Why there is no account
Daylight asks people to say what they actually think about a project their colleagues are about to start. That only works if being identified is impossible rather than merely against policy — so there is nothing to sign into, and nothing that could say who answered.
What is stored, and what is not
A vote is five columns
Everything stored when you answer is the card it belongs to and your three numbers, plus any doubts you picked:
votes ( card_id, today, bar, odds, tags )
No name, no account, no email, no IP against your answer. No primary key and no timestamp — those are missing on purpose. A creation time would order the votes, and the order people answered in a nine-person team is often enough to identify them.
Your three numbers are not kept together
A row like (3, 7, 5, scope unclear) is one person’s entire opinion, reassembled. So the card never reads rows — it reads three separately sorted lists, one per question.
Every number you gave is in there. Which of them were given by the same person is not, and cannot be recovered, because the ordering that linked them was thrown away on the way out.
The floor is in the database, not the code
A card shows nothing until five people have answered. That rule is not an if statement in a page that someone could forget to write — it is enforced by the database view every surface has to read through.
No screen in this product is capable of showing an early result, including by mistake, including to whoever made the card. The reason for the floor is the same as for the missing timestamp: a number that moved with each vote could be watched, and the difference read backwards to whoever just answered.
Email, if the creator asks for it
A creator can paste addresses in when they make a card, so Daylight sends the link instead of them. Those addresses sit in their own table, are never joined to a vote, and are deleted when the card sends its last mail. A card made without them stores nothing of the kind.
It also has to keep the voting link itself, in plain text, for as long as the card still has something to say — up to about ninety days on a card with a metric. Every other card stores only a hash of that link, which is why a card made without addresses cannot be opened by anyone who gets at the database. A card made with them can.
It does not weaken the anonymity of a vote. Knowing every address on a card still tells you nothing about who said what, because a vote has no name, no order and no time to match an address against. What it does mean is that Daylight now holds one thing it did not before, so it is written down here rather than left for you to discover.
What is deliberately not collected
No department, no team, no role. It has been asked for, and the answer is no: on a team of nine, a department is an identifier. Once the breakdown shows one person in Design, their answer has their name on it in everything but letters.
No submission order, no device fingerprint, no analytics on the card surfaces. There is no user table to join any of it against, because there is no user table.
Where this can still break
One place, and it is worth knowing before you use it. The seven offered doubts cannot identify anyone — plenty of people pick “Timeline”. But a doubt you write yourself is shown back in your exact words, and a specific enough sentence can point at its author as clearly as a signature. Nothing on our side attaches your name to it. The phrasing can.
What it costs you
Having no account is not free, and the bill comes to you rather than to us.
Your cards live in this browser
The list of cards you made or answered is kept by your browser and nowhere else. It does not follow you to another machine, and clearing your browser clears it. Keep the links if a card matters.
One vote per browser, not per person
A marker in your browser stops an accidental second answer. It is defeatable on purpose — another browser works. With no identity there is nothing stronger available, and a defeatable block was chosen over building the thing that would make it stronger.
Both of those could be fixed by adding accounts. Neither is worth it: the moment there is a user table, every guarantee on this page becomes a promise instead of a fact.
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