Privacy Policy
Last updated: April 2026
Sifa ID is operated by Singi Labs, Netherlands. Contact: privacy@sifa.id
1. Who we are
Sifa ID is operated by Singi Labs, based in the Netherlands. You can reach us at privacy@sifa.id. We have not appointed a Data Protection Officer. If you have concerns about how we handle your data, contact us at that address.
Sifa is currently in alpha, meaning the product is still being shaped. This policy describes how we handle your data right now. If we make material changes to how we process your data, we will post the updated version here with a revised date and give you at least 14 days notice by email (if you have provided one) or by prominent notice on the site.
2. How the AT Protocol works
Sifa is built on the AT Protocol, an open standard for decentralised social and professional apps. On the surface, Sifa might look like any other professional network. The difference (which is a big one) is in who controls your data.
Your data lives in your Atmosphere account. Your Atmosphere account is your Personal Data Server (PDS) on the AT Protocol. Think of it as a personal database you control. Your professional profile (positions, skills, education, and everything else) is stored there, not on Sifa's servers. When you sign in, Sifa uses AT Protocol OAuth to get permission to read from and write to your Atmosphere account on your behalf.
Sifa is one app among many. Any AT Protocol app or tool can read your public records. Apps that support the Sifa profile format (id.sifa.* records) can also write or edit those records. Today that includes Sifa, Eurosky, and weareonhire.com, plus any tool that accesses your Atmosphere account directly. Changes you make anywhere are reflected everywhere.
Public means public. When you publish a record to your Atmosphere account, it is publicly readable by anyone: other apps, developers, search engines, and services that subscribe to the AT Protocol's real-time event stream. Sifa can't prevent others from reading your public profile records. That's how the protocol is designed, and it's intentional.
Your data is portable. Your data stays in your Atmosphere account. If Sifa shuts down, your profile data stays intact and any other compatible app can read it. The AT Protocol is designed to let you migrate your data to a different account provider. Most users' accounts are currently hosted by Bluesky (bsky.social), though you can also self-host or choose another provider. If you're new to the AT Protocol and want to learn more about how your account works, atmosphereaccount.com is a good starting point.
Sifa is the data controller for what it processes. Even though your profile data lives in your Atmosphere account, Sifa processes a subset of that data as described in this policy. For that processing, Sifa is the data controller under GDPR.
3. What we handle and what we don't
Sifa handles:
- Your AT Protocol identity: your handle, display name, and avatar, read from the AT Protocol network
- Your professional profile data: positions, skills, education, and similar records, stored in your Atmosphere account. These records are also written to our database when you create or update them through Sifa.
- Your activity across AT Protocol apps: if you claim your profile, Sifa checks your Atmosphere account for records from a set of known AT Protocol apps and builds activity stats from those records in our database
- Import metadata: if you import from LinkedIn, we log when the import happened and how many items were imported per category (not the content itself)
- Analytics: anonymous, aggregate page view data, no personal information
- People notes: private notes you write about other users, stored in our database (not in your Atmosphere account). Only visible to you.
- External account verifications: if you link an external account (ORCID, GitHub, LinkedIn, etc.) through Sifa, or if you've verified accounts through a service like Keytrace (which stores verifications in your Atmosphere account), we store the verification URL, status, and when we last checked it
- Server logs: request metadata for debugging and abuse prevention, including IP addresses
- Your email address: only if you choose to provide it, for notifications and/or newsletters. Always optional.
What we don't currently do:
- We don't build advertising profiles
- We don't serve ads
We don't seek out or process special category data (health information, religious or political beliefs, etc.). Our indexing is limited to professional profile fields defined in the id.sifa.* format, which aren't designed to capture this type of information. Because Sifa reads publicly available AT Protocol records, such data could theoretically appear if you've published it to another app and your cross-app activity is visible on Sifa. You can hide individual items or entire apps from your Sifa profile in your settings, but hiding something on Sifa does not remove it from your Atmosphere account or the AT Protocol, where it remains publicly accessible. If you believe special category data has been processed in error, contact privacy@sifa.id and we will investigate and remove it.
See section 12 for your rights, including how to request a copy of the data we hold about you.
Sub-processors
We don't share personal data with any third parties for their own purposes. These are the services we use to run Sifa:
| Service | Purpose | Location |
|---|---|---|
| Hetzner | Server hosting | Germany, EU |
| Scaleway | Transactional email delivery | France, EU |
4. Your profile data
When you import from LinkedIn, your browser opens and processes the ZIP file locally. You can review the extracted data and remove any items you don't want before confirming. Once you confirm, the structured data is sent to Sifa's API, which writes it to your Atmosphere account and to our database on your behalf. The raw LinkedIn ZIP file is never uploaded to or stored on our servers.
Publishing a position, skill, or other profile record means making it publicly available on the AT Protocol.
If you want to inspect or manage your records directly, you can do that through your Atmosphere account provider's tools without going through Sifa or any other specific app.
5. Cross-app activity (claimed profiles)
If you claim your Sifa profile, we check your Atmosphere account for records from a set of known AT Protocol apps (Bluesky, Tangled, Whitewind, and others we support). We read your public records and build activity statistics from them on our side. We store those statistics (which apps you're active on and approximate record counts) in our database.
We don't store your posts, photos, code, or other content from those apps. We read activity content live from your Atmosphere account each time someone views your profile and cache it temporarily (between 5 and 15 minutes depending on the content type). It's never written to our database.
You can hide any app from your Sifa profile in your activity settings. This only affects what Sifa shows, it doesn't remove anything from your Atmosphere account or the AT Protocol. To remove data from the protocol itself, delete it in the app where you originally created it.
Activity stats are refreshed roughly every 24 hours, triggered when someone views your profile.
6. Unclaimed profiles
If you haven't claimed your Sifa profile, we don't collect or store any data about you in our database. Your profile page shows only basic identity information that's already publicly available on the AT Protocol: your handle, display name, and avatar. We fetch that live from the public AT Protocol network when someone visits your page, cache it for up to 5 minutes, and don't write it to our database.
Any AT Protocol user can request removal of their unclaimed profile from Sifa, no Sifa account needed. Visit sifa.id/privacy/removal to submit a request. We'll suppress your profile from Sifa and prevent it from being recreated.
To honour your removal request permanently, we store your DID (Decentralised Identifier, a permanent unique identifier assigned by the AT Protocol that does not change even if you change your handle) and the date of your request on a suppression list. We keep this so we can't accidentally show your profile again after a future event on the network. Without it, your profile could reappear. We store nothing else about you.
7. Analytics
We use Umami for website analytics. Umami is open source, cookieless, and self-hosted on our own infrastructure in the Netherlands. No data is sent to third parties.
Umami collects anonymous, aggregate data: page views, referrer URLs, browser type, operating system, screen size, and approximate country. We can't link it back to you or your Sifa account. Umami uses no cookies and doesn't build profiles of individual visitors. You can verify this yourself: Umami's source code is public at github.com/umami-software/umami.
8. Cookies and local storage
Sifa uses one cookie:
- Session cookie: keeps you signed in. It contains an opaque identifier that points to your session in our database. Deleted when you sign out or after 180 days of inactivity.
Your light/dark mode preference is stored in your browser's local storage (via the next-themes library), not as a cookie. It never leaves your device.
That's the complete list. No tracking cookies, no advertising cookies, no third-party cookies. Our analytics tool (Umami) is fully cookieless.
Our session cookie is strictly necessary to provide the service. Under the Dutch Telecommunicatiewet (which implements the ePrivacy Directive), strictly necessary cookies do not require consent. That's why we don't show a cookie consent banner.
