Privacy notice
Effective 2026-10-29. Six Vines Farm LLC operates plumbspec, plumbspec.org and support.plumbspec.org, and is responsible for the personal data described here. This notice says what we hold, why, for how long, and who else receives it.
The website
The requirements check on plumbspec.org runs entirely in your browser and sends nothing.
Your account
Your email address is the account. We keep it encrypted, under a key of its own, and look it up by a keyed digest rather than by the address itself. Signing in sets one cookie, plumbspec_account, which keeps you signed in for up to 30 days; it is used for nothing else. An address that is never confirmed is deleted after 7 days.
When we send you mail — a sign-in link, a notice about a case, an answer you asked to be told about — the message waiting to be sent holds the address it goes to until it is sent, and then the address is erased from it.
To stop the service being used to flood somebody's inbox, we record the network address each request to send mail came from, and limit how many one address may make in an hour. Those records are kept.
Support cases
What you write in a case, its replies, and any files you attach are stored encrypted. The facts about a case — when it was opened, its state, which account it belongs to — are stored as they are. Withdrawing a case stops it but does not erase it. Mail sent to our support address is kept as it arrived.
When a case needs a person, the people who answer cases are told in a private Telegram group, and the notice carries what the case says so they can act on it. It does not carry your email address. Our copy of the notice is erased once it is posted, and withdrawing a case removes its notices from the group.
The question box
A question typed into the box is stored with the time it was asked and nothing that identifies you. If the knowledge base cannot answer it, its wording is passed to the people who answer cases. If we publish an answer, it becomes a public page.
If you leave an email address to be told when it is answered, the address is stored encrypted under a key used for that one mail and destroyed once the mail is queued, and the queued mail forgets it once it is sent. We keep a keyed digest of it, the question, and the network address it came from, so the same address cannot be signed up over and over.
What you hand over to be converted or reviewed
Documents and code you hand over for conversion or for the deep review are stored encrypted, each file under a key of its own, and kept with your account until you have them deleted. A file we could not read is recorded by its name and why, and nothing of its contents is kept.
Answers written by AI, and the model provider
We use Anthropic's Claude models through Anthropic's API. Anthropic receives the questions typed into the box together with our published knowledge base. For subscribers' work it also receives what that work needs: passages of documents you upload for conversion or review, the specification chapters reviewed, and the text of closed cases, from which we draw lessons for the knowledge base. What you hand over for conversion is sent first to be counted, which is how the page can give its price, and then, once you start it, to be read: a document a passage at a time, a specification under review a chapter at a time, and code one program at a time, with the copybooks it copies and the job steps that run it. We do not send it your account's email address. Anthropic processes this under its own commercial terms and privacy policy.
Payment
Paddle is the merchant of record: it collects your payment and billing details and handles tax, receipts and refunds under its own privacy policy. The checkout page is the one page of ours that loads Paddle's script. From Paddle we keep the subscription and customer reference, its state, the number of seats and the period paid to, and for each payment its reference, amount, currency and date — none of your financial information.
Who else
Besides Anthropic, Paddle and Telegram as described above, the service runs on servers we rent and sends and receives mail through a mail provider; they hold what passes through them only to provide that service to us. We do not sell personal data, and share it with nobody else unless the law requires us to.
Your choices
Your account pages show your cases, members, keys and billing, and your results can be downloaded as a file. To have your account and what it holds deleted, ask from your account or write to us; a person acts on it, by destroying the keys your encrypted data is held under, which also makes the copies in our backups unreadable. To ask what we hold about you, or to correct it, write to us.
Changes and contact
When this notice changes, the new one is published here with a new effective date. Questions about it go to contact@plumbspec.org.