Privacy Policy

CanvasFlow is run by Sahil Barak, an individual based in India (“we”, “us”, “our”). We decide how and why your personal data is used. Under India’s Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023, that makes us its “Data Fiduciary”.

For anything about your privacy, email privacy@canvasflowapp.com.

Only what CanvasFlow needs to work:

• Your account: your name, email address and password. We store the password only as a one-way hash, so we can’t read it. Also your profile photo if you upload one, your cursor colour, and when you agreed to our Terms of Service and which version.
• If you sign in with Google or GitHub: your account ID with them, your email address, your name and a link to your profile photo. We ask them for nothing more, and we don’t keep their access tokens.
• What you create: your boards and everything on them, images you upload, board and workspace names, who you share boards with and the access you gave them, requests people make to join your boards, share links (stored only as a hash), and which boards you let other websites embed.
• Links you put on a board: when you paste a link, our server visits that page to read its title, a short description and its picture for the link card. We keep that preview and show it to anyone who pastes the same link. The site sees our server, not you. Embedded pages, such as a video, load from their own site in the browser of whoever opens the board, so that site sees them as it would on its own pages.
• Diagrams you generate: when you ask CanvasFlow to draw a diagram from a description, the description is sent to Anthropic, whose AI writes the diagram, and the diagram is put on your board. We don’t keep the description. We keep only how many diagrams you’ve generated each month, to apply your plan’s limit.
• If you buy a plan: you pay Polar, our payment provider, and your card and billing details go to Polar and its payment processor, never to us. From Polar we keep which plan your workspace has, how often it’s paid, how many seats it has, when it renews or ends and whether a payment failed. When you open Settings → Billing, we show your card’s brand, last four digits and expiry date and your invoices, read from Polar each time rather than stored.
• If you join a board as a guest: the name you type, and which board you joined.
• Security records: for each device you sign in on, the device and browser, an approximate location (city and country, worked out from your IP address by our network provider) and when it was last used. We also keep a security log of important events, such as signing in and out, password changes and resets, creating, sharing or deleting boards, and changes to workspaces and their members, with the IP address and device each came from. Failed sign-in attempts are stored against a scrambled (hashed) form of the email address used.
• Usage analytics, only if you allow it: which features you use, such as the tools you pick, boards you create, and when you share, export or comment; whether you use a pen, touch or a mouse; and your browser, device type and screen size. Each record carries your account ID and the kind of page you were on, never the page’s address. It never includes what’s on your boards, board or file names, comment text, your name or your email address, and we don’t keep your IP address with it. We don’t record your screen or every click.

We don’t use advertising or tracking tools, and we don’t buy data about you from anyone. Usage analytics is off unless you turn it on.

• To run your account: to create it, sign you in and keep you signed in.
• To provide CanvasFlow: to store and sync your boards, and show them to you and the people you share them with.
• To email you about your account: to confirm your address, reset your password, and warn you about security events such as a password change. We don’t send marketing emails.
• To keep things secure: to show you where you’re signed in, stop misuse such as password guessing, and investigate problems.
• To improve CanvasFlow, if you allow usage analytics: to see which features are used and where people get stuck.
• To answer you when you contact us.
• To meet our legal duties, such as answering lawful requests and keeping records the law requires.

We use your data only for these purposes. We don’t sell it, use it for advertising, or send your boards to AI services.

Under the DPDP Act, this is data you give us so you can use CanvasFlow, used only for that. Usage analytics is the one exception: we collect it only with your consent, which the editor asks for once. You can withdraw it as easily as you gave it, by turning off Usage analytics in Settings → Data & Privacy.

• People you work with. The people you share a board with see what’s on it, and your name and profile photo while you’re on it together. Your cursor moves live on their screens; we don’t save it.
• Anyone who sees a board you embed. If you turn on Embed on a website for a board, anyone who can see a page with its embed code can view what’s drawn on the board — its shapes, text, images and link cards — but not its comments, who is on it or who changed what. Turning it off stops every copy of the code at once.
• Service providers that run parts of CanvasFlow for us, and handle your data only to do that:
  • Vercel, which hosts the website and the editor
  • Fly.io, which runs our servers, in Singapore
  • Neon, which stores our database, in Singapore
  • Cloudflare, which protects our network and stores uploaded images and photos
  • Resend, which sends our emails
  • Polar, which sells our paid plans and takes payments, only if you buy one
  • Zoho, which hosts the mailbox your emails to us arrive in
  • Anthropic, which turns a description into a diagram, only when you ask for one
  • PostHog, which stores usage analytics in the European Union, only if you allow it
  • Google and GitHub, only if you sign in with them
• When the law requires it, or to protect the safety and rights of our users, the public or CanvasFlow.
• If a company takes over CanvasFlow. If we set up a company to run CanvasFlow, as our Terms of Service allow, your data moves to it under this policy.

