Privacy Policy

Who is responsible

Policon is built and run by one person, not a company. That person is the data controller for everything described here, is established in Sweden, and can be reached at contact@policon.net. There is no data protection officer, because the scale of the service does not require one.

What we collect

To run an account and match you into debates, we collect and store:

• Your email address, your handle, and a hashed (never plaintext) password.
• Your answers to the political survey and the position they compute to. This exists so you can be matched with someone who disagrees with you, and it is what the matchmaker reads.
• An optional avatar image, bio, headline, and social links, if you choose to add them.
• Transcripts of what you say in debates, the AI judge's scoring of it, your match history, and your rating.
• A country code derived from the network you registered from, and a keyed hash of that network address. The raw IP address is not stored: the hash is a one-way pseudonym, keyed with a server-side secret, and exists only so administrators can spot clusters of accounts created from the same network. It is never shown to other users.
• Operational logs with identifiers and event metadata. They never contain raw audio, passwords, tokens, or the text of what you said.

Political opinions, and why we may hold them

Your survey answers, the position computed from them, and much of what you say in a debate are political opinions, which the GDPR treats as a special category of data. We process them on two footings, and both apply:

• Your explicit consent, given when you agree to this policy at registration and again when you complete the political survey. Matching people by political distance is the entire function of the service, so consent to it is not separable from using Policon at all: if you withdraw it, the account cannot continue.
• Opinions you have manifestly made public yourself. Your computed position is shown on your public debater profile, and a debate you take part in becomes a match report that anyone with its link can read.

You can withdraw consent at any time by asking us to delete your account. Withdrawal stops future processing; it does not make our processing before that point unlawful, and it does not reach into a finished debate that the other participant also has a record of.

Why we are allowed to process it

Our legal bases under Article 6 are:

• Performance of a contract with you: running your account, matching you, transcribing and judging debates, computing ratings, and showing your match history. This is the bulk of it.
• Explicit consent for the political opinions described above.
• Our legitimate interests in keeping the service working and safe: rate limiting, abuse and multiple-account detection, moderation, debugging, security, understanding how the judge behaves so it can be improved, and promoting the service. We have weighed these against your interests and consider them proportionate, and you can object to any of them by writing to us.
• Legal obligation, where the law requires us to keep or produce something.

Voice audio: transcribed, then deleted

During a debate your microphone audio is transcribed to text in real time, and the AI judge scores the arguments so both debaters get live scores and a match report. This is the same disclosure you accept before your first debate. Concretely:

• Raw audio is transient by design. Each chunk is deleted immediately after transcription, whether transcription succeeded or failed, and is never written to long-term storage. There is no recording of your voice to request, leak, or subpoena, because none exists.
• The transcripts, and the match reports and judge output built from them, are retained, but not forever. We keep the full report of your ten most recent matches, plus any match you have saved to your profile and any match that has been flagged or reported. Older reports than that are deleted. The result of every match you have ever played is kept, because it is what your rating and your statistics are made of.

Match reports are readable by link

A finished debate produces a report: the transcript, the judge's scoring, and the result, under both debaters' handles. Anyone with the report's link can read it. While a debate is in progress it can also be watched live on Policon TV, where viewers see the same debate the debaters do: video, audio, live scoring and the transcript, under both debaters' handles and profiles, exactly as in the finished report. Viewers cannot speak, appear, or take part; who is watching is never shown to anyone, and audience reactions are never attributed to a viewer. What a stranger sees of a report is the public copy: any moderation record the report carries is visible only to the debaters themselves and to moderators, never to other readers. If you would rather not debate on the record, Policon is not the right place to debate: the transcript is the product.

How we use it

• Matching you into debates with people whose views diverge from yours.
• Grading arguments and surfacing notable moments during a live debate.
• Computing and displaying your rating, match history, and lifetime stats.
• Reviewing reports of abuse, harassment, or other conduct violations.
• Operating and securing the service: rate limiting, abuse prevention, debugging.
• Counting page views to understand how the site is used. These statistics are aggregate and cookieless: each view increments a daily counter for a page type, no cookie or identifier is set or stored, and nothing links a view to a person or to another view.
• Showing debates on Policon TV, and quoting or clipping debate content to promote Policon elsewhere. Outside the site your handle is removed from anything we publish for promotion, unless you have agreed to be named.