9. Email notifications
Your email address is entirely optional. If you choose to share it, you control what we use it for in your account settings: notifications about activity on your profile, newsletters, or both. You can withdraw your consent at any time by updating your preferences in settings or by contacting privacy@sifa.id. Withdrawing consent does not affect the lawfulness of any processing that happened before withdrawal.
We store your email address in our own database, linked to your AT Protocol identifier. Unlike your profile data, it's not stored in your Atmosphere account, because your Atmosphere account is public and you don't want your email address readable by the entire world. We don't share it with third parties. You can update or remove your email address in your settings at any time, or contact privacy@sifa.id.
10. Server logs
Our servers log request metadata (timestamps, HTTP response codes, request paths, and IP addresses) for two purposes: debugging issues and protecting the service against abuse, spam, and denial-of-service attacks. IP addresses are a necessary part of this. We don't log profile content or personal data from your AT Protocol records.
Logs are stored on our servers in Germany (Hetzner) and retained for a maximum of 30 days before being rotated. They're not stored in our application database and aren't used for analytics.
11. Account deletion
When you delete your Sifa account, we remove the following data from our database: your professional profile records, activity statistics, people notes, external account verifications, email address, notification preferences, session data, and import metadata.
As part of the deletion process, you can also choose to:
- Remove your Sifa profile data from your Atmosphere account. Sifa will attempt to delete all
id.sifa.*records from your Atmosphere account on your behalf. If your account is unreachable or your authorization has lapsed, we'll still delete our own database records, but the records in your Atmosphere account may need to be removed separately through your account provider. - Suppress your unclaimed profile. After your account is deleted, your handle may still appear as an unclaimed profile on Sifa (showing only publicly available AT Protocol identity data). You can choose to add your DID to our suppression list so your profile won't reappear.
Your AT Protocol account, Bluesky profile, posts, follows, and data from other apps are not affected by deleting your Sifa account. We can only delete what we hold: we have no control over what other AT Protocol apps or services may have indexed from the public network.
To delete data from your Atmosphere account directly, use your account provider's settings or the app where you originally created the data.
If you just want to stop using Sifa without deleting your account, you can sign out. Your profile data stays in your Atmosphere account and remains publicly visible through Sifa until you request removal or delete it from your Atmosphere account.
12. Your rights (GDPR)
Under the GDPR, you have the following rights over your personal data:
- Access: you can request a copy of all data we hold about you. Where we hold data that you did not provide to us directly (for example, public profile data from the AT Protocol network), we will tell you the source.
- Rectification: for data Sifa holds in its own database, you can request correction of inaccurate data. For profile data stored in your Atmosphere account, correction is done directly through your account provider or the app where you created the record.
- Erasure: you can ask us to delete your data
- Restriction: you can ask us to stop processing your data while a dispute is resolved
- Objection: you can object to processing based on legitimate interest
- Portability: you can request your data in a machine-readable format
- Withdraw consent: where we rely on your consent (for example, your email address), you can withdraw it at any time via your account settings or by contacting privacy@sifa.id. Withdrawal does not affect the lawfulness of processing carried out before withdrawal.
For profile data, most of these rights are already self-service: your data lives in your Atmosphere account and you can inspect, edit, or delete it directly through your account provider or compatible tools.
For data Sifa holds in its own database, use the data export tool in your account settings or contact privacy@sifa.id.
If you do not have a Sifa account, you can request a copy of any data we hold about you by emailing privacy@sifa.id with your AT Protocol handle or DID. We will respond within one month.
To request removal of an unclaimed profile, visit sifa.id/privacy/removal.
How we handle data about non-users
Some data we process comes from the public AT Protocol network rather than directly from you. For example, if someone visits your profile page on Sifa and you haven't signed up, we fetch your publicly available identity information from the network. Because notifying every AT Protocol user individually would be impractical (the protocol is open and public by design), we rely on Art. 14(5)(b) GDPR and make this privacy policy publicly available as our disclosure mechanism. You can always contact privacy@sifa.id for the full information we are required to provide under Art. 14.
