Privacy
Last reviewed: 9 August 2026
The short version: The Lantern stores absolutely nothing. The Postcard keeps your photo until midnight in your city and then deletes it — and before keeping it, it strips the EXIF, which is where the exact spot you took it is written. The Lighthouse stores one thing, your email address, and only because there’s no other way to tell you it’s your turn to write; it deletes itself thirty days after you stop coming. El Puente stores today’s inscriptions and yesterday’s, and doesn’t even know whose they are. There’s no analytics, no profiles, no advertising, and nobody anything is sold to.
Who is responsible
Behind insomne there is a person, not a company. Their identifying details — name, ID and home address — are not published on this page, for the same reason this site doesn’t ask you for anything it doesn’t need: it’s somebody’s home address and it would be in plain view of anyone.
They are available to anybody entitled to demand them and are handed over without further formality: the Spanish Data Protection Agency, the courts, law enforcement and any other competent authority. Also to any person who needs them in order to exercise their rights or to bring a claim, by asking at the address below.
For anything to do with your data, including exercising your rights: mantente@insomne.es. Replies come within the one month the regulation allows, and almost always much sooner.
What is processed, what for, and for how long
The Lantern
Nothing is stored anywhere. The whole conversation lives in the server’s memory while the lantern is lit and disappears as soon as it goes out: there is no database, no file, no copy. The nicknames make themselves up and are never used again.
The Lighthouse
| What | What for | Legal basis | How long |
|---|---|---|---|
| Your email address | To confirm it’s you and to tell you if you’re drawn | Consent (art. 6.1.a GDPR), given when you confirm the link | Up to 30 days after your last visit; then it deletes itself |
| Which language you were last here in | To write to you in it. The “it’s your turn” letter goes out hours later, with nobody in front of a screen to ask | Performance of the service you asked for (art. 6.1.b) | With your address: it goes when that goes |
| When you last wrote a night | So that nobody writes twice in the same day. There is one lighthouse per time zone, so this can no longer be checked by looking at the night: you have to look at the person | Performance of the service (art. 6.1.b) | It’s a timestamp, not a diary: it doesn’t say which night it was or what it said. It goes with your address |
| That you signed up for a night, and your place in the queue | To make the draw and pass the pen on if you don’t write | Performance of the service you asked for (art. 6.1.b) | 7 days |
| The text you write | To show it that night | Performance of the service (art. 6.1.b) | Wiped at dawn. Only the last line survives, one more day |
| Your IP | To know what time zone you’re in, to count which countries things happen in, and to stop abuse | Legitimate interest (art. 6.1.f) | Not stored on disk or in memory. The place is looked up in a table on the server itself, without writing anything down; of the country only a number is left — “this many times in Mexico” — which expires after 30 days and leads to nobody. The attempt counter lasts 1 h |
The text you write is anonymous: it is never shown next to your address, and whoever reads it has no way of knowing who you are.
The Bridge
What you write on a brick is kept until the next day and then deleted: today’s bridge and yesterday’s, and nothing further back. Who wrote it is not stored. The only thing next to each inscription is a random number that comes from a cookie in your browser, and it serves one purpose: knowing you already laid your brick today. That number knows nothing about you and goes with the day.
Your IP is used the same way as in The Lighthouse — to know what zone you’re in, to count which country a brick is laid from, and to stop abuse — and is not stored on disk.
Knowing where you are is not asked of anybody: it’s looked up in a table that lives on the server itself. Your address doesn’t leave here for that. The table is DB-IP’s IP to City Lite de DB-IP, con licencia CC BY 4.0.
The Globe
This one keeps what you write — a question and, the next day, an answer — and there is one thing worth understanding before the table, because it changes what everything else means: there is no row per person, but one per distinct sentence, with a number beside it. If a thousand people write the same thing, that is one single row saying “a thousand”. There is nowhere that says who wrote what.
| What | What for | Legal basis | How long |
|---|---|---|---|
| The question or answer you write | Showing it over the planet and counting how many people said the same | Performance of the service you asked for (art. 6.1.b) | Until the three-day round ends. When the next one starts, everything from the previous one is deleted, not just the old part |
| How many people wrote that same thing | Knowing what the world is asking itself, which is what the app is about | Performance of the service (art. 6.1.b) | It goes with the sentence |
| The language it is written in and the country code it was written from | Showing it in the reader’s language and spreading it over the planet | Performance of the service (art. 6.1.b) | They go with the sentence. They are two letters — “ES”, “MX” — attached to a text, not to a person: there is nothing next to them that leads to anybody |
| That you have already asked, or already answered, this round | Keeping it to one per person per round | Performance of the service (art. 6.1.b) | It lives in your browser, in a signed cookie that carries which round it is. There is no list of people here to check it against |
| Your IP | Knowing which time zone you are in, counting which countries things happen in, and stopping abuse | Legitimate interest (art. 6.1.f) | Same as the others: not stored on disk or in memory |
What you write is anonymous: it is not stored next to your address, your email, your IP or any number that leads back to you. And what comes out at the end of the round — the world’s question and what the world answered — quotes nobody: it is a summary written from the grouped sentences and their counts.
The Postcard
This one keeps an image you upload, which is the most delicate thing this house stores, so it is worth saying exactly what happens to it.
The photo that arrives is never stored as it came. It is opened, resized and written again here, and what comes out of that is a new file that keeps nothing of what it carried inside: the whole EXIF tag goes, including the GPS coordinates of where it was taken and the camera’s serial number. They are not deleted afterwards: what gets stored is written by this server.
