The Good Machine
Effective 12 September 2026 · Selah Now, LLC · thegoodmachine.love
This describes what is collected when you apply to join The Good Machine, who handles it, how long it is kept, and what you can ask for. It is written to be checked rather than admired — where something cannot be deleted, it says so.
The entry conversation runs on Selah Now, LLC's infrastructure, and Selah Now, LLC holds the transcript. The Good Machine — the cooperative Selah Now, LLC operates — holds your application record and the decision on it. Both are covered here.
| What | Why |
|---|---|
| Your name and email | To identify the application, email your transcript, and reach you with the decision |
| Your country | Regional stewardship and governance |
| The role you apply for | Standard member, firekeeper, or council |
| Links you choose to give | Optional. Only what you enter |
| Your entry conversation | The application itself. Read by the council before it votes |
| A background summary | Consented to at the door. See below |
| Your score and the council's decision | Five dimensions, a summary, and the vote with its stated reason |
| Payment details, if you join | Handled by Stripe. We never see or store a card number |
When you agree at the door you consent to a background verification using publicly available information associated with the name and email you gave. This is what that means in full.
It records an identity summary, whether a public profile was found, notable affiliations, anything worth asking you about directly, claims worth verifying and how to verify them, a confidence rating, the searches performed, and free-text notes. It includes a standard sanctions screen.
It is researched by Perplexity, synthesised by Claude (Anthropic), and screened against OpenSanctions. All three run in Selah Now, LLC's infrastructure. The result is stored keyed to your email address and is treated as stale after two hours.
You may decline it. If you would rather no background summary were prepared, say so before you begin and we will talk about how to proceed. Membership is not conditional on it.
A human council votes. The software prepares, scores and recommends. It has never had a vote and will not be given one. Every ballot carries the name of the person who cast it and their stated reason. If you are declined, a person declined you, and the reason is recorded.
| Processor | For | Whose infrastructure |
|---|---|---|
| Anthropic | The conversation, and synthesising the summary | Selah Now, LLC |
| Perplexity | Researching publicly available information | Selah Now, LLC |
| OpenSanctions | Sanctions screening | Selah Now, LLC |
| Supabase | The application record, members, ledger, votes | The Good Machine |
| Netlify | Hosting, functions, and short-lived stores | Both |
| Resend | Email delivery | Both |
| Stripe | Membership payment | The Good Machine |
We do not sell your information. We do not share it outside the council. We do not use it for advertising.
The processors above operate in the United States and may process data there. If you apply from outside the US, your information is transferred to and processed in the US.
The application record is kept permanently, including if you are declined or never finish. That is deliberate and it is what the covenant requires: a decision that cannot be traced to the people who made it is exactly what this cooperative exists to refuse. A declined application is kept so that the decline can still explain itself years later.
The transcript copy held by Selah Now, LLC exists so a failed email can be resent, and is deleted once delivery is confirmed.
The Good Machine anchors its records daily to the Stellar network, and publishes certain documents to Arweave, which is permanent by design.
Your personal information is not published to either. What is anchored is a cryptographic hash of your record, combined with a random value held only on our servers, inside a daily Merkle root. The hash cannot be reversed into your data, and the random value is never published, printed or shared.
What may be published to Arweave is constrained in the database itself to four categories — the Founding Covenant, ratified governance decisions, published journalism, and anchoring receipts. Never emails, transcripts, applicant records, or any personal data. That is a constraint on the table, not a policy we remember to follow.
The honest limit. Anything already written to Stellar or Arweave cannot be removed by anyone, including us. If you ask for deletion, everything we hold about you is erased — but a hash already inside a published Merkle root stays where it is. It reveals nothing about you, and it cannot be taken back.
When one member gives GOOD to another, the ledger records two entries: who gave, who received, how much, when, and — if you wrote one — a note saying why.
The note is encrypted. It is encrypted before it reaches the database, with a key the database does not hold, so a copy of the database on its own does not reveal what you wrote. If that key is ever unavailable, a transfer carrying a note is refused rather than stored in the clear.
The honest limit, and it is a real one. We can see that you gave, to whom, when, and how much. That is not encrypted and we are not going to tell you it is.
The reason is arithmetic, not indifference. Your balance is calculated by adding up your entries inside the database, under a lock, which is what makes it impossible to give away GOOD you do not have. That calculation requires the amounts and the member each one belongs to be readable. And once they are readable, the pairing is visible anyway — the two halves of one exchange share an identifier, share a timestamp, and carry mirrored amounts. Encrypting the name on one side would look like protection while changing nothing. We would rather write this paragraph than pretend.
Two things do limit the exposure. Only the cooperative's own servers can read the ledger; it is not exposed to other members or to the public. And erasure is genuine: deleting your rows destroys the random values that make the anchored hashes mean anything, which is why the permanent record left behind cannot be connected back to you by anyone, including us.
One exception, stated plainly. If the community removes a member under the covenant, the grounds for that decision are published permanently and are not encrypted. A decision to remove someone has to be able to explain itself. A member who simply leaves is never published at all.
Write to selahnow@proton.me. We answer within 30 days.
We do not sell personal information and we do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising. There is no opt-out to offer because there is nothing to opt out of. You have the rights to know, delete, correct and to non-discrimination for exercising them; use the address above.
The Good Machine is for adults. You confirm you are 18 or older when you agree at the door.
If this changes materially, the effective date above changes and the change is described here rather than made quietly.