Privacy Policy

Who we are

Naming Thing is a lab project operated by Minute.tech. This policy explains what we collect when you use it, why, and where it goes.

The short version

• Your names are yours. We claim no ownership over anything you name here (see the terms).
• We never sell your data, and we don’t use it for advertising.
• Your briefs and results stay with your account. A share link opens only for the people you give it to.
• The only others who see your data are the providers that run the service, listed below, and only to do that job.

What we collect

• Account: your email address, used to sign you in with a magic link.
• Session records: when you sign in, our auth system stores a session with your IP address and browser user-agent, used for security and abuse prevention.
• Your activity: the naming briefs you submit and the names generated for them, the domains, handles, and keywords you check, your thumbs-up and thumbs-down on names, and the items you save to shortlists — so your history, votes, and shortlists work.
• Searches without an account: you can run a few name generations and keyword checks a week without signing in. To meter those we set an anonymous visitor cookie and store a salted hash of your IP address alongside each search — the hash can’t be turned back into the address, and neither is linked to a name or email. The brief and results of those searches are stored the same way as for accounts.
• Billing: if you subscribe to a paid plan, you enter your payment details on Stripe’s checkout page, not ours — we never see or store your card number. We keep your Stripe customer ID, whether your subscription is active, and when it renews, so we know which plan you’re on.
• Usage analytics: we use Vercel Analytics, which collects aggregate, privacy-focused usage data (page views, country, device type). We don’t run advertising trackers.

Cookies

We set the cookies needed to keep you signed in, plus one anonymous visitor cookie (nt_vid, kept for a year) that counts free searches when you aren’t signed in. Nothing else: no advertising or cross-site tracking cookies.

How we use it

To run the service: generate names, answer availability checks, show your history and shortlists, keep accounts secure, prevent abuse, and understand aggregate usage so we can improve things. We do not sell your data, and we don’t use it for advertising.

Where your data goes

The service is built on a small set of providers that process data on our behalf:

• Vercel hosts the site and provides analytics; our database runs on infrastructure provisioned through it.
• Anthropic receives the text of your naming brief to generate name suggestions, and the name and context of each keyword check to judge what the web turned up (including, when no search provider is configured, running the web search itself).
• SendGrid receives your email address to deliver sign-in links.
• Stripe processes payments for the paid plans. It receives your email address and name from us, and collects your payment details and billing address directly. Stripe keeps billing records under its own privacy policy.
• Domain data sources — registry RDAP servers, Cloudflare, Fastly, and Porkbun — receive the domain names you search so we can answer availability and pricing. These lookups are made from our servers and carry only the searched name, not your identity.
• Keyword-check sources — Google results via Serper.dev, the YouTube Data API, and the US Patent and Trademark Office’s open data API — receive the name being checked (and, for web results, the short context you typed) so the check can report who else is using it.
• Social platforms are queried the same way for handle checks: only the handle being checked is sent.

Every set of generated names also has a share link (/s/…) that shows the names and the reasoning behind them to anyone who has the address, without signing in. It shows the names, not your brief. Links use long random ids and are marked to keep search engines from indexing them, but treat a link you send as public: there is not yet a way to switch one off.

If you follow a registrar link to buy a domain, you leave our service and that registrar’s own privacy policy applies. Some of those links are referral links (see the Terms).

Retention and deletion

We keep your account data, history, votes, and shortlists while your account exists; deleting the account deletes all of it. To have your account and its data deleted, or to request a copy of what we hold about you, contact us through minute.tech from the email address on the account. Payment records Stripe holds for a subscription are kept as long as tax and accounting law requires, even after the account is deleted.

Anonymous search records (the ones tied only to the visitor cookie and hashed IP) are kept to run the weekly free-search meter and to spot abuse. They are not tied to an account, so there is nothing to request under a name; clearing the cookie disconnects your browser from them.

Security

Traffic is encrypted in transit, sign-in is passwordless (magic links, so there is no password for us to lose), and access to production data is limited. No system is perfectly secure, so we can’t guarantee absolute security — but we keep the amount of data we hold small.

Children

The service isn’t directed at children under 13, and we don’t knowingly collect their data. If you believe a child has created an account, contact us and we’ll delete it.

Changes

If this policy changes, we’ll update the effective date above. Material changes to what we collect or share will be called out on the site.

Contact

Privacy questions and requests: reach us through minute.tech.