Privacy Policy

Effective October 17, 2026. This policy explains how Tekari LLC handles personal information for Spareband.

1. Who is responsible

Tekari LLC operates Spareband and is responsible for (the "controller" of) the personal information described here. Contact us about privacy at hello@spareband.com. "Spareband", "we", "us" and "our" mean Tekari LLC. Words like "Service" and "customers" mean the same as in our Terms of Service.

This policy covers spareband.com, the Spareband dashboard, the Spareband app and our emails. It doesn't cover the websites our customers visit or the services of the providers we sell traffic to.

2. What we collect

When you join the waitlist

To stop abuse, the waitlist form counts signups per IP address in memory for up to an hour. That count isn't saved.

When you create and use an account

To stop password guessing, sign-in, signup and password-reset attempts are counted per IP address and per email address in memory for up to an hour. Those counts aren't saved.

About your devices

While your app is connected

About the traffic your device carries

We record only the host name and port of each destination. We don't record the pages, paths, search terms or contents of the traffic. Most of it is encrypted (HTTPS) between the customer and the website, so we can't read it; any unencrypted traffic passes through our servers without being stored.

When you visit spareband.com

Like most websites, our web server records each request: your IP address, the time, the page requested, the referring page, and your browser's description of itself (its "user agent"). We use these logs to keep the site running and secure. The site loads no third-party scripts, fonts or trackers. Cookies are described in section 10.

3. What the app does on your computer

• The app only makes outgoing connections: one encrypted connection to Spareband, and the connections to websites our customers ask for. It never listens for connections from the internet.
• It doesn't collect your computer's name, files, browsing history, other programs, or details of other devices on your network.
• To protect your home network, the app checks each destination against your computer's own network addresses and the public IP address our server sees you connect from, and refuses to connect to them or to any private network address. It does this on your computer; it doesn't send us your computer's network addresses.
• The app looks up website names through your computer's normal DNS settings, so your DNS provider (often your router or internet provider) sees those lookups, as it would for any app.
• It saves a small file with today's and this month's data counts, so your caps still work after a restart.
• It writes a short activity log on your computer (for example "sharing paused"). That log doesn't include the websites customers visit.

4. How we use it, and our legal bases

We use personal information only for the purposes in section 2. Where the law requires a legal basis (for example, under the GDPR in the European Economic Area and the United Kingdom), ours are:

We don't use your information for advertising, and we don't build profiles of you.

You don't have to give us any information, but we need your email address and a password to create an account, and your PayPal email address to pay you. Without them we can't provide the Service or pay you.

5. Automated decisions

When your app connects, our servers automatically check whether its IP address belongs to a hosting, cloud or VPN network, and whether another device is already sharing from the same IP address. If so, the device isn't allowed to share. This is necessary to run Spareband as a home-connection service under our contract with you. If you think a decision is wrong, email us and a person will review it; you can give us your view and challenge the decision.

6. Who sees it

• Customers and the websites they visit. When your device carries traffic, the destination website, and the customer and its provider, see your connection's public IP address and the approximate location that can be worked out from it. This is the Service you ask us to provide. We never give customers your name, email, account details or device name.
• Service providers who process information for us under contract:
  • DigitalOcean, which hosts our servers in New York, USA;
  • MXroute, which hosts our email and sends our emails;
  • Google, because a copy of email sent to hello@spareband.com is kept in a Google (Gmail) mailbox;
  • Cloudflare, which runs the DNS for our domain. It doesn't receive your account information.
• PayPal, when we pay you: your PayPal email, the amount and a reference. PayPal handles that information under its own privacy policy.
• Abuse investigations. If an abuse report or legal request concerns traffic through your device, we may share the relevant connection records with the provider and customer responsible. We may tell the person who reported it that the traffic came through Spareband's network, without identifying you, unless the law requires otherwise.
• The law. We disclose information when we believe in good faith that the law requires it, for example under a valid subpoena or court order, or when it's needed to protect someone's safety, our rights or the Service. Where the law allows, we'll tell you before we disclose your information so you can object.
• A new owner. If Spareband is sold, merged or reorganised, your information may pass to the new owner, who must respect this policy for information collected under it. We'll tell you before that happens.
• Anyone else, with your permission.

Where you download the app from (for example, a public container registry) handles your download under its own privacy policy.

7. We don't sell your information

We don't sell or rent your personal information, and we don't share it for cross-context behavioural advertising. Customers paying for traffic that leaves from your IP address isn't a sale of your information: it happens because you direct us to share your bandwidth, and only while you choose to share. We don't use or disclose sensitive personal information for any purpose other than providing the Service.

8. How long we keep it

We may keep information longer if the law requires it, or for as long as needed for an ongoing investigation, dispute or legal claim.

