Litter Layer

An indie search and bookmarking community by user#7.

Privacy

Bookmarks and visitor identity

Litter Layer offers personal bookmarks with or without a login account.

Without an account: we use FingerprintJS(opens in new tab), an open-source (MIT) library that runs in your browser. It reads browser attributes and computes a hashed visitorId on your device. That ID is sent to our server when you save, reorder, tag, or remove bookmarks, when you use the notepad on your bookmarks page, or when you dismiss the welcome tour.

We load the FingerprintJS library from this site (/assets/fingerprintjs-v5.js), with the public CDN as a fallback. If fingerprinting is unavailable (blocked script, privacy mode, etc.), your browser generates a random ID stored in localStorage instead.

With an account: if you create an account and log in, bookmarks are tied to your user account instead of a visitorId. We store your email for authentication (verification and password reset only). Browser bookmarks and account bookmarks stay separate — for example, bookmarks saved on a shared computer are not copied into your account when you log in. To move anonymous bookmarks into your account, export a JSON backup while logged out, then import it after you log in.

You may delete your account at any time from Account settings. You must confirm your email and current password. Deletion removes your account bookmarks and, when you confirm from a browser that has guest bookmarks, removes guest data tied to that browser as well.

What we store for bookmarks

If you turn on a public bookmarks page in Account settings, anyone with the link can see a read-only list of your bookmark titles, URLs, and descriptions sorted alphabetically. Your notepad, tags, and private bookmarks tools are not shown on that page. You can turn this off at any time.

Anonymous bookmarks are keyed by your visitorId, not by a real-world identity. Logged-in bookmarks are keyed to your account. We do not sell this data or use it for advertising. Anyone who knows your visitorId could theoretically read or change anonymous bookmarks, so treat that mode as a convenience feature rather than a secure vault. Account bookmarks require your password to access.

Your visitorId may change if you change browsers or after certain browser updates; bookmarks tied to an old ID cannot be recovered automatically. You can export a JSON backup from your bookmarks page and import it later to restore your list and notepad. Browser bookmark HTML files you import are parsed in your browser and sent to our server as URLs and titles, the same as when you add a bookmark manually.

Custom links and search indexing

When you add a custom URL on your bookmarks page, we always save it to your personal list. If the URL is not on our banned domains list and is not already in the search index, Patu may crawl it and add it for all users. If a site blocks Patu from crawling, you may provide a title and description manually when bookmarking or suggesting the site. Banned domains (large corporate platforms) remain in your bookmarks only and are never indexed.

What we generally do not do

We do not run cross-site tracking, build advertising profiles, or require accounts for normal search. Accounts are optional. Our web host may log IP addresses as part of routine hosting; we do not use those logs for bookmarks.

Removing your website from Litter Layer

To remove your website from litterlayer.com search results, put nothing but the word block in a patu.txt file at the root of your site (same place as your robots.txt). The next time Patu visits your domain, it checks patu.txt first and removes all of your pages from the index.

To keep Patu from re-adding your site afterward, also update your robots.txt:

User-agent: PatuBot*
Disallow: /

Patu checks patu.txt for a block signal before it applies robots.txt rules, so you can add both files at the same time. robots.txt alone prevents future crawling but does not remove pages already in the index — you need the patu.txt block for that. Once your site has been removed, you may delete the patu.txt file; keep the robots.txt rule if you do not want to be crawled again.

Removal is not instant. The next time Patu crawls or refreshes your domain, it will remove your site from litterlayer.com.