Yankis built to be useful without being invasive. We don't sell data. We don't run third-party ads. We don't track you across the web.
When you submit a URL, we store the URL itself, the resulting yank, and basic timestamps. That's the product.
We also keep the transcript of a source for thirty days, filed against that source rather than against you, so that if the same video or episode gets yanked again nobody pays to have it transcribed a second time. After thirty days it is deleted.
Our servers also log standard request metadata — IP address, user agent, timestamp — for short periods, used only for rate limiting, abuse prevention, and operational health.
We count what happens on our own pages ourselves: a page view, a share, a copy of a link or a line's address, opening a line's context, playing a moment, jumping to a line from the map above the cards, arriving through the short address printed on a card, and following a link to a source or to a related yank. Each is one row with the page, the yank, the line, the action, and a random id that lives only in the browser tab you have open and disappears when you close it. No cookie, no IP address, no device details, no fingerprinting, no third-party scripts, and nothing that follows you onto anyone else's site.
“Customize for sharing” opens the card in ThumbCrafted, another site we run. A picture of the card travels with you. Nothing about you does, and the two sites do not share an identity for you — ThumbCrafted cannot tell us who you are, because it does not know.
While you are there, ThumbCrafted reports three things back to us about the card: that it was opened, that you changed something, and that you exported a result. That is how we judge whether the feature is worth keeping. Each report carries the yank, the line, a random id belonging to that tab of ThumbCrafted, and nothing else. Your composition — the words you add, the graphics, the file you save — is made in your own browser and never reaches us.
On a yank made from a YouTube video, “Loop this line” and “Watch the lines as a Cut” open Playback, another site we run, which plays those parts of the video through YouTube's own player. What travels in the link is the video, the start and end of each line in seconds, the yank's title and the words of the lines. Nothing about you does, and the two sites do not share an identity for you. We count that the link was opened, the same way we count a share. Playback reports nothing back to us, and nothing is saved there unless you choose to keep the Cut, which makes it yours on Playback under its own privacy policy.
Every yank gets a permanent URL designed to be shared, and each of its five lines has a permanent address of its own. Treat any URL you submit as something that may become a public artifact.
Questions about privacy: hello@yank.info.