Privacy

Last updated 23 August 2026.

If you host it yourself, we hold nothing

Burnside Steps is open source, and most people run it themselves. A self-hosted relay runs on your infrastructure and files into your tracker. Your feedback, your screenshots and your users' data never reach us. There is no account, no telemetry, and nothing phones home.

This page is about the hosted service. If you self-host, almost none of it applies to you.

What we hold about you

If you use the hosted service, we hold your email address, the GitHub or Google account you signed in with (stored as that provider's user id alongside the email it gave us), an internal account and tenant id, and, if you have paid, the customer and subscription ids Stripe gave us. If you bought a Pro licence we also store the key alongside the email it was issued to. The key itself carries no personal data: it holds a licence id, the tier, and the date of issue, and nothing that identifies you.

We do not hold a password, because there isn't one. Sign-in goes through GitHub or Google and your credentials never touch us. We do not hold your card details either. Those go to Stripe and stay there.

What we hold for you, about your users

When someone submits feedback through a widget you installed, the hosted relay receives and stores, on your behalf: the title and description they wrote, a name if they chose to give one, any tags you configured, the address of the page they were on, the size of their browser window, where they placed the pin, a screenshot, a recent slice of the browser console, and the browser and operating system their request reports.

We hold that as a processor. It is your data about your users, kept so we can pass it to your tracker. We do not build profiles from it, we do not sell it, and we do not train anything on it.

The browser console, which is the part people do not expect

The widget keeps the last 50 console entries from the page it is running on, trimmed to 500 characters each, and attaches them to the report. There is an overall size cap as well, so when the entries run long you get fewer than 50 of them. The capture is there because a bug report without the console output usually costs a round trip to get it.

It also means whatever your application writes to the console can end up in a feedback report. If you log access tokens, session identifiers, or your users' personal data, that gets captured too. Look at what your app logs before you put the widget on a page that handles sensitive data.

What we never store

We never store IP addresses. A request carries one, and we use it in the moment to work out whether a single source is flooding us, whether that is feedback submissions, sign-in attempts, or licence lookups. It is used as a counter key and then discarded. It is not written to any database, object store, or log of ours.

There is no analytics on this website. No Google Analytics, no Plausible, no Segment, no pixel, no third-party script of any kind. We do not know you read this page.

There are no tracking cookies. The cookies we set keep you signed in and carry you through the sign-in handshake, and sign-in would not work without them. The widget stores four small values on your users' own devices. One is kept until they clear their browser: where they dragged the launcher, remembered per project. The other three last only for that browsing session: whether feedback was switched on, whether they have unlocked a key-protected widget, and the name they last typed into a report, so they do not have to type it again.

That last one is a person's name, and unlike the others it does leave the browser: it is part of every report they choose to send, which is the whole reason it is kept. The other three stay on the device and go nowhere.

Who else touches it

Cloudflare runs the whole service and stores everything we store. Stripe takes payments: they hold your card details, we hold only the identifiers they give us so we can tell whether a subscription is active. Resend sends exactly one email, the one carrying your Pro licence key, so it sees your address and that key. Mintlify hosts the documentation site, which holds nothing of yours.

Where it is stored

Your users' screenshots are stored in the European Union. Those are the most sensitive thing we hold, because the people in them never chose us.

Your own account data is not. Your email address, the provider id you signed in with, and your Stripe identifiers are stored in Western North America. We would rather tell you that than round it up to "the EU".

GitHub and Google are not on that list. They are where you sign in. When you do, they tell us your email address and your user id with them, and nothing else.

Where it goes because you sent it there

Feedback does not stay with us. The point of the product is to file it into Linear, GitHub or GitLab, and it goes there because you chose that destination and supplied the credentials. Once a report reaches your tracker it is in your tracker, under your agreement with them.

How long we keep it

On the free tier, screenshots are deleted 90 days after they are filed. On Pro, screenshots are kept until you delete them or close your account. Account records last as long as the account does.

What you can ask us for

Two different people read this section, and the answer is not the same for both.

If you have an account with us. Write to privacy@burnsidesteps.com and we will tell you what we hold about you, correct it, delete it, or send you a copy. You can also delete your account yourself from the dashboard, which removes the account, every project, and all stored screenshots, and cancels an active subscription. One record outlives it. If you bought a Pro licence we keep the key and the email it was issued to, because that is the proof of purchase behind a licence that never expires. Ask us and we will delete that too.

If you sent feedback through somebody else’s site. Ask that site, not us. Your report and the screenshot in it belong to them: they chose to collect it, they decide what happens to it, and we only hold it on their behalf. We are not passing you around. Acting on our own would mean deciding, on our own, that the person writing to us is the person in the screenshot, and we are not in a position to know that. The site you sent it from is.

What we have done is make sure they can actually answer you. Anyone running Burnside Steps can search the screenshots they hold, by project and by individual report, and delete any of them, from their own dashboard, without asking us and without waiting on us. If you write to us anyway, at privacy@burnsidesteps.com, we will pass your request on and tell you we have.

If you run a site that uses Burnside Steps. You are the controller for the feedback your users send you, and we are your processor. That means a request from one of your users lands with you and the deadline is yours, not ours. The Screenshots tab in your dashboard is where you answer it. We will sign a data processing agreement; ask at the same address.

A person answers these, usually within a few days. We do not charge for them.

The rest

Do Not Track. We do not track you, so there is no signal to honour and nothing changes if you send one. We say so explicitly because California law asks us to.

California Shine the Light. We do not disclose personal information to third parties for their own direct marketing, so there is nothing to request under Civil Code section 1798.83.

Changes. If this policy changes in a way that affects what we do with your data, we will say so here and update the date at the top. If the change is significant and we have your email address, we will email you.

Who we are. Burnside Steps is operated by Greenwich Steps LLC, a California limited liability company. Questions go to privacy@burnsidesteps.com.