chatlobby privacy policy

chatlobby is built so there is very little about you to hold. an account is optional, we never learn your name or your email, and almost everything here deletes itself within a day. this page says exactly what that means rather than asking you to take it on trust.

who runs this

chatlobby is run by a single operator, who is the data controller for the purposes of UK GDPR and the EU GDPR. for anything about this policy, write to hello@chatlobby.cc — that reaches the operator directly.

what you give us

at entry you choose a username, gender, age and country. none of it is verified, none of it has to be true, and it exists only to populate the lobby. you may optionally add a short tagline.

after that we hold whatever you send: messages in rooms, direct messages, group messages, images and video you upload, reactions, and the list of people you have blocked. we also record that someone opened your profile card, so the view counter works.

if you make an account, we store the username you chose, the password (hashed, never in the clear), your level and sparks, and the lobby defaults you set. there is no email, no phone number, no card and no real name anywhere in it.

what we do not collect

no email address. no phone number. no real name. no payment card. no IP addresses in the clear.

that last one needs spelling out. when you enter the lobby, the address your request came from is run through a one-way hash with a fixed salt, and the hash — not the address — is stored on your profile and, if you have an account, on the account. it exists for two things only: counting rewarded ad views per address, so a script cannot farm them, and refusing entry to an address that has been banned. a completed ad view keeps the hash it was counted against, and a ban keeps the one it was issued against.

nothing joins that hash to your messages. no other user can read it — it is not part of the profile the lobby shows — and we do not try to turn it back into an address, though we are straight about the fact that with the salt in hand one could. apart from the random visit id described below, it is the only durable identifier the site holds, and it is why a ban is a speed bump rather than a wall.

how you found us

on your first visit your browser picks a random visit id and remembers how you arrived: the campaign tags in the link you followed (the utm_ part of the address), the name of the site that sent you (just the site, never the page), and the page you landed on. we record that, plus which days the id came back, whether it entered the lobby and whether it sent a message that day. we use it only to count which links bring people who stay.

it is our own, not a third-party analytics service. it holds nothing you typed, it is never joined to your messages or to a guest profile, and it is linked to an account only if you sign in to one in that browser.

separately, our servers and the hosting and CDN providers in front of them write ordinary access logs, and those logs contain IP addresses. that is true of essentially every website. we do not join those logs to your messages or your profile, and nothing in the product reads them.

automated moderation

messages and images are checked automatically, by software running on our own server, for spam, threats, hate, and signs that someone is under 18. adult content between adults is not a reason to remove anything. a check can hide a message, blur an image, or mute or pause an account; a person reviews anything serious, and you can write to us if you think we got it wrong.

the text of your messages never leaves our systems for this. the one exception is images: each uploaded image is checked against databases of known child sexual abuse material by Project Arachnid, run by the Canadian Centre for Child Protection. a match is preserved as evidence, never shown again, and reported to the authorities.

how long we keep it

your profile

deleted about an hour after your last activity. close the tab and it goes.

the hashed address

goes with your profile, or with your account if you have one. the copy attached to a rewarded ad view stays with that record; the copy attached to a ban stays for as long as the ban does.

messages — rooms, dms and groups

deleted 24 hours after they are posted, automatically, without exception.

images and video in chat

deleted 24 hours after upload, on the same clock.

images and gifs you put into swap

kept while they are in the pool, so other people can draw them. a submission leaves the pool when you delete your account or when moderation removes it, and the oldest media may be removed if storage runs short.

how you found us

deleted 180 days after the first visit, automatically.

reports you or others file

deleted 24 hours after it is filed, reviewed or not. if a report led to action — a removed message, a mute, a ban — the record of that action is kept by moderation, separately.

moderation records

when something is hidden, or someone is muted or banned, moderation keeps a record of what happened with a short excerpt of the content: 180 days, and longer only where it concerns suspected abuse of a child, which we have to preserve and report.

your account

kept while you use it. an account with nothing in it and no sign of life for 90 days is deleted automatically.

who else sees it

we use a small number of providers to run the site, and we do not sell or share your data with anyone else:

• Supabase — the database and anonymous sign-in
• Netlify — hosting the site
• Cloudflare — content delivery, the anti-bot check at entry, and privacy-preserving visit counts that set no cookies and do not profile individuals
• our own infrastructure — uploads and media, and the automated moderation described above
• Project Arachnid (Canadian Centre for Child Protection) — checks uploaded images against known child sexual abuse material

advertising

the site carries advertising, in a small number of fixed slots. this is the part of the page where the most data leaves our control, so it gets its own section.

the ads are served by ExoClick. each one is kept isolated from the rest of the site and cannot reach anything belonging to chatlobby — not your session, not your messages, not your profile. what the ad network does receive is what any embedded advertisement receives: your IP address, your browser and device, and the fact that an ad was requested from this site. it may set its own identifiers and use them to limit how often you see the same ad, or to target it.

we deliberately do not pass on which page you are reading. addresses of rooms and conversations identify who you are talking to, so the ad network is told only that you were on chatlobby — never where.

everyone sees advertising, whether or not you have an account. there is nothing to buy that removes it — the ads are what pay for the site.

cookies and local storage

we set no advertising or analytics cookies of our own. the site keeps a few things in your browser's local storage so it works at all: your anonymous session, your light/dark preference, which conversations you have read, which ones you have hidden from your list, whether you have acknowledged the content warning on a room, whether you have seen the first-run cards, dismissed the install prompt, left the swap guide open, or turned the dm sound on, and the random visit id with how you first arrived (see "how you found us" above). clearing your browser data removes all of it and ends your session.

the anti-bot check sets what it needs to tell a person from a script, and advertising may set storage of its own as described above.

your rights

under UK GDPR and the GDPR you can ask for a copy of your personal data, ask us to correct or erase it, object to how it is used, or complain to a regulator — the ICO in the UK, or your national authority in the EU.

here is the honest limitation. because there is no account, no email and no name, we usually have no way to connect a request to a particular session — and a system that let a stranger claim someone else's messages by describing them would be far more dangerous than the one we have. in practice the erasure is already happening: close the tab and your profile is gone within the hour, and everything you said is gone within a day. if you hold an account, write in from it and we can act on the account itself.

age

chatlobby is for adults only and refuses any stated age under eighteen. we do not knowingly hold data about children. if you believe we do, write to hello@chatlobby.cc and it will be handled ahead of anything else.

changes

if what we collect or how long we keep it changes, this page changes with it. the site's changelog records what changed and when.