Privacy

The short version

Essential keeps the least it can to send you a good digest: your email address, the topics you choose, what you tell us about your work, and your feedback on what we send. We don't sell data, run ad trackers, or read your inbox.

What we collect

• Waitlist: your email address, the fields you picked, the invite code you joined with (if any), and the campaign name in the link you followed (if any).
• Account: your email address and a sign-in identifier from Google or from our email sign-in link.
• Preferences: the fields and niches you confirm, why you read (for example founder or researcher), what you never want to see, your delivery days and time, how many minutes you have on weekdays and weekends, and the reading level you want (introductory, practitioner or expert).
• Your work, if you tell us: what you wrote about your work and this quarter's decisions, the companies and products you named in it, and a short summary (a few sentences) that we use to explain why each piece matters to you. When you tell us what to change about your digest, we add a sentence or two about it to that summary and discard the rest of what you wrote.
• What your work depends on: the tools, platforms and companies we watch for you, which of your topics are part of your job and which you read for interest, and what you’re working on now. We read these from what you tell us, your shared context and what you read, and show them in Settings, where you can change any of them.
• Your context, if you share it: when you add a link or a document, we read it once and keep only what we learned from it: your industry, topics, and the companies and products that matter to you. We never store the file or a copy of the page, and removing a source in Settings removes what it taught us.
• Your reading: which pieces we sent you, which ones you open, your thumbs up and down, “too basic” and “too advanced”, saves and deep-dive requests. Saving a piece or asking for its deep dive follows that story for seven days, so new pieces on it come back to you; we keep which stories you follow until then. Once a month we note that we asked whether your focus has changed.
• Abuse protection: to limit automated sign-ups, we count requests per network using a one-way scrambled (hashed) form of your IP address. We never store the address itself, and the counts are deleted within a day.

Links in your emails

Each link in a digest is personal to you. It opens Essential’s page for that piece without signing in, records that you opened it, and lets you rate or save that one piece. Links stop working after 90 days. If you forward a digest, whoever opens its links can read those pages and rate those pieces as you, so forward with care.

What we never touch

• Google sign-in asks only for your identity and email address. We never request access to your mail, contacts, calendar, or files.
• When you describe your interests in your own words, we turn them into topics, keep the topics you confirm, and discard the text you typed. (What you write about your work is the exception above, and only because it makes your digest personal.)
• We don’t use advertising pixels or third-party analytics.

AI processing

We use an AI provider, Anthropic, to read the pieces we recommend, to understand links and documents you share, to turn what you tell us into changes to your digest, and to check which pieces fit your work and explain why. For those last steps it sees the summary of your work, your role and goal, what we learned from your context, and your written feedback, never your email address. Anthropic processes this only to answer our request and does not use it to train its models.

How we use it

To pick, explain and send your digest, and to let you in from the waitlist. Emails are delivered by our email provider, and data is stored with our database provider. Neither may use it for anything else. Our delivery log keeps only the domain of the address we sent to and whether it arrived.

Your choices

In Settings you can change your topics, reading level, time and delivery days, tell us what to change, remove shared context, stop emails, or delete your account. Deleting your account removes your preferences, what you told us about your work, your shared context, your reading and feedback, the stories you follow, and your digests. To leave the waitlist, reply to any email from Essential and ask.