Privacy policy

Undernotes is a library of independent perfume houses and their fragrances, gathered from the makers’ own websites. Nothing is sold here and there is no log-in. You can read every page without telling us anything.

Two things you type are stored on our server: a house suggestion and a smell-like phrase. A search sends what you type to the server, but nothing is kept. Your shelf stays in your browser. Each is set out below.

Suggesting a house

When you suggest a house we store what you put in the form: the house name, its website, your message if you wrote one, and your email address if you chose to give it. The email is optional and is used only to reply to you about that suggestion. With the form we also store the time and a hashed copy of your IP address. The hash is there so we can refuse more than five submissions a minute from one address; the address itself is not stored and the hash is not used for anything else. A hashed address is not fully anonymous, so we treat it as personal data and it is covered by the deletion right below.

The smell-like box

The phrase you type into the smell-like box is stored as you typed it (up to 200 characters), with a count of how often it has been asked for and when. If nobody has asked for it before, it is turned into a list of perfume notes. To do that, the phrase is sent to Anthropic, a third-party processor, which turns it into that list under Anthropic’s terms; nothing else about you goes with it. The result becomes a page on this site, at an address made from your phrase, that anyone can visit, and a phrase that has been asked for can appear in the “Most asked for” list on the smell-like page. The phrase is also written to our server log.

Please do not type anything personal into that box: not your name, not another person’s, not an address. If you have, ask and we will delete the page and the phrase.

To limit how many new translations one visitor can start, we keep a short hash of your IP address with an hourly and a daily count next to it. Those counts are deleted within three days. No address, hashed or otherwise, is stored with the phrase itself.

Your shelf

The shelf (the bookmark on any fragrance) is a list of fragrance ids kept in your own browser, in local storage under the key ifl:shelf. It stays in your browser and is never written anywhere on our side. When you open your shelf page, your browser asks our server for the details of those fragrances so it can draw the cards, the same as loading any other page; we do not store that request. A shared shelf link carries the ids after the # sign in the address, which browsers do not send to servers, so only the people you send the link to see the list. Clearing your browser’s site data clears the shelf.

Server logs

Our web server does not keep a log of page requests, so we have no record of who read what. It logs start-ups, errors and the smell-like translations described above; those lines include the phrase that was translated, not who asked for it.

• No cookies of our own. No page on this site sets a cookie.
• No analytics, advertising or tracking. No third-party script loads on any page; the fonts are served from our own server.
• No accounts. There is nothing to sign up for and no profile of you anywhere.
• No selling or sharing of data. Nothing above is sold, shared or used for marketing. The only third party we hand anything you typed to is Anthropic, for the smell-like translation described above.

Two things happen outside our server. Images of fragrances and houses, product photographs and logos, are copies stored here, so looking at a page does not contact a maker’s site. Buy links do: every one goes to a maker’s own site or to a store we do not control, and once you follow it that site’s policy applies. It may also see that you arrived from undernotes.com, as browsers normally tell a site where a visitor came from.

The public site at undernotes.com is published through Cloudflare, which sits between you and our server. Cloudflare sees every request, as any network provider in the path would, and may set a cookie of its own when it checks a request for abuse. That is covered by Cloudflare’s privacy policy, not this one.

• Suggestions stay until we have dealt with them. Nothing deletes them automatically, so if you want yours gone, ask.
• Smell-like phrases, and the pages made from them, are kept: they become part of the library. Ask and we will delete yours.
• Rate-limit counts for the smell-like box are deleted within three days. The hashed address stored with a suggestion stays with that suggestion.
• Server logs are kept in the system journal on the server, which discards old entries automatically; we do not copy them anywhere or share them.
• Your shelf stays in your browser until you clear it.

You can ask to see, correct or delete anything described here that concerns you: a suggestion you sent, a phrase you typed, the page made from it. Say which one you mean and what you want done, and it will be done. You will not be asked to prove anything beyond enough detail to find the record.

For anything on this page, use the suggestion form: the form asks for a house name, so write “privacy” there and put what you would like done in the message. It is read by the person who runs the site.

If this policy changes, the date at the top changes with it. There is no mailing list to notify, so check back here if it matters to you. The terms of use and the about page say the rest about how the site works.