Your postcard does not land where you are. It lands in one of the twenty spots your city has, spread a few kilometres around its centre and picked by a number. This server does not know your exact location and does not ask for it: all it looks at is which city you are in, in the same local table the other apps use.
| What | What for | Legal basis | How long |
|---|---|---|---|
| The image, already rewritten by the server | Showing it on the map that day | Performance of the service you asked for (art. 6.1.b) | Until midnight in the city where it was left. Then the file is deleted |
| The line you write on the back, if you write one | Reading it when the postcard is opened | Performance of the service (art. 6.1.b) | It goes with the photo |
| That you have already left yours today | Keeping it to one a day | Performance of the service (art. 6.1.b) | It lives in your browser, in a cookie with the date signed. There is no list of people here to check it against |
| The fingerprint of a removed image | So that it cannot be uploaded again | Legitimate interest (art. 6.1.f): keeping out what was already removed | The only thing in this app that lasts more than a day. It is not a photo and cannot rebuild one: a few dozen bytes taken from its shapes and colours |
| Your IP | Knowing which city you are in, counting which countries things happen in, and stopping abuse | Legitimate interest (art. 6.1.f) | Same as the others: not stored on disk or in memory |
A postcard is anonymous. Who left it is not stored: next to the image there is no address, no email, no IP and no number that leads back to you.
And if you come across something that should not be there, the button on the postcard itself does two things: it hides it from your view immediately — that happens entirely in your browser and is not sent anywhere — and it flags it for review. Flagging does not store who flagged it.
Notifications
The Lantern and The Lighthouse can tell you about two or three things that happen in the small hours: that the street is opening, that it’s closing, that the lighthouse has somebody to write, that it has lit or that it has gone out. It’s voluntary and off by default. You turn each one on from the bell at the top right, and off the same way.
If you turn it on, only what’s needed to knock on that door is stored: the address your browser gives for receiving notifications — a long address on a server run by Google, Mozilla or Apple, depending on your browser — two keys for sealing the envelope, which notifications you want, your clock’s time zone — because The Lantern’s street opens at each person’s hour and the lighthouse lights at each place’s — and which language to write them in. Your name, your email, your city and your IP are not stored.
The text of the notification is encrypted from here and only your browser opens it: the notification server it passes through cannot read it. Nothing that was said in a conversation, and nothing the lighthouse says, is ever sent that way; only that something happened and at what time.
It’s deleted in three cases: when you turn it off, when your browser tells us that address no longer exists, and after ninety days without you opening the app again.
Who else sees it
Nobody buys or receives any of this for their own benefit. Four services are involved along the way, and they are these: an artificial intelligence one that checks the text before it lights, the one that delivers the emails, the one that serves the site, and — only if you turned notifications on — the notification server run by your browser’s maker. Each one sees only its own part, and only for that.
Some are outside the European Economic Area. Those transfers rely on the European Commission’s standard contractual clauses or on adequacy decisions, depending on the case. If you want to know exactly which ones, that’s no secret: ask at mantente@insomne.es.
Where artificial intelligence is used
Where there’s text other people are going to see, and it’s worth saying plainly: what is written in The Lighthouse and The Bridge is checked by an artificial intelligence system before being published, to make sure it doesn’t break the rules of use. A machine does it, not a person.
It’s used nowhere else: not to choose whose turn it is to write in The Lighthouse — that is a draw — not to order the queue, not to decide where your brick lands, not in El Farolillo, and not to build profiles or analyse anybody. Your address isn’t attached to the text, nor is anything that identifies you, so the system doesn’t know whose words it is reading.
In The Postcard it works the other way round, and it is worth knowing: images are not reviewed when they are uploaded. One is reviewed when someone flags it as something that should not be there, and only then a small copy of that image is sent to the same system to say whether it has to be taken down. Nothing identifying anyone is sent with it: not who uploaded it, not who flagged it.
It is not an automated decision about you within the meaning of article 22 GDPR: it produces no legal effects and does not significantly affect you, and the only thing it decides is whether that particular text is shown that night. Even so, if you think it got it wrong you have the right to have a person look at it: write to mantente@insomne.es.
Your rights
You can ask for access to your data, for it to be corrected, for it to be deleted, for its processing to be restricted, you can object, or you can take it elsewhere. In The Lighthouse there is also a shortcut: the “Forget me” button on the page itself deletes your address there and then, without writing to anybody or waiting for any deadline.
For everything else, write to mantente@insomne.es. If you think it hasn’t been done properly, you can complain to the Agencia Española de Protección de Datos.
Minors
This is not for anybody under fourteen, which is the age from which you can consent to the processing of your own data in Spain. If you’re younger, don’t leave your email here.
This house can be seen from anywhere, and the age is not the same everywhere: across the European Union it runs from thirteen to sixteen depending on the country, and outside it there are different rules, sometimes stricter. The most protective of the ones that apply to you is the one that counts: if the age where you are is higher than fourteen, that’s the one that applies to you.
How it’s kept
Everything is encrypted in transit. Passwords don’t exist because there are no
accounts: you come in through a single-use link that expires in fifteen minutes. The cookie
that remembers you is signed, is HttpOnly and no script can read it. The keys
sent by email are stored hashed, not in the clear.
If this changes
The date at the top changes. If the change affects something you consented to, you’ll be told by email before it’s applied.
← back to insomne