What the website and the waitlist keep, and for how long

When you join the waitlist

Three things are kept:

1. The e-mail address you typed, in lower case.
2. The line about what you would make first, if you wrote one.
3. The time you joined.

They are kept in the Loam service's database (Amazon DynamoDB, in AWS's Ohio region), encrypted at rest by AWS. There is no backup copy of the list.

What is not kept

Not your network address, your browser or anything about your device. The website sets no cookies, runs no scripts and loads nothing from any other site: no fonts, no analytics, no tracking.

On the way in, Amazon CloudFront delivers the page and counts requests from each network address for a few minutes, so that one network cannot flood the form. Those counts are not logged. The service's own log has a line for each request it answers, with the time and how long it took, not what you typed; it is deleted after 14 days.

Who sees it, and what it is for

Only the person who runs Loam. Your address is used to send you an invite code, by hand, and for nothing else: no newsletter, no other mail, and it is never sold or given to anyone. The line about what you would make helps decide who gets a code first.

How long

On the waitlist: until you get a code or ask to come off, and at most one year from the day you joined. After a year the entry is deleted automatically, within a few days of that date. Joining again with the same address changes nothing and does not restart the year.

Once you get a code: your address comes off the waitlist. It stays as the note on your invite code, and on your Loam account if you join with it, so that it is known whose account it is. It stays there until you ask for it to be deleted; that is done by hand, within a week, as below.

To come off the list

Write to the address that sends the codes, from the address on the list, and the entry is deleted within a week. You can also ask what is kept about you.