Privacy

Stancr shows how outlets across the political spectrum cover the same story, and lets readers pick a side and discuss it. This page explains what we store about you, why, who else handles it, and how long we keep it.

Reading

You can read everything without an account. We don't use advertising or third-party analytics trackers. Like any website, our servers and our network provider (Cloudflare) see your IP address and browser details to deliver pages and to block abuse; we use the address for rate limits and don't keep it with your account. Our server logs record requests (including IP addresses) and are kept for up to 14 days.

Your account

Email address: to send sign-in links (via our email provider, Resend) and security notices, such as when a passkey is added. It is never shown publicly.
Username: shown with your comments.
Passkeys: if you add one, we store its public key and the name you gave it. Your fingerprint or face never leaves your device.
Sessions: a cookie keeps you signed in for up to 30 days. We store when each session started and was last used, and how you signed in, so you can see your devices and sign the others out.

Sides

Picking a side records a political opinion. Your side on a story is shown next to your comments on it and counts towards the story's split. We ask before your first pick. You can change or clear a side at any time, and deleting your account removes all of them. Accounts created before we started asking keep their sides private on their comments until they accept.

Picking a side without an account. If you pick a side or answer a debate question without signing in, we set a cookie (ps_anon) with a random identifier so you can see and change your pick. We store only a one-way hash of it with your picks, which count in a separate “Visitors” tally, never in the readers' split. They are deleted after 180 days at most. If you then sign in or create an account and agree to the side-picking terms, your picks move to your account and the anonymous copies are deleted. We never share the identifier with anyone. To limit abuse we count picks per network (a one-way hash of your network, not your IP address) for an hour.

Follows and notifications

If you follow a storyline or story, we store what you follow and the notifications we create for you (in-app, and if you turn them on, browser push and an email digest), including whether and when you read or opened each one, so we can show what's new and count opened notifications in our daily totals. For push we store your browser's push subscription (an address at your browser vendor's push service and its keys); pushes go through that service. You can turn each kind and channel off, set quiet hours and your timezone, and every email has a one-click unsubscribe link. All of this is in your data export and deleted with your account.

The Six-Way Brief

If you subscribe, we store your email address, when you subscribed and confirmed, and a log of the issues sent to you (sent through Resend). We don't use tracking pixels. Links in the email go through our own redirect; when the page opens it reports the click, which we count per issue, never per reader. Unsubscribe with one click from any issue or in your account; deleting your account deletes the subscription.

Measurement

We count pageviews, visible story-link impressions, clicks, scroll milestones, engaged reading time and broad traffic sources alongside picks, answers and follows. Impressions require at least half a story link to be visible for one second; clicking the link also counts as exposure. Reading time excludes hidden tabs and stops after 60 seconds without interaction. We store aggregate daily counts for up to 90 days, not individual browsing histories. We do not collect form contents, URL query strings, full referrer URLs or activity on account, sign-in, admin and dashboard pages. Traffic sources are broad categories such as search, social or newsletter, not full campaign URLs.

To estimate daily visitors and suppress duplicate event deliveries, we use a daily keyed hash of your network and browser details. Raw IP addresses and browser strings are not stored in analytics, and temporary deduplication markers expire within 48 hours. The hash changes each UTC day, is never linked to your account or political picks, and cannot identify a person reliably: shared networks and similar browsers may be counted together. No new analytics cookies or browser identifiers are set. We respect Do Not Track and Global Privacy Control signals for these new web measurements. Existing actions needed to run the service, such as recording a pick, remain recorded.

To put the most-read stories first in Top stories, we count views of each story over the last 24 hours. A view is counted once per network per story per day: we keep a keyed one-way hash of your network address for 24 hours to skip repeats, then it expires. The counts are per story, never per person.

