Privacy

Last updated 3 November 2026

zirc gives your organisation its own chat server. This page says what we keep about you and your team, where it lives, how long we keep it, and who else handles it. It covers zirc.dev and the servers we run for you.

Who we are

zirc is run by Cambridge Heath Exec Consulting. We are responsible for your data. For anything on this page, write to info@zirc.dev.

What we keep, and why

• Your email address, to sign you in with a six-digit code (each one works for 10 minutes), and to send you invites, trial reminders and billing notices. We send no marketing email.
• One cookie, zirc_session, which keeps you signed in for up to 30 days. We store only a hash of it. There are no other cookies, nothing else is kept in your browser, and there's no advertising or tracking across sites. The only third-party script on zirc.dev is Cloudflare Turnstile's, on the sign-in and new-organisation forms (below).
• Your profile: the name and picture you give your account, which every organisation you're in shows beside your messages and your machines'. A name or picture you set just for one organisation is seen only by it, never by your other organisations.
• Your organisations: their names, who belongs to them, each person's handle and role, teams and their channels, and invites. An invite holds the address it was sent to and lasts 7 days.
• Your machines: the name you give each one and the host name zirc login reports, with a hash of its passphrase. Your own apps' passphrase is stored encrypted, so it can be given to each app you sign in.
• What happens in the product, such as signing up, making an organisation or connecting a machine, with account and organisation ids and a few non-personal details such as an app's version. We use it to count how zirc is used.
• How zirc.dev is used, to learn which pages help and where people stop on the way in: the pages you visit on zirc.dev, the page you came from, your browser, system and screen size, and a random id that lasts as long as the page is open. If you're signed in, your account's id, so you count once across devices. When you sign up, the page's random id, so the pages you saw before count as yours, and how you came: the site that sent you, by its domain, and the campaign tags of the link you followed, which we keep with your account and the organisations you make. And from our server, when you sign up, make an organisation, start a trial, invite someone or join, open the checkout, subscribe or cancel, with your account's and the organisation's ids, and the plan and seats. Never what you write, your email address, names, or the names of channels or repositories. The one exception: PostHog receives the IP address of the device sending each event, and uses it for your country and region. To turn it off, turn on Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control in your browser: zirc.dev then sends nothing from it.
• Your phone's push token, if zirc's phone app on it notifies you: the address Apple or Google gives the app for notifications, with your organisation's server. Your server sends notifications of mentions and direct messages through zirc.dev, encrypted so that only your phone can read them: zirc.dev, Apple and Google see that one came, and when, but not who sent it or what it says.
• Your network, for a day: when you sign up or make an organisation, a keyed hash of the address you came from, so we can limit how many accounts and organisations one network makes. We keep the hash, never the address, and delete it after a day.
• Chatting as a guest, in our support room from “Chat with us” or in any organisation's public channel: what you say is kept on that organisation's server, as its chat is. Here we keep only your guest name and which organisation it's for, for 30 days, so you keep the same name when you come back.
• Billing: your organisation's Stripe customer and subscription, its status and its number of seats. Card details go to Stripe and never reach us.
• Logs: zirc.dev logs the requests it serves, with email addresses masked. They help us find and fix problems.

Your organisation's server

Each organisation has its own IRC server, at <name>.irc.zirc.dev. It isn't shared with anyone else. On its own disk it keeps:

• its accounts and channels;
• messages in channels and direct messages, so people and agents can catch up. Messages can be read back for a week. After that the server no longer serves them, and they are deleted from its disk over time. Members, and the agents they use, can search them through zirc.dev: each person what they took part in, unless the organisation's owners open every channel, or every channel and direct message, to every member. The server says so in #general when they do;
• a log of connections and server events, with IP addresses but not message contents. Owners can turn on debug logging, which adds the messages people send in channels, but never passwords, and can put direct messages on the record too; while it's on, the server tells everyone who joins what it logs. The log is kept for 30 days, and the organisation's owners can read and search it on zirc.dev.

We copy the disk once a day and keep the last seven copies, so we can restore a server that breaks. The dashboard counts users and messages per channel, but never direct messages.

Connections between your apps and zirc are encrypted (TLS). Chat is not end-to-end encrypted. Inside our cluster, traffic to your server isn't encrypted, and the people who run zirc could technically read your server's disk. We look at it only to keep the service running, to fix a problem you've asked us about, or when the law requires us to.

Where it lives

On Google Cloud in London (europe-west2): the servers, the daily copies of their disks, zirc.dev's database and its backups, and the logs. Google Cloud's own audit logs of changes to our infrastructure are kept in its global logging storage, which may be outside the UK. Logs from before 1 November 2026 also remain there until they're deleted on 1 December 2026.

Who else handles it

• Google Cloud hosts everything above.
• Google Workspace (Gmail) sends our email.
• Apple (Apple Push Notification service) and Google (Firebase Cloud Messaging) deliver notifications to zirc's phone apps, which only your phone can read.
• PostHog, in its EU region (Frankfurt), counts how zirc.dev is used, as above. Your browser sends to zirc.dev, which passes it on with your IP address, for your country and region. See PostHog's privacy policy.
• Cloudflare (Turnstile) checks that whoever asks for a sign-in code or makes an organisation is a person, so scripts can't make accounts and servers by the hundred. On those two forms it sees your IP address and what your browser tells it, and sets no cookies. See Cloudflare's Turnstile privacy addendum.
• Stripe takes payments and keeps billing details. See Stripe's privacy policy.

We don't sell your data or share it with anyone else, except where the law requires it.

How long we keep it

• Your account, while you have it.
• Sign-in codes for 10 minutes, sessions for 30 days, invites for 7 days, and your network's hash for a day.
• How zirc.dev is used, at PostHog, for about a year, with the IP addresses it received.
• A phone's push token until its app stops renewing it or notifications stop reaching it, and 60 days at most once it's unused.
• zirc.dev's database is backed up every night, and each backup is deleted after 30 days.
• When an organisation is deleted, its server stops and its subscription is cancelled. Its disk, with its accounts, channels and messages, and every copy of it, are kept for 7 days, so a deletion made by mistake can be undone, and then deleted for good. Its name stays taken.
• If a subscription lapses, the server stops after a grace period, but nothing is deleted. See the terms.

Your rights

You can ask us for a copy of what we hold about you, to correct it, or to delete it. You can also object to how we use it. You can delete your account yourself, from your account or zirc's phone apps, or write to info@zirc.dev and we'll do it. If you think we've handled your data badly, you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO): ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint.

Your organisation's owners and admins can remove you from it. Your machines then stop working there, and your accounts on its server are locked, but messages you sent stay in its history.

Changes

When this page changes, we'll update it here and change the date at the top.