Legal bases for processing
| What we process | Purpose | Legal basis | Retention |
|---|---|---|---|
| AT Protocol identity (handle, display name, avatar) | Display profiles | Legitimate interest | Cached up to 5 minutes for unclaimed profiles; stored for claimed profiles until account deletion or removal request |
| Professional profile data (positions, skills, etc.) | Display and manage your profile | Contract performance (Art. 6(1)(b)) | Until you delete the record or your account |
| Cross-app activity stats | Show activity on claimed profiles | Contract performance (Art. 6(1)(b)) | While your profile is claimed; deleted on account deletion or removal request |
| Activity content (posts, etc.) | Display activity feed | Legitimate interest | Not stored; cached 5 to 15 minutes depending on content type |
| People notes | Your private notes about other users | Contract performance (Art. 6(1)(b)) | Until you delete the note or your account |
| External account verifications | Verify linked accounts (ORCID, GitHub, etc.) | Contract performance (Art. 6(1)(b)) | Until you remove the linked account or delete your account |
| Import metadata (date, item counts) | Admin analytics | Legitimate interest | Until account deletion |
| Email address | Notifications and/or newsletters | Consent | Until you remove it or delete your account |
| Server logs (incl. IP addresses) | Debugging and abuse prevention | Legitimate interest | Maximum 30 days; not stored in application database |
| Analytics data (browser, OS, country) | Understand site usage | Legitimate interest | Aggregate only; not linked to individuals |
| Suppression list (DID + date only) | Permanently honour removal requests | Legitimate interest | Indefinitely. Deleting this record would allow the same DID to be re-indexed, defeating the purpose of your removal request. This is the minimum data necessary. |
| Session cookie | Authentication | Strictly necessary (ePrivacy exemption); Art. 6(1)(b) | Deleted on sign-out or after 180 days of inactivity |
Where we rely on legitimate interest as the legal basis, we have conducted a documented Legitimate Interest Assessment covering the three-part balancing test required under Art. 6(1)(f). You can read it at sifa.id/privacy/lia.
Complaints
If you think we're not handling your data correctly, you have the right to lodge a complaint with the Dutch Data Protection Authority (Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens) at autoriteitpersoonsgegevens.nl.
13. Service availability
Sifa is provided as-is and without warranty of any kind. We do not guarantee uninterrupted access, accuracy of data, or any specific level of service. We are not liable for indirect, incidental, or consequential damages arising from your use of Sifa.
Because your profile data is publicly available on the AT Protocol, we cannot prevent other apps or services from accessing it. Sifa is not responsible for how other AT Protocol applications, services, or individuals use data that is publicly available on the protocol.
14. What happens if Singi Labs is acquired or dissolves
If Singi Labs is acquired or merges with another entity, data stored in Sifa's own database (activity statistics, email addresses, notification preferences, people notes, and other data listed in section 3) may be transferred to the new owner as part of that transaction. Your Atmosphere account data is not part of this, it stays in your Atmosphere account and is not ours to transfer. We will notify you by email (if provided) or by prominent notice on the site before any such transfer, and the new owner will be bound by this privacy policy until they publish a replacement.
If Singi Labs dissolves, we will delete all personal data in our database. Your Atmosphere account data is unaffected, as it is stored independently from Sifa.
15. Governing law
This policy is governed by the laws of the Netherlands. Any disputes arising from it are subject to the jurisdiction of the competent courts in the Netherlands, without prejudice to your rights as a consumer under the laws of your country of residence.
16. Contact
For privacy questions, data requests, or anything related to this policy, reach us at privacy@sifa.id. We aim to respond within 7 days and will always respond within one month of receipt. Where a request is complex or you have submitted multiple requests, we may extend this by a further two months. If we need to extend, we will let you know within the first month and explain why.
If your request relates to data in your Atmosphere account, we may refer you to your account provider, since we don't control that data.