The hardest privacy question, answered
What a breach of Guardian would expose.
Most technology built for homelessness gets breached — and leaks the very people it was tracking. We designed Guardian so that our worst day is still safe. Here is exactly what an attacker, or a subpoena, would get.
What a breach WOULD get (we don't hide this):
- A short list of sign-in emails — auth is a minimal record (an email); text-message sign-in is off.
- The contact-form inbox: a name, an email, and a message from anyone who wrote to us — kept at most 180 days, then purged, with no IP address stored.
- Aggregate credit counts and the public resource locations — which are already public.
What a breach would NOT get — because it does not exist:
- No database of the people we serve. No biometrics. No facial recognition.
- No conditions, no risk scores, no domestic-violence, health, immigration, or criminal-history records.
- No Social Security numbers — the benefits helper never stores one; you give it to the county, not to us.
- No per-recipient dossier or case file.
For contrast — what ODIN's breach actually leaked (January 2023):
The photos, reports, and Social Security cards of unhoused people — from a company that sold police facial recognition to identify them.
We are not claiming we hold zero data. We are claiming we never built the catalog of vulnerable people that gets breached — and that catalog does not exist here. That is the difference.