Onyx and Tephra · Obsidian Metrics · Effective date: October 16, 2026
These terms are in effect as of the date above. We may update them from time to time; the effective date reflects the current version.
This policy covers onyx.obsidian-metrics.com ("Onyx") and tephra.obsidian-metrics.com ("Tephra",
formerly Brain, also reachable at brain.obsidian-metrics.com) (the "Services"),
operated by Andrew Lang d/b/a Obsidian Metrics ("we," "us," "our"). Contact: support@obsidian-metrics.com,
Pittsburgh, PA, USA.
US-only service. The Services are offered only to persons located in the United
States. They are not offered or directed to residents of the EU, EEA, or United Kingdom, and signup
and checkout refuse EU/EEA/UK traffic by country (via Cloudflare). This policy is written for US users
and US law.
Content you create: memories, conversations, uploaded files, projects, settings.
Billing data: handled by Stripe. We never see or store your full card number;
we store only the subscription status Stripe reports.
Operational data: request timestamps, error logs, and usage counts needed to
run, meter, and secure the Services.
Under the CCPA/CPRA, these fall into the categories: identifiers (email); customer records (login
credentials); commercial information (subscription tier, billing status); internet or network activity
(usage counts, logs); and the contents you choose to store. We collect them from you directly and from
Stripe (billing status), and use each only for the purposes described here.
2. How we store it
Content is stored on Cloudflare infrastructure (D1 database and Vectorize index). Member content
is encrypted at rest (AES-256-GCM), and login credentials are stored hashed, never in plain text.
Accounts are isolated per tenant: your memories and conversations are scoped to your account and
are designed not to be returned to another member's queries. No system is perfectly secure and we
cannot guarantee against every failure, but tenant isolation is a core control we design for and
enforce on reads.
3. How AI processing works
Your prompts and relevant memory context are sent to third-party AI model providers (currently
DeepSeek, with Groq as fallback, and Cloudflare Workers AI for embeddings) to generate responses.
For memory recall, the top candidate memory snippets are sent to Novita AI, a managed inference
provider, to rerank them by relevance. If our primary embedding path is unavailable, your recall query
text is also sent to Novita to generate its embedding. This data is processed transiently to rank
results and is not used to build a profile of you.
An automated screening layer runs before any provider call and is designed to block requests
containing sensitive identifiers (SSNs, health records, payment or HR records) rather than send them
to any provider. It catches common cases but may not catch every one.
We do not use your content to train our own AI models, and we do not authorize training
by our providers where we can control it. However, prompts and context you submit are
processed by the providers above under their own terms, which may permit them to use submitted content
to generate your response. Do not submit anything you need to keep confidential from these providers.
International processing: some AI providers (for example DeepSeek) process your
prompt and relevant context on infrastructure outside the United States, including in China. By using
the Services you consent to this cross-border processing.
4. What we share
Service providers only, as needed to operate, with the general processing location
noted: Cloudflare (hosting/storage; global edge), Stripe (billing; US), Brevo (transactional email such
as password resets; EU), Groq (AI responses; US), DeepSeek (AI responses; China), and Novita AI (AI
inference for memory recall — reranking and failover embeddings; global). We will update
this page before adding a new subprocessor that processes member content.
We do not sell your data and we do not "share" it for cross-context behavioral advertising as those
terms are defined by the CCPA. We do not share it with advertisers.
We disclose data only if legally required, and will notify you where the law allows.
4a. AI apps you connect to Tephra
Added October 8, 2026. You can connect an outside AI app (for example Claude, ChatGPT,
Cursor, VS Code, or Gemini CLI) to your Tephra account. Nothing is connected unless you sign in to
Tephra and approve the app on a consent screen that names it.
What a connected app can read: it can recall your Tephra memories and the shared
library, as you could yourself. What it reads is then handled by that app's company under its own
privacy policy, not ours.
What a connected app can write: if you approve write access, it can save new
memories to your own Tephra. It cannot reach another member's account.
What we keep about a connection: the app's name and the web address it asked us to
send you back to, your account email, the access you approved, and when it was connected, last used, and
disconnected. We store only scrambled (hashed) copies of the
access keys, and a scrambled form of the network address that registered the app, used to limit abuse.
An access key lasts one hour. The app renews it with a renewal key that works only once and expires if
unused for 30 days, so a connection stays active while the app keeps using it, until you disconnect it.
How to disconnect: open tephra.obsidian-metrics.com/connect while signed in and
press Disconnect next to the app. It loses access straight away. You can also contact
support@obsidian-metrics.com. Disconnecting does not delete memories the app already saved; you can delete those
in Tephra. The record that a connection existed is kept with your account and is deleted when you delete your account (see
section 7a).
5. Data breach notification
If a breach affecting your personal data occurs, we will notify affected users without undue delay
and notify regulators as required by applicable U.S. state law.
6. Your rights
Access / copy: request a copy of your memories and account data; we provide it in
a structured, machine-readable format (for example, JSON).
Deletion: delete individual memories in-app at any time, or delete your whole
account yourself while signed in; if you email support@obsidian-metrics.com, we send you the steps. What is deleted, what is kept
and why are set out in section 7a.
Correction and access: edit your memories in-app or contact us.
California residents have the rights to know, delete, correct, opt out of any
"sale" or "sharing" (which we do not do), and limit the use of sensitive personal information (we do
not use sensitive personal information beyond providing the Services you requested). You may complain
to the California Privacy Protection Agency or the Attorney General.
How to exercise: contact support@obsidian-metrics.com, including through an authorized agent.
