeps nothing about you on a server. The interests that tune your feed and the trail you leave live in your browser's local storage, and the feed itself is built on your device — you can wipe all of it anytime from the interests panel.

Signing in is optional, and adds little on the server: your email address (so you can log back in and sync across devices) and a copy of that interests list. If you register a passkey, the server also keeps its public key and a device label so you can recognize and manage it. The email is used to send your login link or code — nothing else. We don't email you newsletters, and we don't share or sell any of it. Your browser is still the source of truth; the server copy is just a backup so your feed can follow you to another device.

How it's kept safe

• Login codes and session tokens are kept in our database only as one-way hashes, so a leak of it can't be replayed as your login.
• Passkeys keep their private key on your own device; the server only ever sees the public half, which can't sign in by itself.
• The one cookie Tangent sets is an essential sign-in cookie (HTTP-only, same-site). There are no advertising or cross-site tracking cookies.
• Your data lives in Cloudflare's infrastructure, which hosts and protects the service.

Usage, measured anonymously

To understand how Tangent is used and keep it working, we record basic, aggregate usage — things like how many articles get served, liked, or branched from, and which themes are popular. These are simple aggregate counts with no profile attached and no cookies: no name, no email, no account id, and no IP address tied to them. They tell us what's happening in general, never what you specifically did.

Deleting your data

Your account is yours to erase. Deleting it from your account settings permanently removes everything tied to it — your email, your synced interests, your passkeys, and every session — in one step; there's no soft-delete or hidden retained copy. You can also revoke an individual passkey without deleting the account, and you can clear the on-device data anytime from the interests panel.

Questions, or want a copy of your data or help removing it? Email help@tangent.page.