Comments, votes and reports

We store your comments, the votes you cast on comments, and any comments you report. Before a comment is shown it is screened automatically under our community rules: by a blocklist, by a moderation model we host ourselves (Laya), and, only for comments Laya is uncertain about, by a language model from an outside provider: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash, accessed through OpenRouter (or, if we switch, a model on Cloudflare Workers AI, Clef). Only the comment text is sent to that provider, without your username or any other account details. The models score each comment against the rule categories (such as “attacks another reader” or “unverified claim”); we keep those scores with the moderation decision, which can show the comment, label it, collapse it, hide it or hold it for a moderator. Some comments are reviewed by our moderators. Moderation decisions are kept for 180 days. We do not use your comments to train our moderation model; it is trained on synthetic example comments only.

When you post, we first check the draft the same way (blocklist and Laya only, never the outside provider) to suggest rephrasing if it looks like it breaks a rule. That check stores nothing about the text: we only count which rule it was and whether you edited, without your account.

If one of your comments is hidden or collapsed, you see the reason and can appeal once. Your appeal and its optional note go to our moderators with the comment and its category; the outcome is kept with the comment, and an appeal that succeeds removes the effect of that hide on your trust score. Appeals are included in your data export.

Comment perspective

Currently off. Comment perspective analysis is switched off. When we tested our model it was not accurate enough, and it showed a bias: neutral comments that only mentioned the writer's religion were read as far-right. So right now we don't estimate any comment's perspective, cross-side upvotes all count double, and “How each side is talking” isn't shown. We will only turn it back on after retraining the model and passing a bias test, and we will update this page first. Perspective scores stored before it was switched off are still deleted with the comment and included in your data export. The rest of this section describes how it works when it is on.

Laya also estimates which of the six perspectives each comment reads as (or neutral, for off-topic comments). This describes the comment, never you, and it never affects whether a comment is hidden. It is never shown for a single comment, and comments can't be filtered by it. We use it for two things:

Fair cross-side votes: upvotes from readers on another side count double. If, over the last 30 days, at least five of your comments consistently read as one side while you picked a different one, that bonus is withheld from your cross-side upvotes. We store only a yes/no flag and when it was checked, recalculated hourly, never a political profile.
“How each side is talking”: anonymous averages per side on a story, shown only once a side has at least 10 comments.

Each comment's perspective scores are deleted with the comment, and when you delete your account. They are included in your data export.

When you award a “Δ Changed my mind”, we keep a one-way hash of your network (as for reports, not your IP address) with it, so one network counts once toward the recipient's trust score; it is kept as long as the Δ exists.

Each account has a trust score that sets how much its votes and reports count. It is calculated automatically from your account's age, whether you have a passkey, your comments that stayed up, upvotes from readers on other sides, comments of yours that were hidden, and whether moderators agreed with your reports. When you report a comment we also keep a one-way hash of your network (not your IP address) so one network can't report a comment many times; it is deleted once moderators decide on the report, or after 30 days. Your score and what it was calculated from, and your cross-side vote flag (see below), are included in your data export.

Story summaries

Story summaries are written by a language model, accessed through OpenRouter, from the news articles themselves. None of your data is sent for this. (Comment moderation, above, is the only time your content goes to OpenRouter.)

Bot protection

When enabled, the sign-in form uses Cloudflare Turnstile to tell people from bots. Cloudflare processes data about your browser for that check under its own privacy policy.

How long we keep things

Sign-in links: deleted a day after they were sent (they stop working after 15 minutes).
Sessions: deleted when they expire, after at most 30 days.
Rate-limit counters (keyed by IP address, email address or account): deleted automatically within 24 hours.
Live update streams (recent split, comment and story changes, replayed to readers who reconnect): expire within 24 hours.
Server logs: up to 14 days.
Moderation decisions: 180 days.
Picks and answers made without an account: at most 180 days, or until they move into your account.
Your account and everything tied to it: until you delete it.

Your choices

From your account page you can download everything we hold about you as a JSON file, see and sign out your devices, and delete your account. Deleting it removes your profile, sides, votes, reports, passkeys and sessions at once. Your comments stay so that replies keep their context, but they are anonymised: your name and the text are replaced with “[deleted]”, their perspective scores are deleted and any appeal notes erased.

Contact

Questions about your data: privacy@stancr.com (to be confirmed before launch).