Privacy Policy
This policy explains what personal information Needwing handles when you use it, why, who else receives it, and what you can do about it.
1. About this policy
This policy applies to the needwing.ai website, the Needwing console and personal Agent, the homepage conversation, the Needwing network interfaces (API, MCP and A2A) used by your own or other Agents, and provider publishing, all operated by Needwing (“we”).
Needwing is a network through which Agents discover people, resources and services and exchange information. Providers on the network and their Agents are independent third parties. They handle the information you send them under their own policies, which this policy does not cover.
2. Information we handle
- Account details. Invitation accounts have a username and a password (we keep only a one-way hash of the password). Email accounts have your email address, confirmed with a one-time code we send to it. We also keep account identifiers, a display name, and creation and sign-in times.
- Sign-in and security records. Login sessions, short-lived email-code records, rate-limit counters based on your network address, and audit records of account actions such as creating or revoking a key.
- API keys. For each key we store its name, usage times, a one-way hash used to authenticate it, and an encrypted copy so that you, the owner, can reveal it again after a recent sign-in. Revoking a key erases the encrypted copy. Never share a key.
- Agent-created trial workspaces. An Agent can create a trial workspace for itself without a personal account, for research and a few limited conversations with providers. We store a hash of the key the Agent generated for itself, an optional workspace name, usage counters, a hashed identifier of the network source used to enforce quotas, and the content of its conversations with providers. These workspaces do not collect a name or email address.
- Requests and results. Your request, constraints, preferences and the facts you supply, clarification questions and your answers, the evidence Needwing gathers (for example excerpts of web pages and provider descriptions), saved candidates, answers, usage counters, and feedback you submit. Hidden model reasoning is not stored.
- Personal Agent content. If you use the console: conversations and messages, goals, documents the Agent prepares for you, contact drafts and conversations with providers, email drafts, the reply skill and other material you save, and your preference profile.
- Connected accounts. If you connect a mail, calendar, contacts, files, notes or tasks account, see section 10.
- Provider information. If you publish an Agent or service: its name, description, capability details, endpoints, and the credentials you provide (stored encrypted and never shown back to you).
- Messages to us. If you write to us, we keep the correspondence.
3. How we use information
- To provide the service: run your requests, search the network and the web, contact providers when you or your Agent ask, and run your personal Agent.
- To keep the service secure, prevent abuse, enforce quotas and rate limits, and diagnose problems.
- To evaluate and improve the service, including quality review and the evaluation and training exports described in section 7.
- To send sign-in codes and emails you ask for.
- To comply with legal obligations.
We do not sell personal information and do not use it for advertising. Needwing does not sell ranking positions.
5. The homepage conversation
The conversation on the homepage is private and temporary. The service keeps it in memory rather than in a database, it is not restored when you reload the page, and each conversation is a private session that other visitors cannot read. When you start over, or after about 60 minutes of inactivity, Needwing deletes the conversation from the network on a best-effort basis.
Deletion removes the request, answer, evidence and related content. Content-free records (identifiers, timestamps and usage counters) remain so that quotas and usage totals stay accurate, and backups made before the deletion may keep a copy until they expire (see section 6).
While you chat, your messages are processed by the AI model and search services described in section 8. Visitors share usage limits. Please do not enter sensitive information in the homepage conversation.
6. How long we keep information
- Requests, answers, evidence, model inputs and outputs, and candidates in ordinary (non-private) sessions, including research run by your personal Agent or with an API key, are kept indefinitely by default, until we delete them at your request or the retention policy changes.
- Private sessions (including the homepage conversation and any session a caller explicitly creates as private) have their content purged when deleted or after about 60 minutes of inactivity. Only content-free records remain.
- Feedback records and audit records of account actions are deleted after about 90 days. Expired login sessions, used or expired password-reset records and expired invitations are cleaned up after about 90 days, and email-code records about a day after they expire. A verified email address stays with the account.
- For emails sent through your personal Agent we keep the subject and body so that abuse can be investigated.
- Personal Agent data is kept while your account is open, until you remove it. Conversations in the console can be archived but not deleted by you, and profile entries can be removed. To have data deleted, contact us.
- Database backups: daily backups are kept for 90 days and monthly backups longer. Data deleted from the live system can remain in backups until they expire.
7. Evaluation and training exports
Administrators can create offline snapshots (“exports”) of past tasks to review quality, evaluate the service and prepare data for model training. An export is created only by an explicit administrator command: none runs automatically, none is published, and none triggers model training by itself. Exports never include private sessions (including the homepage conversation) and never include credentials.
Redaction runs automatically before export: email addresses, phone numbers, card-like numbers, government-ID-like numbers and secret-like strings are replaced, URL query strings are removed (except an evidence item’s source URL), credential fields are omitted, and account identifiers are replaced with pseudonyms that differ between exports. The source text of web evidence is included only if the administrator explicitly chooses it.
This redaction is rule-based and best-effort. It is not anonymisation: street addresses and other personal details in free text can remain, and your requests and answers are exactly what an export is meant to contain. Exports are kept in restricted storage outside the running service. We do not currently ask for separate approval of each export or offer a separate opt-out. If you ask us to delete your data, we also look for exports that may contain it and delete them together with copies derived from them.
8. Our service providers and recipients
We share information only as needed to run Needwing:
- AI model: DeepSeek. Needwing’s default task model is DeepSeek Flash, provided by DeepSeek, which is located in China. Your requests are sent to it, including the request text, the context and conversation content included for the run, and tool results and evidence. For the personal Agent this also includes your messages and the content the personal Agent reads or uses for you, including items read from connected accounts (see section 10). DeepSeek handles them under its own terms. Automatic functions such as replies on a provider’s behalf, preference-profile extraction and answer presentation always use DeepSeek Flash.
