# Privacy Policy

This is a short, honest description of what Third Platz actually collects today — not a boilerplate list of things a bigger company's stack might collect. If that changes, this page changes with it.

## What we collect

Three things, all directly tied to using the service:

- Account email, if you create one. Used only for login and, if you ever request it, account recovery. Your password is stored hashed, never in plain text.
- A stub identity cookie. Every visitor — including anonymous ones — gets a random, signed cookie that ties their contributions to a consistent (but not personally identified) handle, like "swift-falcon-07". It contains no personal information by itself.
- Content you contribute. List titles and descriptions, item blurbs, entity details (name/kind/address/url), and votes, all attributed to your account or stub identity.
- An optional home location, geo-level only (e.g. a city or country, never a precise address or coordinates), if you choose to set one on your own profile. It's never inferred from your IP address or any other signal — only set, changed, or cleared by you, from your own profile page — and it's used to power an optional "Locals" ranking lens on list pages.

## What we don't collect

Third Platz currently runs with no analytics and no third-party trackers of any kind — no ad pixels, no cross-site tracking cookies, no behavioral profiling. We don't collect your IP address for anything beyond the request-rate-limiting already required to keep the service usable (see Security in the project README), and that isn't stored long-term.

## Cookies

Two cookies, both functionally required (not for advertising or tracking): the stub identity cookie described above, and a session cookie if you're logged in. Neither is used for cross-site tracking.

## How data is stored and shared

All data lives in a single database operated by us. We do not sell or share your data with third parties. Because content you contribute is, by design, publicly visible on the site (that's the product), don't include personal information in a list title, blurb, or entity detail that you wouldn't want public. Every account and stub identity also has a public profile page (/u/{handle}) that aggregates this same already-public contribution history — lists created, items added, posts, comments, with counts — nothing beyond what's already visible elsewhere on the site, and never your email or votes. Karma (shown next to your handle and on your profile) is public too, derived entirely from that same public contribution history — never from your individual vote history, which stays closed, always.

## Your choices

Contributing anonymously (never creating an account) is fully supported and is not a degraded experience. Your home location (see above) is entirely opt-in, and you can change or clear it at any time from your own profile page — nothing else on the site requires it. If you have an account and want it removed, or have any other privacy question, contact us — see below.

## Changes to this policy

If what we collect changes — for example, if analytics are added later — this page will be updated to reflect it truthfully, not left stale.

## Contact

Privacy questions: hello@thirdplatz.com.

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