Privacy Policy

The short version

We do not ask for your name. We do not run advertising networks or third-party analytics. What we keep is the minimum that makes the site work: whether you confirmed your age, what you answered about cookies, which language you chose, and — only if you asked for one of them — an account, a notification or a message you sent us.

What we collect, and only when

• Age confirmation and your cookie answer. Two small records in your browser. Without the first we show no media at all; without the second we do not load the broadcasting platform's player.
• Your choice of language. So that the next page comes in the language you picked.
• An account, if you create one. An email address, a password we store only as a hash, and your list of favourites. Nothing else.
• A request to be told when a broadcaster goes live, if you ask for one. The address you gave and which room it was for.
• A message you send through a form. The address, the subject if you wrote one, the text, the page you sent it from, the language of that page, a short description of your browser, and a one-way fingerprint of your network address.
• Server records. Ordinary web-server logs, kept briefly, to find faults and to stop abuse.

What we do not collect

No advertising identifiers, no cross-site trackers, no profiling, no selling or renting of anything about you to anyone. We do not follow you off this site, and we do not receive from the broadcasting platforms any record of what you did once you were there.

About that network-address fingerprint

Forms attract abuse, and a form with no defence is a way to fill our database with rubbish. So we store a one-way fingerprint of the address a message came from, not the address itself. Two messages from the same place can be recognised as coming from the same place; the address cannot be read back out of the fingerprint. That is enough to deal with a flood and not enough to identify you.

Why we are allowed to hold it

Age confirmation and the cookie answer: we have to, to meet our obligations about adult material and about consent. Your account, your notification requests and your messages: you asked, and that is consent, which you can withdraw. Server logs and the fingerprint: our legitimate interest in keeping the site up and usable, weighed against how little each of them says about you.

Cookies

Four small records, all of them ours, all of them necessary. Which ones, what for and how long they last is set out on the cookies page. Non-essential scripts are not loaded before you agree, and if you choose essential only, they are not loaded at all.

Who else sees it

The company that hosts our servers, because the data sits on them. Nobody else — no advertising network, no analytics service, no data broker.

We hand something over to an authority only when a valid legal demand requires it, and only what the demand covers.

Following a link to a broadcasting platform does not send them anything about you from us. Your browser goes there and they see what any site sees about a visitor; what happens next is between you and them.

How long we keep it

• Age confirmation: one year. The cookie answer: six months. Language: one year.
• An account: until you delete it. Deleting it also deletes your list of favourites and any live alerts you asked for with that address.
• A notification request: until it has been acted on, or until you ask us to drop it.
• A message from a form: while the matter is live and for two years afterwards, so that a repeat request can be recognised as one.
• Server logs: a short period, measured in days.

What you can require of us

You can ask what we hold about you, ask for a copy, ask us to correct it or delete it, object to our keeping it, or withdraw a consent you gave. Write to us at chatcums.com/contact/ from the address the record is under, and we will answer within a month.

If you think we have handled this badly, you can complain to the data protection authority where you live. We would rather you told us first.

Children

The site is for adults. We do not knowingly hold anything about anyone under 18. If you believe we do, write to chatcums.com/contact/ and we will delete it.

Changes to this policy

If this policy changes, the date above changes with it. A change that affects what we do with what we already hold will be announced on the site before it takes effect.

Contact

Everything about this policy goes through chatcums.com/contact/.