Private publishing tool

Shasta Soft Publisher Privacy Policy

Last updated: October 15, 2026

About this tool

Shasta Soft Publisher is a private tool operated by Brian Cory under Shasta Soft. It is intended to prepare, review, approve, schedule and publish posts to Brian's own LinkedIn profile. It is not an outreach service or a public account-management platform.

Account connections require Brian's consent. Connecting an account does not enable publishing. Each post requires Brian's approval of the exact text, account, visibility and publication time, and publishing must also be enabled through the service's protected controls.

Information the service uses

When Brian connects LinkedIn, the service uses the authorized member identifier, basic display name, granted permissions, access credentials and authorization expiry. It requests account-identification and personal-post-publishing permissions. It does not request LinkedIn email access, private messages, contacts, advertising information or company administration.

The service stores draft text, the chosen account and visibility, publication times, exact approval records, queue status, publication attempts, returned post identifiers and operational status. Temporary sign-in and authorization records protect access to the private service. Unneeded profile fields are not retained.

How information is used and shared

Information is used to identify the authorized account, present drafts for review, enforce the owner's approval, publish at a chosen time, prevent duplicate publication and report failures or expired authorization.

Post text and the author identifier are sent to LinkedIn when publication is authorized. Drafts and status requested through a connected ChatGPT tool are returned to ChatGPT. Research and writing conversations remain subject to the policies of the chat service being used. The publishing scheduler does not call an AI model.

DigitalOcean hosts the private publisher service. Cloudflare hosts this privacy-policy page, and GoDaddy provides DNS for the publisher hostname. These providers may process technical information needed to operate and secure their services. The publisher creates encrypted backups on the same server nightly and retains successful copies for 14 days. The backup-encryption key is kept separately from the archives. No independent or off-server backup service is configured; these copies do not protect against loss of that server or its backup key. Recovery requires manual review before publishing can resume, to prevent duplicate posts. Information is not sold or shared for advertising.

Access and security

The private service restricts access to its owner and authenticated tool connections. The application encrypts stored LinkedIn access credentials and keeps its encryption key and application secrets in separate server-side files. Credentials are excluded from source control, application logs, chat responses and browser-side code. Drafts and approval records require protected server storage and backups.

The private review page uses sign-in cookies and authorization state to protect access and approval actions. The application does not include advertising or third-party analytics scripts.

Retention and choices

Drafts, approvals and attempt records are retained while needed for the owner's queue, publishing history and duplicate prevention. Expired temporary authorization and session records are removed automatically. The owner can request review or deletion of stored information using the contact below. Pending and uncertain publication attempts must be reconciled before their records are removed, to prevent accidental duplicate posting.

Brian can cancel queued work and disable new publishing attempts. A request already sent to LinkedIn may still finish. LinkedIn access can be revoked through LinkedIn's permitted-services settings; authorization expiry may require reconnection. Removing service data does not remove a post already published on LinkedIn. ChatGPT and LinkedIn retain information according to their own policies and account controls.

Changes and contact

This policy will be updated before materially different data handling begins. Questions, access requests and deletion requests can be directed to Brian Cory at brian@shastasoft.com.