Privacy Policy

This policy describes what forum collects and why. The short version: we collect what the product visibly needs, we don't sell it, and you can delete all of it yourself.

What we collect

• Account: email address, username, password (stored as a scrypt hash — we can never read it), optional bio and profile images, account privacy setting, and follow requests.
• Content and activity: your posts, comments, votes, bookmarks, debate stances, follows, and direct messages. If you use Daily Brief, forum keeps up to seven editions containing selected existing content references and grouped activity counts.
• Search: the query you submit is used to return matching topics, posts, and articles. forum does not build a saved account search-history list, and URL query values are removed from server request logs.
• Feed personalization: interests you choose, items shown in your feed, opens, approximate time visible, outbound publisher opens, and “Not interested” choices. These first-party signals are used to rank and diversify your feed; they are not used for advertising.
• Computed data: a political-lean placement derived from your posts and votes by a deterministic algorithm. It exists only inside the app and is shown on your profile.
• Device and diagnostics: a push-notification token if you enable notifications. Crash diagnostics may include app version, build, device model, operating-system version, and the screen where a problem occurred. We do not collect contacts or advertising identifiers. Uploaded photos have their metadata (including GPS EXIF) stripped on upload.
• Feedback: feedback text, an optional screenshot, and the route, theme, app version/build, platform, OS, and device metadata attached to the report.

How it's used

• To operate the product: showing your content, computing placements, preparing the in-app Daily Brief, delivering notifications you opted into, and sending account emails (verification, password reset, optional Daily Brief).
• Recommendations: forum locally creates numeric topic vectors from posts and article coverage, then combines them with your selected interests and in-app activity. Behavioral profiles are not sent to OpenAI or an advertising network. You can clear selected interests, viewing signals, and “Not interested” choices under Settings → Content → Reset feed personalization.
• forumAI: if you explicitly allow OpenAI processing, your question, recent conversation context, eligible attributed publisher headlines, forum-generated story metadata, and relevant community-post context may be sent to OpenAI to generate the answer. Publisher article bodies are not stored or sent to OpenAI. Content from publishers with reviewed AI or automation restrictions is excluded from OpenAI context. Locally derived aggregate clustering signals may still help forum identify a covered topic, after which only eligible attributed headlines are supplied to OpenAI. These inputs are not used by forum to build an advertising profile.
• Moderation: narrow safety rules run on forum's server first. If you explicitly allow OpenAI processing, profile text, posts, comments, direct messages, forumAI prompts, and uploaded images are also sent to OpenAI's moderation service. Signup usernames are checked only by forum's on-server rules. We store decision metadata and a one-way input hash for audit, not rejected raw content.
• Product quality: structured feedback and crash diagnostics help us reproduce and fix problems.

Your OpenAI choice

Before forum sends your personal data or user content to OpenAI, the app identifies OpenAI, explains the content and purposes involved, links to this policy, and asks you to allow or decline. Permission is versioned and recorded with the time of your decision. Existing users are not automatically opted in.

You may choose Not now and continue using browsing, text posts, comments, direct messages, profile editing, voting, saving, following, reporting, and blocking under forum's on-server safety rules. Image uploads, feedback screenshots, and forumAI require OpenAI processing for their image-safety or AI function and will ask again when needed. You can withdraw permission at any time under Settings → Privacy → OpenAI processing. Withdrawal stops new content from being sent; it does not reverse processing that occurred while permission was active.

What we don't do

• No selling or renting personal data.
• No third-party advertising or tracking SDKs.
• No routine human reading of direct messages. forum's on-server rules process messages before delivery, and OpenAI provides an additional automated check only with your permission. A recipient can report a received message, in which case moderators may review that reported message and take action.

Service providers

Infrastructure providers process data on our behalf: application hosting (Railway), database hosting (Neon), public and private image storage (Cloudflare R2), email delivery (Resend), push and build delivery (Expo), crash diagnostics (Sentry), TestFlight distribution (Apple), and AI responses and optional additional safety checks (OpenAI). Each receives only what its function requires. forum requires providers to protect personal data consistently with this policy and applicable privacy obligations and does not authorize them to use forum data for advertising.

Retention and deletion

Data is kept while your account exists, except Daily Brief editions, which rotate after seven days. Settings → Delete Account immediately removes your profile, posts, comments, votes, messages, Daily Brief editions, push tokens, and feedback text and metadata. Associated public media and private feedback screenshots are queued for deletion from active storage, retried on failure, and removed within 24 hours. Backups age out on a rolling basis.

Your rights

You can access and edit your profile in-app, export your content by request, and delete everything yourself. Contact us for anything else.

Questions: support@forumeveryside.com