01 · privacy & policy
this is a public marketplace with a public reputation layer. what you write, what you build & what you were paid is readable by anyone over the same api this site uses. read this before you post a problem that names your employer.
last changed —
02 · what is collected
not a category summary .. the actual columns, because you can read them yourself over the api anyway.
| what | why it exists | who can read it |
|---|---|---|
| handle | attributes a vote, a claim or a post to someone | anyone |
| display name, headline, bio | optional, and only what you type | anyone |
| your account, password resets, and reaching a buyer about their own build | never published | |
| password | signing in | nobody — stored only as a bcrypt hash |
| when you were last active | so a stale account can be told apart from an abandoned one | only you |
| github, leetcode, codeforces, agent streaks | self-declared proof signals. nothing is verified against the source yet, and the site says so rather than letting you assume | anyone |
| square8 id and identity level | a persistent identity that survives you changing your github | anyone |
| problems, briefs, posts, comments | the marketplace itself | anyone |
| contribution ledger | decides how the build pool divides. it has to be inspectable or it is not evidence | anyone |
| synergy ratings | reputation and invitations. never pay | aggregate only — an individual rating is never shown, to you or to the person rated |
| attack findings | the adversarial round and its bounties | anyone |
| escrow and payouts | amounts, buckets, recipients, and the policy version behind each one | anyone |
| a session token in your browser | so you are not asked to sign in on every click. signing out deletes it | only your browser |
03 · what is never asked for
no card number. no bank details. no aadhaar, pan or any government id. no otp. no phone number. an account is an email address and a password you choose, and that is the whole of it.
payouts to builders, when they happen, are arranged out of band with people you have actually spoken to. nothing on this domain will ever ask you to enter payment details. if a page here does, it is not ours.
handled by supabase auth and stored as a bcrypt hash. it never reaches this site's code and nobody here can read it — a reset link is the only way back in, which is why the email has to be one you can actually receive.
your handle is public and permanent. your email is attached to the account and never published. identity levels above 1 are recorded but not yet enforced, and the site says so rather than implying a verification that has not happened.
04 · posting a problem
when you describe a problem, the brief that comes out of it is listed so teams can compete on it. that text is public from the moment it is listed. your email is attached to the record but is not published.
which means: write the problem, not the incident. "our reconciliation runs late and we pay vendors late as a result" is a brief. an unredacted export of last month's failures is a disclosure, and once it is listed it has been read.
email harish@square8.studio and the listing is withdrawn. a withdrawn listing stops being served, but anything already read by a person or a crawler cannot be recalled, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.
05 · ratings & moderation
a technically strong, socially difficult person does not lose money because somebody disliked them. contribution decides pay. synergy decides invitations.
a score from one collaboration is shown as low confidence and labelled as such on the page. a high count from very few raters is treated as a ring rather than as evidence.
an automated layer flags harassment, coordination, leaked secrets and rating manipulation. bans, payout disputes and contribution overrides are decided by people.
public project channels may be analysed for moderation and project health. private conversations are not silently monitored.
06 · third parties
| who | what for | what they see |
|---|---|---|
| Cloudflare Pages | serves this site | the usual request logs — ip, user agent, which page |
| Supabase | the database and the api this page reads | everything in the table above, as its operator |
| Google Fonts | two typefaces | your ip, when the font files load |
| Resend | outbound email, when a build needs to reach a buyer | the address and the message |
there is no advertising network here, no third-party analytics beyond cloudflare's own, no session recording and no cross-site tracking. nothing is sold or shared with a data broker. the site sets no cookies of its own, which is why it has never shown you a cookie banner.
07 · your side of it
a copy of everything attached to your handle · correction of anything wrong · deletion of your profile and the content you wrote · withdrawal of a listing you posted.
one honest limit. records that other people's money depends on — a payout row, or a contribution ledger on a build that has already paid out — are kept, with your handle replaced by your square8 id. an audit trail that can be edited afterwards is not an audit trail.
email harish@square8.studio from an address you can be reached at, saying which handle. a person reads it, not a queue, so expect days rather than minutes.
square8 labs is operated from india. this document describes what actually happens rather than restating a statute back at you.
08 · demo content
the site launched with example builds, example people and example payouts so the mechanisms could be seen working end to end. every one of them carries a demo marker on the card it belongs to.
counting…
the people in them are invented and their github handles are prefixed s8demo- so that no real account is implied. the money in them was never moved.
09 · security
no table is writable directly. every change runs through a database function that checks its own preconditions, and row level security is on everywhere.
funding escrow, releasing it, selecting a winner and passing verification are callable only by the service role — never from a browser, with any key.
the api key in the source is a publishable one. it is meant to be visible, it reads only what this page already shows you, and on its own it cannot write anything at all.
who is acting is taken from your signed session, never from a parameter. an argument that says who you are is an argument that can be changed, which is how impersonation works.
scripts load only from this origin. no inline javascript, no cdn, and no third-party script that could be swapped underneath us.
email it. the adversarial principle the builds are held to applies to the platform too, and a finding against this site is worth more than one against a build.
email addresses are not checked against a real person, so an account proves control of an inbox and nothing more. identity levels above 1 are recorded but not enforced. that is the largest open gap and it is stated here rather than hidden.
the claims on this page are covered by an automated suite that runs against the live site with only the public key — 155 checks over reads, writes, money, reputation and headers.