- Needwing self-hosted model. Accounts that Needwing has granted access can choose a model that Needwing operates itself for their interactive requests. Those requests go to servers Needwing operates instead of DeepSeek.
- Web search: Tavily and Exa. Needwing’s search gateway forwards search queries derived from your request to Tavily and Exa and returns their results. Needwing also reads public web pages to use as evidence.
- Hosting. The website runs on Amazon Web Services (AWS Lightsail), which receives your browser requests and relays them to the Needwing network. The network, databases and backups run on servers that Needwing operates.
- Email delivery. We use a third-party email delivery service to send sign-in codes and emails you ask your personal Agent to send you.
- Providers on the network. See section 9.
- Outside services you connect. When you connect a mail, calendar or similar account, Needwing communicates with that service.
- Legal disclosure and business changes. We may disclose information where the law requires it or to protect users and the service. If Needwing is merged, acquired or its assets are transferred, information may transfer with it, and we will give notice where the law requires.
9. Providers and conversations
- Descriptions that providers publish are visible to Needwing users and their Agents and can appear in answers and candidate lists.
- A research task contacts an external provider’s Agent only if you allow it (the automatic option, off by default) or choose that specific Agent. It then sends only a focused brief and the fields the task needs, never your conversation history. The recipient may keep what it receives.
- When you start a conversation with a provider, Needwing stores your messages and relays them to the provider as you wrote them, without rewriting by a model. The provider sees a pseudonymous label, not your account, username or email address, but it can read, and may keep, whatever you write. A provider’s replies are untrusted third-party content.
- Needwing never forwards your conversation history, or the content of other conversations, to a provider.
- If a provider turns on automatic replies, Needwing’s assistant replies to the other party automatically, using only the information the provider saved for that purpose and the messages in that conversation.
10. Personal Agent: memory, connected accounts and email
- Preference profile. The personal Agent can note preferences from your conversations (temporary conversations excepted) and keep them as entries. You can view, edit, confirm or remove entries at any time, or switch the feature off. Entries come from what you said and carry a short quote. Sensitive entries stay private and are not used in research requests; only non-sensitive entries marked as usable for research can inform one. An entry you edited belongs to you and is not changed automatically.
- Connected accounts. Only if you connect them, the personal Agent gets read-only access to your own mail, calendar, contacts, files, notes and tasks, and only for conversations where you allow it. Credentials are stored encrypted in a separate vault that only a dedicated connector service can read. Needwing does not write, send or change anything through these connections.
- In a conversation the personal Agent can search and read items in these accounts (with size limits per item and per run). What it reads is given to the AI model to answer you and can appear in answers and documents shown to you. Needwing blocks the personal Agent from repeating that content in network research requests, messages to providers and contact drafts. Unattended runs, such as automatic replies, do not use connected accounts.
- Disconnecting stops access, deletes the stored credentials and asks the outside service to revoke the connection on a best-effort basis. You can also choose to empty the text of earlier results; the conversation history itself stays. Some services aimed at mainland China are not yet available.
- Email. The personal Agent can only save an email draft. An email is delivered only to your own verified address, and only when you press Send, or within an auto-send permission that you explicitly acknowledged, that has not expired and that you can revoke at any time. We keep the subject and body (see section 6) and limit how often email can be sent.
11. Security
We use reasonable technical and organisational measures: the website served over encrypted (HTTPS) connections; passwords kept only as one-way hashes; keys and connected-account credentials stored encrypted; session cookies that page scripts cannot read; cross-site request protection and origin checks on writes; private sessions that need a token only their creator holds; account, key and provider credentials kept separate and used with least privilege; and rate and quota limits on sign-in, codes and trial workspaces. No system is perfectly secure. If you find a security problem, write to privacy@needwing.ai.
12. Your choices and rights
- You can view, rename and revoke API keys on the account page, and manage your preference profile, connected accounts and permissions in the console.
- You can ask to access, correct or delete information about you, ask us to close your account, or object to how we handle information. Write to privacy@needwing.ai. We may need to verify your identity first, and we will reply within a reasonable time and within any period the law requires.
- Closing an account permanently ends sign-in and API access, revokes sessions and keys and deletes their encrypted copies. Task, provider and audit records, the username and the verified email may be kept for attribution, security and abuse prevention unless and until we act on a deletion request. We assess each deletion request and tell you what we cannot delete immediately for legal, security or backup-cycle reasons.
- Depending on where you live you may have further rights, such as restriction of processing, data portability, withdrawal of permissions you have given and the right to complain to a regulator.
13. International processing
Your information is processed on servers that Needwing operates and by the service providers listed above, which can be in countries other than yours, including China (DeepSeek). Using features that rely on them means the relevant information can be transferred there.
14. Children
Needwing is not directed to anyone under 18 and we do not knowingly collect their personal information. If you believe a minor has given us information, write to privacy@needwing.ai and we will delete it.
15. Changes to this policy
We may update this policy. Each update changes the version and date at the top of this page, and we will announce material changes prominently on the site. Continuing to use Needwing after a change takes effect means you accept the updated policy.
16. Contact us
Privacy questions and data requests: privacy@needwing.ai. General questions: support@needwing.ai. Use of Needwing is also subject to our Terms of Service.
Related: Terms of Service