Privacy Policy

Lampsi is a free search engine run by a sole proprietorship based in Sarnia, Ontario, Canada (“Lampsi”, “we”, “us”). We are responsible for the personal information described here. You can reach us through the contact form.

• You can search without an account. When you do, we don’t keep a record of your searches tied to you.
• If you create an account, we keep what you need for it to work: your email, name, password (hashed), settings, saved items and, if you leave it on, your history.
• We don’t sell your information, we don’t show ads, and we don’t use advertising or analytics trackers.
• You can download everything as a file, turn history off, delete items or delete your whole account, at any time, from your account pages.

We do not ask for, and ask you not to send us, sensitive information such as health or financial details.

• To provide the Service: run searches, show results and answers, open pages in the reader, and keep you signed in.
• To provide account features you choose to use: history, saved items, collections, preferences, profile, 2-step verification and data export.
• To keep the Service and your account secure: prevent password guessing, abuse and automated scraping, and let you see and sign out of your sessions.
• To answer you when you contact us.
• To meet legal obligations.

We rely on your consent, which you give by using the Service and choosing the features you use. You can withdraw consent for optional features at any time, for example by turning history off or deleting your account. We don’t use your information for advertising or sell it to anyone.

To answer a search, our server sends your query (not your IP address or account details) to free public sources. Depending on the search, these include Bing (Microsoft), DuckDuckGo, Wikipedia, Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons (Wikimedia Foundation), YouTube (Google) and the Free Dictionary API. Each handles queries under its own privacy policy.

Some things on the page are loaded by your browser directly from other servers, which therefore receive your IP address and browser details:

• website icons, from DuckDuckGo’s icon service;
• image thumbnails and pictures, from the sites or image services that host them (for example Bing or Wikimedia);
• videos in the reader, embedded from YouTube’s privacy-enhanced domain (youtube-nocookie.com) when you open a video page.

When you open a result, our server fetches that public page from the publisher, extracts its text, and may keep a cached copy for up to about a day so it loads faster for the next reader. The publisher sees a request from Lampsi’s server, not from you, and we don’t send them your IP address, account or cookies. If you are signed in with history on, the page is added to your history.

The reader shows text written by third parties. Their content may mention people, and it is the publisher’s, not ours. If you want something removed from the original page, contact the publisher; if you want it removed from Lampsi, use the contact form.

We share personal information only with service providers who help us run Lampsi, and only as much as they need:

• Vercel Inc. hosts the website and processes requests.
• Supabase Inc. hosts our database, where account data is stored.
• If we send you an email, such as a sign-up verification code, an email delivery provider processes your email address to deliver it.

We may also disclose information if required by law, such as a valid court order, to protect the rights, safety or security of users or the public, or as part of a sale or transfer of Lampsi, in which case this policy would continue to apply to your information. We do not sell, rent or trade personal information.

Our database is hosted in the United States (US East), and our website runs on Vercel’s global network. This means your information is stored and processed outside Canada, where it may be subject to the laws of those countries, including access by courts and authorities there. We use contracts and our providers’ security controls to protect it.

When you delete your account, we delete your account and everything linked to it from our live database right away. Copies may remain in our providers’ encrypted backups for a limited time until those backups are replaced.

Passwords, recovery codes, backup codes and session keys are stored only as one-way hashes. Session cookies are HTTP-only and sent only over HTTPS. Database access goes through narrow server-side functions, not direct table access. You can add 2-step verification and review your signed-in devices. No system is perfectly secure, but if a breach creates a real risk of significant harm to you, we will tell you and the Privacy Commissioner of Canada as the law requires.

• Access and export: download all your account data as a JSON file from Your data.
• Correct: edit your name and photo in Profile.
• Delete: delete history items or all history in History, or your whole account in Your data.
• Pause history: turn history off at any time.
• Search without an account: all search features work without signing in.

You can also ask us, through the contact form, for access to or correction of the personal information we hold about you, or for an explanation of how we use it. We will respond within 30 days.

Lampsi is not directed to children under 13, and children under 13 may not create an account. If you believe a child under 13 has given us personal information, tell us through the contact form and we will delete it.

We use one essential cookie to keep you signed in, and your browser’s local storage to remember settings and recent searches. We don’t use advertising or analytics cookies. See the Cookie Notice for the full list.

If we change this policy, we will update the date at the top. If a change materially affects how we use information we already have, we will show a notice on the site, and ask for your consent where the law requires.

For privacy questions or requests, use the contact form and choose “Privacy request”. If you aren’t satisfied with our answer, you can complain to the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada.