Privacy
Your cases stay in your browser.
Trait Bench has no accounts and no database. Every case you enter, every response and every score is held in a cookie in the browser you entered it with, and nowhere else. The server reads that cookie to render each page and keeps no copy of it. And what the cookie can hold is limited on purpose, so that a case is a code and a set of answers rather than a person.
What is stored, and where
One cookie, named tb_bench, split into up to 3 parts when it grows. It holds the whole record: each case's assigned code, its Case ID if you gave one, the year it was entered, and each administration's form, mode, year and item responses. Nothing else is stored. There is no name field, no note field and no date field, and every date is reduced to its year before it is written, so a month, a day or a time cannot be recorded about anyone. It is compressed and checksummed. It is not encrypted: anyone who can use this browser profile can open these pages and see your cases, so treat the device the way you would treat a filing drawer.
The cookie is marked HttpOnly and SameSite, is sent only over HTTPS on the public site, and lasts 400 days from the last change. A record holds roughly 134 completed short-form cases or 78 full-form ones. When it is full, the bench refuses the next entry and says so, rather than quietly dropping an old case.
What that means in practice
- Each browser is its own bench. Another device, another browser, or a private window starts empty and cannot see this one's cases. That is also why nobody else can: there is no shared store to look into.
- Clearing cookies erases the record. So does closing a private window, and so does the "Forget everything on this device" button. There is no server copy to recover from.
- A backup is the only copy that travels. Download one from the cases page: a plain JSON file you keep, stamped with the year it was made. Restoring it on another device adds its cases there. Keep it where you would keep the paper.
Identifiers
Every case is assigned a code like TB-4KQ7M, random and derived from nothing about the person. That code alone is enough, and if you never type anything else the record holds nothing a human chose at all. Dates are recorded as the year only.
The Case ID field is optional and constrained: letters, digits, dots and dashes, up to 24 characters, with no spaces: a code of your own, never a name. Anything outside that is refused, and the page says why. It is a real text field, though, and the constraint cannot tell a meaningless code from a meaningful one: P-0147 is what it is for, and a patient's initials and birth year would fit too. Choose something that means nothing outside your own records. The map from a Case ID to a person is yours to keep; it never reaches this site, and the site holds nothing it could rebuild one from. The security page is exact about which part of this the software enforces and which part is yours.
What the server does see
Each request arrives with the address it came from, the page it asks for, and the cookie. The server uses them in memory to build the reply and discards them. It writes no access log, has no database and no disk store for case data, and runs no analytics script on any page. Every page is sent with Cache-Control: no-store, so neither your browser nor anything between it and the server keeps a copy; with Referrer-Policy: no-referrer, so a link followed out of a report does not tell the destination which page it came from; and with a Content-Security-Policy that stops the page loading script from anywhere but this site.
Two third parties are involved, and both are visible in your browser's own network view. Cloudflare sits in front of the site, terminates HTTPS and passes requests to the server; it sees the address a request came from and keeps its own edge logs under its own policy. Cloudflare Web Analytics is not enabled on this site. Google Fonts supplies the typeface, which means two requests to Google when a page loads: one for the stylesheet and one for the font file. If you would rather not make them, block them: the pages fall back to your system font and lose nothing.
What this page is not
It is a plain description of how the site is built, written in September 2026 and describing the site as deployed then. It is not legal advice, and it does not make your practice compliant with anything by itself: the security page says what stays your responsibility.