Privacy
Last updated: May 21, 2026
Cairn is a community-first platform for parents and family of autistic children — including grandparents, foster parents, legal guardians, step-parents, adult siblings, spouses and partners of autistic adults, and the close- support network around an autistic person — with autistic adults welcomed as peers. We’re in early access — anyone can sign up, and invited founding members have access to the community room itself. This policy describes what we collect and what we do with it.
What we collect
Account basics — your email address, your display name, and (if you signed up with a password) a hashed password. If you signed up with Google, we receive a unique account identifier and your name and email from Google.
Profile details, all optional — a short bio, your country, your state (US only), language preference, role (parent / autistic adult / both), and an age band for you or your child. You can leave any of these blank or change them later in Settings.
What you write — posts, replies, reactions, bookmarks, and direct messages. Photos you attach are processed to strip EXIF metadata (including GPS) before they’re stored.
Direct messages are private to you and the person you’re messaging. We don’t read them, scan them, or surface them anywhere — with one exception below.
Session basics — a session cookie that keeps you signed in, and the rough IP address of recent sessions (used for rate limiting and abuse prevention).
We don’t collect addresses, phone numbers, browser fingerprints, or any city-level location data.
What we do with it
We store your account and content in Railway (our database provider) and Cloudflare R2 (for photo storage). Email is stored and sent via Resend. We send a confirmation when you sign up, and transactional emails for things you’ve opted into — reply notifications, for example, which you can turn off in Settings.
Reports and moderation
If someone reports a direct message you sent, a moderator sees the reported message plus a small window of surrounding context — the three messages before and the one message after — so they can judge intent. They don’t see anything else in the thread, and they can’t open DMs that haven’t been reported. Reported content can be removed by a moderator; a removed direct message stays visible to both sides as “[Removed by moderator]” so the conversation still makes sense.
What we don't do
We don't sell your email or share it with marketers, partners, or anyone else. We don't run ads on this site, ever. We don't track you across the internet — our analytics (Cloudflare Web Analytics) don't use cookies or store identifying information.
About external links
Cairn maintains a curated Resource Directory of aligned organizations and writers. When you click a link in the directory, you leave Cairn and land on the organization’s own site. We don’t track those clicks, attach any identifier to the outbound link, or share anything about you with listed organizations. Once you’ve left Cairn, that site’s privacy policy applies — not ours.
Deleting your data
You can delete your account from Settings — that wipes your posts, replies, reactions, bookmarks, and profile within a few days. If you’d rather we delete it for you, email hello@cairn.community and we’ll do it within seven days. You can also click the unsubscribe link in any email you receive to stop future emails.
Children
Cairn is for adults only. We don’t knowingly accept signups from anyone under 18. If a minor has an account, please email us and we’ll remove it.
Changes
If this policy changes in any way that affects what we collect or do with your data, we’ll email everyone with an account before the change takes effect.