Privacy Notice

This Privacy Notice explains how Opinions uses personal data when you visit our website or use the platform. It is written for UK data protection law, including the UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018.

The controller of your personal data is [ADMIN: legal entity or sole trader name], trading as Opinions, of [ADMIN: legal address].

General contact: us using the Contact button on your profile. Privacy contact: [ADMIN: privacy email].

ICO registration number: [ADMIN: ICO registration number, if registered]

Information you provide

When you sign up, complete onboarding, edit your profile, post, vote, report, appeal or contact us.

Information generated through use

Votes, reactions, participation, notifications, moderation records and feed ranking signals.

Information collected automatically

Technical data such as IP address, browser details and logs created when your device connects to our services.

Information from third parties

If you sign in with Google or Apple, we receive basic details from them such as your name, email address and an account identifier.

The lawful bases below are proposed and must be confirmed by the platform owner before launch.

See the section on sensitive information above. We do not use special category data for advertising or to make decisions about you.

Personalisation

Your For You feed is ranked using the interests you choose and your activity, such as the topics of debates you engage with.

Recommendation systems

Ranking also uses general signals like recency and activity. Hot and Active feeds are not based on your personal interests in the same way.

Profiling

This is a limited form of profiling for content ranking. It does not produce legal or similarly significant effects for you. You can change your interests at any time in Settings.

Automated decision-making

We do not make decisions with legal or similarly significant effects about you based solely on automated processing without the safeguards required by law.

Debatability score

Your public profile shows simple activity statistics, including a Debatability measure calculated from how your opinions perform in debate. It is calculated automatically from public activity and is not used to restrict your account.

When content is reported, the reported text and report reason are sent to an AI model, accessed through the Lovable AI Gateway (currently a Google Gemini model), to help assess it against our Community Guidelines. The outcome is recorded and can be appealed and reviewed by a person.

We do not use your content to train AI models. [ADMIN: confirm AI provider data-use terms]

We do not sell your personal data. We share it with service providers (processors) who help us run Opinions, under contract and only on our instructions.

Professional advisers

Lawyers, accountants and insurers where needed.

Law enforcement and regulators

Where legally required, or where necessary to protect someone from serious harm.

Corporate transactions

If Opinions is sold, merged or reorganised, data may transfer to the new operator, who must respect this notice.

Some providers may process data outside the UK. Where they do, we rely on UK adequacy regulations or appropriate safeguards such as the UK International Data Transfer Agreement or Addendum.

Data locations: [ADMIN: confirm hosting region and transfer mechanisms for each provider]

Retention criteria

We keep data for as long as your account is active and as needed for the purposes above, then delete or anonymise it.

Account deletion

When you delete your account, your profile, opinions and arguments are removed or anonymised.

What may remain

Replies by others to your content stay visible, and your content may show as “Comment deleted”. Aggregate vote totals remain.

Legal and safety retention

Moderation records and information connected to serious harm or legal claims may be kept longer. [ADMIN: retention periods for each category]

Anonymised data

We may keep data that no longer identifies you, such as totals.

Email [ADMIN: privacy email]. We aim to respond within one month.

Identity verification

We may ask you to confirm your identity, usually by contacting us from your account email, before acting on a request.

Please contact us first so we can try to help: [ADMIN: privacy email].

You also have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) at ico.org.uk or on 0303 123 1113.

Opinions is not intended for anyone under 16. We ask for date of birth at sign-up. If we learn an account belongs to someone below the minimum age, we will close it. [ADMIN: confirm age-assurance approach for Online Safety Act duties]

We use measures such as encrypted connections, hashed passwords and access controls that limit who can see data. No system is perfectly secure.

Data breaches

If a breach is likely to result in a risk to you, we will notify the ICO where required, and tell you without undue delay where the risk is high.

Content may link to other websites. Their privacy practices are their own responsibility.

We will update this notice when our practices change and tell you about significant changes in the app or by email.

Privacy contact: [ADMIN: privacy email]. Effective date: [ADMIN: effective date]. Version: 0.1 (draft).