We don’t sell or rent your personal data to anyone.

Our servers and database are in Singapore, and some providers, such as Cloudflare, Vercel and Resend, work through networks around the world. So when you use CanvasFlow, your data is stored and handled outside India. Usage analytics, if you allow it, is stored by PostHog in the European Union, and descriptions you ask us to turn into diagrams are handled by Anthropic, a company in the United States.

Indian law allows this, and lets the government restrict transfers to particular countries. We’ll follow any such restriction.

• Your account and the boards you own: until you close your account. We then delete them within 30 days, as our Terms of Service say.
• Boards you delete: hidden from you straight away, but kept until your account is closed.
• Guest names: kept with the board the guest joined. They aren’t deleted automatically yet.
• Signed-in devices: until you sign out, and never longer than a year.
• The security log: kept to protect accounts, and not deleted automatically yet. When an account is closed, its entries stay but are no longer linked to it.
• Failed sign-in attempts and password-reset requests: 24 hours. Password-reset and email-confirmation links: 7 days.
• Usage analytics: up to one year. Turning it off stops anything new being recorded; to have what was already recorded deleted, email us.
• Emails you send us: as long as we need them to deal with what you asked.

Our database provider keeps backups for a short time, so deleted data can remain in a backup until it expires.

We use only the cookies CanvasFlow needs to work, none for advertising or analytics, which is why there’s no cookie banner:

• cf.access and cf.refresh keep you signed in.
• cf.guest keeps a guest on the board they joined, for up to 7 days.
• cf.oauth.next and cf.oauth.terms carry a Google or GitHub sign-in through the trip to that provider and back, for up to 10 minutes.

The editor also keeps copies of the boards you open in your browser, so they keep working offline and catch up when you reconnect, along with your editor settings. Clearing your browser’s data for CanvasFlow removes them.

You can also draw at app.canvasflowapp.com without an account. That board, and any pictures you add to it, are kept only in your browser: we never receive them, and clearing your browser’s data for CanvasFlow deletes them for good.

If you allow usage analytics, the editor also keeps a random ID in your browser’s storage (not a cookie), so PostHog can tell one visit from the next. Nothing is stored before you allow it, and turning usage analytics off deletes it.

• Every connection to CanvasFlow is encrypted (HTTPS).
• Passwords are stored only as one-way hashes, and so are share links and the links in our emails.
• You can see the devices you’re signed in on, and sign out of all of them, in Settings → Account & Security.
• Repeated sign-in attempts are limited, to stop password guessing.
• Only we can reach the systems that hold your data.

No system is perfectly secure. If a breach affects your personal data, we’ll tell you and India’s Data Protection Board, as the law requires.

Wherever you live, you can:

• See your data: ask for a summary of the personal data we hold about you, and who we’ve shared it with.
• Correct it: change your name and photo in Settings, or ask us to fix anything else.
• Export your boards: Settings → Data & Privacy → Export all boards downloads every board you own, with its images, and your library. Save to… in the editor’s menu saves a copy of one board.
• Delete it: close your account in Settings → Data & Privacy → Delete account, or ask us to.
• Withdraw consent to anything you consented to, such as usage analytics, which you can turn off in Settings → Data & Privacy.
• Nominate someone to use these rights for you if you die or become unable to.

To use any of these, email privacy@canvasflowapp.com from the address on your account, so we know the request is yours. We’ll respond as quickly as we can, and within 90 days at most.

If you’re unhappy with how we’ve handled your data, tell our Grievance Officer, Sahil Barak, at privacy@canvasflowapp.com. We’ll resolve your complaint within 90 days.

If you’re still not satisfied, you can complain to the Data Protection Board of India.

CanvasFlow is for people 18 and over, as our Terms of Service say, so we don’t knowingly collect data from children. If you think a child has an account, email privacy@canvasflowapp.com and we’ll delete it.

We’ll update this policy when CanvasFlow changes. The date at the top shows when it last changed. If a change is significant, we’ll tell you by email or in the app before it takes effect.

For anything about your privacy or your personal data, email privacy@canvasflowapp.com. For help with your account, email support@canvasflowapp.com.