chatlobby privacy policy

chatlobby is built so there is very little about you to hold. you do not make an account, 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. the registered name and postal address are on the 2257 statement. 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. an email is optional and used for nothing but getting you back in — there is 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 password. no payment card. no IP addresses in our database.

that last one has a boundary worth being straight about: 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.

how long we keep it

your profile

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

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.

reports you or others file

kept. a report is a moderation record and is the one thing here deliberately outliving the content it describes — otherwise a banned user could return by waiting a day.

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

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.

some links here are affiliate links, marked ad, and we may be paid if you use them. following one hands you to a third party whose privacy practices are their own and not covered by this page.

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, and whether you have acknowledged the content warning on a room. 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.