Privacy Policy

What Blockout does

Blockout is a document redaction tool built by Particle AI Labs. You upload a document, we detect personal information, and you choose what to redact. The redacted file is returned to you.

Data we collect

• Account info: When you sign in via Google, we receive your name and email address from Google. This is stored in our authentication provider (Supabase) to manage your account.
• Subscription data: If you subscribe to a paid plan, Stripe processes and stores your payment information. We do not store card numbers.
• Usage data: We track the number of redactions you have performed to enforce plan limits.

Document handling

Documents you upload for redaction are processed in memory. The review session (the document and its detected entities) is held in our servers' memory and destroyed as soon as your redacted file is produced; abandoned sessions are deleted after 30 minutes of inactivity, and always within 2 hours of upload. Separately, a few processing steps (such as converting Office documents to PDF) write short-lived working files to disk. That disk is encrypted, and those files are deleted immediately after the step that produced them completes. We do not train models on your documents. Documents you choose to share via a secure link are handled differently: they are encrypted in your browser before upload, stored only as ciphertext we cannot decrypt, and deleted when the link expires or is revoked.

Blockout uses automated AI detection to identify personal information. While we strive for accuracy, no automated system is perfect. Some sensitive information may not be detected, and some non-sensitive information may be incorrectly flagged. You are responsible for reviewing all redacted output before sharing or distributing it. Particle AI Labs Ltd accepts no liability for personal information that remains in a document after processing.

AI-assisted redaction

If you use the natural-language instruction feature (describing in your own words what to remove), the text of your document is sent to Groq, an AI processing provider, to identify the phrases to redact. This happens only when you use that specific feature; standard automatic detection runs entirely on our own servers and never leaves them. Groq's processing of data sent through their API is governed by their Services Agreement and Data Processing Addendum.

Shared documents

If you create a secure share link, the redacted document is stored encrypted on our servers until the link expires or you revoke it (up to 7 days, depending on your plan). The encryption key stays with you (it travels in the link itself or is protected by a password you set), so we cannot read the contents of shared files. Shared files are permanently deleted once the link expires, reaches its view limit, or is revoked.

Third-party services

• Supabase: authentication, user management, and encrypted storage of shared documents
• Stripe: payment processing
• Groq: AI processing for the optional natural-language redaction feature
• Amazon Web Services (AWS): hosting for the application and API, on self-managed infrastructure in the AWS eu-west-1 (Ireland) region. All document processing takes place in this region.

Cookies

We use essential cookies only, for authentication sessions and theme preference. No advertising or analytics cookies are used. We measure site traffic with self-hosted, cookieless, aggregate analytics that never identify you and never leave our infrastructure.

Your rights

You can request deletion of your account and all associated data at any time by emailing us.

Contact

For privacy questions, contact hello@particlelabs.ai.