We verify identity (typically by confirming control of the account email) before acting. We
will not deny service, charge a different price, or degrade service because you exercised your privacy
rights.
7. Retention
Content is kept while your account is active. When you delete your account it is erased as
described in section 7a. Backups and service logs are not edited; copies in them age out on their
normal retention schedule, except the older disaster-recovery copy described in section 7a.
7a. Deleting your account
While signed in you can ask to delete your account. We email a one-time confirmation link to your account address; it works for 15 minutes and only for the account that asked for it, and you confirm by typing DELETE. If you email support@obsidian-metrics.com instead, we write to your account address with the steps to do this yourself; if you cannot sign in, reset your password first, which also confirms that the address is yours.
What happens: any subscription you pay us for through Stripe is cancelled immediately and any open invoice is voided, so nothing more is charged; refunds follow our Refund & Cancellation Policy. Deleting your account does not cancel a community membership billed by Skool: Skool bills and cancels those under its own terms, so cancel it through Skool. While you are a member of that community, the copy of its member list that we keep (including your name, Skool handle and email address) will list you again the next time we update it. Every signed-in session is ended and sign-in is blocked. Your data is then erased from obsidian-metrics.com, the App Hub tools, Onyx, Tephra and our automations, and your address is removed from our mailing lists. Your sign-in account is deleted last.
How long it takes: erasure normally finishes automatically. Some records need a person on our team: for example, where your address appears in free text in a way that could also belong to someone else, or where a system cannot be checked. We are alerted and work to a 30-day deadline from when you confirm the deletion on the page, or, where we carry out the deletion for you after you email us (for example if you have no account), from when your email reaches us. While the deletion is still running we keep your address in our deletion queue; it is removed when the deletion finishes.
What we keep, and why: (1) a record that a deletion happened, holding a scrambled code made from your address, never the address itself; (2) a security record holding your address that stops sessions, access keys and app connections issued before the deletion from ever working again, even if the address signs up again; (3) billing records: we do not delete your customer record, invoices or payments at Stripe, our payment processor; they still hold your email address and the billing details you gave Stripe, and we keep them for tax and accounting. Our own purchase, seat, payout, wallet, usage and billing-alert entries are kept with your address removed or masked: replaced by a scrambled code or a fixed marker, or, in some billing alerts, shown only partly; (4) what another member keeps in their own Onyx or Tephra account that you sent them or that mentions you, for example mail in their Onyx mailbox, their Onyx conversations and files, and their Tephra memories and journals, because it is that member's data; we do not search it for your address (mail you send to our own support address is covered after this list); (5) if you had asked us not to send you outreach, your outreach opt-out (your address and its date; separate from the newsletter and member-mail unsubscribe records, which are removed) is kept as a record of that request; (6) the internal ids of your deleted Tephra memories and of their search entries (random ids, or ids you or an app you connected chose), filed under a scrambled code made from your address, so that we can keep confirming those entries are gone. Emails you send to our support address — including any request to delete your account — stay in our support inbox and our business inbox as the record of our correspondence with you. An older disaster-recovery copy of our databases (made in September 2026) may still contain your data; there is no fixed date on which it is deleted, and we never restore it into the live service. A working copy of our general knowledge base on our own computer, and its backups (encrypted in our backup vault, plus older compressed copies on that computer), do not hold members' Tephra memories; account deletions are not applied to them.
Limits: backups and service logs are not edited; copies in them age out on their normal retention schedule, except the older disaster-recovery copy described above. A short-lived cache clears itself within about an hour. Some website records are held on a single server instance; a deletion clears the instance it reaches, and the others clear when they are recycled. Some addresses, for example one with non-English characters, cannot be deleted from the page; email support@obsidian-metrics.com and we will do it. If you connected another service (for example a Google account), we delete our copy of its access token but do not revoke it there; remove our app in that service's settings to end access.
If you have no account: if you never created an account, or your account has already been deleted (for example you only filled in a form, signed up for emails, left a comment, used an app a member built with Onyx, or were a customer before), email support@obsidian-metrics.com. To check that the request comes from you, we send a one-time code to that address in a new email, and we delete only after the code comes back from that address within 7 days; we do not act on a request about someone else's address unless the code comes back from that address. If a subscription with us can still bill you, we cannot delete these records until it is cancelled: ask us and we will cancel it once we have confirmed the address is yours, and then delete the records. We then delete what we hold under that address on obsidian-metrics.com, in our mailing system and our mailing provider's lists, in our account and access records, and in Onyx, Tephra and our automations, and what we keep is what items (1) to (5) and the limits above describe, plus item (6) if you had an account with Tephra memories: for example, if you paid us, your billing records at Stripe stay, as item (3) says, and if you had asked us not to send you outreach, your outreach opt-out is kept as a record of that request. If you are in our Skool community, see "What happens" above. Emails between you and our support team, including your request and the code, stay in our support inbox and our business inbox as the record of our correspondence with you.
8. Cookies
We use one strictly-necessary session cookie to keep you logged in. It is not used for advertising
or cross-site tracking, so no consent banner is required. We use no advertising or cross-site tracking
cookies.
9. Children
The Services are not directed to and not intended for anyone under 16. We do not knowingly collect
personal information from children under 16 (or under 13 as defined by COPPA); if we learn we have, we
will delete it. Contact support@obsidian-metrics.com to report.
10. Changes and contact
Material changes will be announced in-app or by email. Questions or requests: support@obsidian-metrics.com.
Andrew Lang d/b/a Obsidian Metrics, Pittsburgh, PA, USA.