Know which systems perform each part of the service.

Shield itself runs in the EU. Notification email does not.

Every Shield service and store is in Google Cloud region europe-west1, in Belgium: the API, the Firestore database that holds your records, the KMS key ring that holds the encryption keys your envelopes are sealed with, and the storage buckets that briefly hold an uploaded file. Notification email is the exception. The sending domain on the Resend account is registered in their us-east-1 region, so the recipient address, subject and body of every message Shield sends are processed in the United States. That is a transfer outside the EEA and the United Kingdom, and it applies to every message listed under Resend below. For the other providers on this page, the processing location and the transfer safeguards are the ones set out in that provider’s own data processing agreement; Shield does not choose a region on your behalf for any of them.

Identity, compute, database, storage, queues, encryption, and detection.

Google services support authentication, authenticated APIs, Firestore records, private object storage, task processing, Cloud KMS, monitoring, OCR/sensitive-data detection, and configured first-party model routes.

Public web delivery.

Netlify builds and serves the Shield web application, applies delivery headers and redirects, and hosts preview and production web deployments.

Billing.

Stripe provides hosted checkout, billing management, and subscription events.

Transactional email delivery.

Resend delivers every email Shield sends itself, over its REST endpoint at api.resend.com and from a sending domain verified on the Forg3t account. Each send hands Resend the recipient address, the subject line, and the full message body: the membership welcome mail, the weekly summary, an organization’s monthly report and member invitations, and a Team or Enterprise inquiry sent from Shield to the Forg3t team. Until September 10, 2026 it also carried the exposure-change notification and privacy or removal requests a member approved; a removal request was addressed to the target organization rather than to the member, and also carried the member’s own address as Reply-To and their name in the sender display name, the subject line, and the body.

Support conversations.

The support widget and support email are operated on Zendesk, so whatever you choose to write in a ticket - your message, your email address, and any attachment - is processed by Zendesk under its data processing agreement. Support requests are the one channel whose content you control entirely, which is why the support page asks you to keep secrets and identity documents out of it.

Used only by features retired on September 10, 2026.

These providers received data only when a member used a feature Shield offered until September 10, 2026, and none of them receives anything from Shield now. Have I Been Pwned, XposedOrNot, and LeakCheck: breach and dark web monitoring queried them only after you approved a specific identifier for checking, and each request said which source it would ask; email checks used a truncated hash where the source supported it, so the provider saw a prefix rather than your address, and returned values were discarded while normalized source, date, category, severity, counts, and hashes were encrypted under the account. Brave Search: the open-web exposure scan sent it search queries built from the identifiers you approved. Google Gmail: a member who connected it had only the exact privacy-request message they approved sent through it. OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity, and Google: the bring-your-own-key AI exposure audit sent an authorized query to the providers a member connected with their own key and selected for a run, under that member’s own account terms. What these features stored was deleted on September 11, 2026.