9. When you delete your account

You can delete your account from the Account page. Straight away, we:

• replace your email address with a placeholder everywhere we stored it, including our activity log and invite notes, and remove you from the waitlist;
• sign you out everywhere and cancel any password-reset links;
• turn off and remove all your devices, which blocks their tokens, and erase their names;
• turn off your referral link, and stop referral earnings for you and for the person who referred you; and
• delete your PayPal email, unless we still owe you a balance of $5 or more. In that case we keep it only until we've paid you.

What remains is the information in section 8 that we keep for accounting, tax and legal reasons, linked only to account and device numbers, and connection records until their 90 days run out. Backups expire within 14 days.

10. Cookies

We use two cookies, both strictly necessary, and no advertising, analytics or third-party cookies:

Our home page sets no cookies. Because we don't track you across websites, there's nothing for Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control signals to turn off, but we honour them as a request to opt out of any sale or sharing of personal information.

11. Security

We protect your information with measures that suit the risk, including encryption in transit (HTTPS and TLS), one-way hashing of passwords and of session, reset and device tokens, protection against forged forms, rate limits, access to our servers limited to people who need it, and logging of administrative actions. No system is perfectly secure. If a security breach affects your personal information, we'll tell you and the authorities as the law requires.

12. International transfers

Spareband is run from the United States, and our servers are in the United States. If you use Spareband from another country, your information is transferred to, stored in and processed in the United States, whose data protection laws may differ from yours. When we transfer information from the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom or Switzerland, we do so because the transfer is necessary to provide the Service you request under our contract with you, and, for our service providers, under safeguards such as the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses where those providers offer them. You can ask us for more information about these safeguards.

13. Your rights

Wherever you live, you can ask us to:

• access the personal information we hold about you and get a copy, in a portable format where you ask for one;
• correct information that's wrong or incomplete;
• delete your information (you can also delete your account yourself);
• object to or restrict how we use it, including use based on our legitimate interests;
• withdraw consent where we rely on it; and
• have a person review an automated decision.

Some of these rights have limits. For example, we may need to keep certain records for tax or legal reasons, and we can't delete connection records about traffic still under investigation.

How to ask. Email hello@spareband.com from the email address on your account and say what you'd like. To protect your account, we confirm requests through that address, and we may ask for more details if we can't verify you. An authorised agent can ask for you if they show us your signed permission and we can verify you. We answer within one month (45 days in California and other US states with privacy laws), and we'll tell you if we need more time, as the law allows. Requests are free, unless they're plainly unfounded or excessive.

If we say no. We'll explain why. You can appeal by replying with "Appeal" in the subject; we'll respond within the time your law requires, which is 45 to 60 days in most US states. If you're still unhappy, you can complain to your data protection authority or your state attorney general.

We won't treat you differently, or pay you differently, for using any of these rights.

14. More for your region

European Economic Area, United Kingdom and Switzerland

The controller is Tekari LLC, contactable at hello@spareband.com. Our legal bases are in section 4. You have the right to complain to your local data protection authority, for example your country's authority in the EEA, the Information Commissioner's Office in the UK, or the Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner in Switzerland. We'd appreciate the chance to sort out your concern first.

California

This section is our notice under the California Consumer Privacy Act, as amended.

We collected these categories in the last 12 months from you, your app and your browser, for the purposes in section 2, and keep them as section 8 describes. We don't sell or share personal information (section 7), so there's nothing to opt out of, and we haven't done either in the last 12 months. We don't knowingly collect information from anyone under 16. You have the rights in section 13: to know, access, correct and delete, and not to be discriminated against for using them.

Notice of financial incentive. We pay you for bandwidth your connection carries, not for your personal information. If a regulator treated these payments as a financial incentive because traffic leaves from your IP address, here are their terms: you opt in by creating an account and running the app; the payment is $0.20 per GB (our launch rate), plus referral earnings of 10% of what people you refer earn, as described in our Terms; you can withdraw at any time by pausing sharing or deleting your account; and we value your data at no more than what we pay you for the bandwidth it carries, which reflects what customers pay us for that traffic, minus our costs.

Other US states

If you live in a state with a consumer privacy law (such as Colorado, Connecticut, Virginia, Utah, Texas, Oregon or others), you have the rights in section 13 and the appeal process described there. We don't sell personal information, use it for targeted advertising, or use it for profiling that produces legal or similarly significant effects. Nevada residents: we don't sell covered information.

Canada, Brazil, Australia and elsewhere

You have the rights your local law gives you, including to access and correct your information and to complain to your privacy regulator. Section 13 explains how to use them. Section 12 explains the transfer of your information to the United States.

15. Children

Spareband is only for adults aged 18 and over. We don't knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 18. If you believe a child has given us information, contact us and we'll delete it.

16. Changes

We'll update this policy when our practices or the law change. If a change materially affects how we handle your information, we'll email you before it takes effect and show the new effective date here. Where the law requires your consent to a change, we'll ask for it.

17. Contact

Tekari LLC, operating Spareband
Email: hello@spareband.com