Privacy
closegraph.com · September 4, 2026
What closegraph does
You connect your Gmail. closegraph works out who you exchange email with. Other members of your circle can then search a name and see whether you know that person, and how close you are.
What we read
We ask Google for the gmail.metadata permission. That permission lets an app read message headers, including subject lines, and labels. It cannot return the text of a message or attachments. We never ask for a permission that could.
closegraph uses less than the permission allows. It requests exactly four headers from each message: from, to, cc, and date. Google returns only those. Subject lines are never requested or received. Labels come back with every message and are discarded. Google also tells us your name and email address so we know which account is yours.
Which messages: closegraph first lists the ids of every message in your mailbox. Ids carry no content. The list shows which conversations had mail both ways: you wrote and someone answered, or someone wrote and you answered. closegraph reads the four headers of the messages in those conversations only. Mail that went one way, in either direction, is never read.
What we keep
- Your Google account’s email and name, and an encrypted token that lets us re-read headers later.
- For each person you have exchanged mail with in both directions: their name as it appears in headers, their email address (used only to tell people apart, never shown to anyone), how many messages went each way, and the dates of the first and last one.
- To keep the both-ways rule exact when new mail arrives, a running tally per account of every address seen in those two-way conversations, including people who have not written back yet. Those never appear in search.
- No message text, subjects, attachments, or contact lists.
Who sees what
Another member can type a name and learn that you correspond with that person, a closeness score, and the organization behind the address (its domain, or “personal address”). They never see the email address, message counts, dates, or anything you wrote. They cannot browse your contacts. Search takes a first and last name and returns only people you have exchanged mail with in both directions.
What we don’t do
We don’t sell your data, use it for advertising, or give it to anyone outside closegraph except the services that run it (a server and a backup). No person reads it, except with your permission, to investigate abuse, or if the law requires it. closegraph’s use and transfer of information received from Google APIs to any other app will adhere to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements.
Leaving
On the home page, while signed in, you can delete any one account or delete everything. Either way closegraph revokes its own access at Google and deletes what it indexed from that account at once. The nightly backup ages out within 30 days. You can also revoke closegraph in your Google Account permissions, which stops our token but leaves the index until you delete it here or email [email protected].
Security
One server, run by us. Tokens are encrypted at rest (AES-256-GCM). Everything travels over HTTPS.
Questions
Nick Soman, [email protected].