Patchwork Labs

Privacy policy

The short version: we collect as little as we can, we never sell it, and you can email us any time to see or delete what we have. Here is the longer version, in plain English.

Last updated October 23, 2026.

What we do with your data

The plain-English guide to ID checks, the video call (never recorded), your demographic answers, deleting your account, and the one thing we keep after you leave.

This website

patchworklabs.org has no accounts, no analytics, no ads, and no tracking cookies. Our hosting provider (Vercel) keeps standard server logs, things like IP addresses and browser info, for a short time to keep the site online and secure. That’s it.

What we collect, and why

Email

When you email us with a question, a donation, or a project pitch, we keep your name, address, and what you wrote so we can reply and follow through.

The Slack

Our community runs on Slack, so Slack's own privacy policy covers the platform itself. Anything you post in channels is visible to other members.

Your Weave account

Weave is our sign-in for the Slack and our apps. It keeps your name, email address, birthday and profile, and the groups and apps you use. We ask for your birthday because members must be 13 or older, and members under 18 need consent from a parent or guardian.

Project Ganymede

To give you access to compute we ask for your name, email, and what you’re building. Shared infrastructure keeps usage logs so we can keep it healthy and fairly shared. Program resources also need an ID check. Read what we do with your data to see how the check works and what we keep.

Hardware grants

Shipping parts to you requires a shipping address. We use it to send the grant and share it only with the carrier delivering it.

What we promise

  • We never sell or rent your information to anyone.
  • We don't run ads or ad trackers, here or anywhere else.
  • We share information only with the services that keep things running (like our web host, Slack, or a shipping carrier), or if the law requires it.
  • We only ask for what a program actually needs to work.

Members under 18

Many of our members are minors, and we take that seriously. We collect only what a program needs, and nothing here is ever used for advertising. If you’re a parent or guardian, you can email us any time to see what we have about your kid, or ask us to delete it.

Members under 18 need consent from a parent or guardian before they join the Slack or use our apps. We email the parent or guardian a link. When they give consent, we keep their name, email address and typed signature, encrypted. We also keep the time, their IP address, their browser and an identifier for their device, and use these only to check that the consent is real.

  • We keep a consent and the parent or guardian's contact details while the member is under 18 and has an account. When the member turns 18 or deletes their account, we delete them.
  • If a parent or guardian does not answer, we delete their name and email address 30 days after the link expires.
  • A parent or guardian can take their consent back at any time from the link in their email.

Questions and requests

Want to see what we have about you, fix something, or have it deleted? Email [email protected] and we’ll take care of it. We’re a small team of volunteers, but we answer.

If this policy changes, we’ll update this page and the date at the top. Big changes get announced in the Slack.