We do not sell your data, and we do not use your survey answers or your debate content to target advertising at you. Your computed political position is displayed on your public debater profile, because arguing across it is the point of the site; your individual survey answers are never shown to anyone. Profile pages are marked not to be indexed by search engines.

Who else is in the path

These are the third parties that actually process data for us, and what each one sees:

• OpenAI judges the debates: transcript text is sent to OpenAI's API to be scored. No audio goes there.
• OpenRouter transcribes speech on the production service: audio chunks are sent to OpenRouter, which routes each one to a third-party inference provider (Groq is one of them) to be transcribed. Those providers process the audio on our instruction and do not retain it, and neither do we.
• Resend delivers account email, such as the confirmation and password-reset messages, and therefore handles your email address.
• AWS hosts the service, so the data described on this page lives on AWS infrastructure.

These providers, and the inference hosts OpenRouter routes transcription to, are based in the United States, so using Policon involves transferring your data outside the European Economic Area. Those transfers rely on the safeguards each provider publishes for European customers, such as the European Commission's standard contractual clauses. We do not share your data with advertisers or data brokers.

Cookies

One cookie: an httpOnly refresh token that keeps you signed in between visits, scoped to the authentication endpoints. It is functional, not tracking. There are no third-party, advertising, or analytics cookies.

That is why you are not asked to accept cookies when you arrive. A consent banner is required for storage that is not strictly necessary, such as advertising or analytics cookies, and we do not set any. There is no third-party analytics or advertising product on this site, and nothing here follows you to another one. Our own usage statistics are counted without cookies and without identifying anyone: a page view increments a daily counter, and no identifier is created or kept. Browser storage on this site holds only your own settings and unfinished drafts, on your own device.

How long we keep it

• Account data, survey answers, ratings, and your match results are kept for as long as the account exists.
• Full match reports (the transcript and the judge’s working) are kept for your ten most recent matches, for anything you have saved to your profile, and for anything flagged or reported. Beyond that they are deleted, and the deletion is permanent. A match that is old for you but recent for the other debater is kept, because it is their record too.
• Match reports outlive an individual account, because a debate belongs to both of the people in it. Deleting your account pseudonymises your side of every stored report: your handle is replaced with a deleted-account marker and your profile material is dropped, while the transcript and the result stay, because they are the other debater's record too.
• Anything held for an open safety review, or needed to establish, exercise, or defend a legal claim, is kept until that purpose ends, whatever else has been deleted.
• Operational logs are short-lived and are kept only as long as they are useful for debugging and abuse prevention.
• Usage statistics are kept as daily totals per page type. There is no per-visit record to keep, because none is ever written.

Your rights

Under the GDPR you can ask us for access to your data, correction of it, erasure, restriction of processing, portability, and you can object to processing we base on legitimate interests. You can also withdraw consent, as described above. Write to contact@policon.net and we will respond within one month.

Erasure you can carry out yourself, without asking us: the account page has a delete control that removes your account, your survey answers, your rating, your match history, your friendships and your notifications immediately and irreversibly. Two things deliberately survive it. A finished debate's match report stays, with your side of it shown as a deleted account instead of your handle, because that report is also the other debater's record of a match they played. Any conduct report filed about you stays too, under the safety and legal-claims grounds described above, with the same pseudonymisation applied to it. A suspended account cannot use the control and should write to us instead.

Some practical limits, so they are not a surprise: we may ask you to verify that the account is yours before acting; we may refuse or charge for requests that are manifestly unfounded or repetitive; and a request cannot remove a record that another person also has rights in, or content we are retaining for an active safety review or a legal claim. Inside the product you can also edit or remove your profile fields at any time, and you can block another user, which also removes any friendship between you.

If you think we have handled your data badly, please tell us first. You also have the right to complain to the Swedish Authority for Privacy Protection (Integritetsskyddsmyndigheten), or to the supervisory authority where you live.

Security

Passwords are hashed, sessions are cookie-based and scoped, secrets are held server-side, and access to anything sensitive is limited to the operator. No service is perfectly secure, and we do not promise that ours is: we take reasonable technical and organisational measures, and we cannot guarantee that no incident will ever happen.

Age

Policon is not for children. You must be at least 16 to hold an account. If we learn that an account belongs to someone younger, we delete it and the data attached to it.

Changes to this policy

We may update this policy, and if it changes materially we will update the date above. Continued use of the service after a change means you accept the updated policy.

Contact

Questions about this policy, and account or data requests, go to contact@policon.net.