We know almost nothing about you.

• Your Complaint. The words you typed, exactly as you typed them. If it was published, it is on the site.
• A random token for your browser. Your browser mints it, it stays in your browser, and we store only a hash of it. It is what lets you be First without an account, and what stops one device raising a thousand Stinks a minute. It is not a name, and it is not linked to one.
• Roughly where you were. City, region, and country, worked out from your connection, plus a 50 km map tile — the square the Globe draws your Pulse in, which covers a lot of people and points at none of them.
• When it happened. Timestamps, so a Tally can be counted over today, this week, and all time.

• Your address. Your IP address is hashed to enforce rate limits and deleted with the rest of that day’s counting. It is never stored with your Complaint.
• Where you actually are. No coordinates, no GPS, no street. The tile is as close as it gets, and it is deliberately too big to be you.
• An account to complain. No email, no password, no profile, no sign-in is needed to raise a Complaint.
• Anything for advertisers. We do not sell this and there are no advertising trackers on the site.

Published Complaints, the Stinks and Categories they were filed under, the Tallies they add up to, and the Place they came from at city level. That is the whole product: a Complaint counted against everybody else’s. We do not publish your browser token or IP address. The words you submit can still identify you or someone else, so leave private details out.

We use PostHog to count visits — how many people showed up, roughly where from, and whether they got as far as the button. It never sees what you typed. Not the Complaint, not what you searched for, not the name of the thing you are sick of. If you are in Europe or the UK we ask first, and no is a complete answer.

We also count things in the aggregate — how many Complaints came from a city, which Categories are growing — and we reserve the right to publish and licence those numbers. They are counts, never your words, and nothing in them points back at you.

If you choose to support the project, the payment service receives the details you provide there. We do not attach your Complaint or browser token to the support link. Payment records stay separate from anonymous Complaints. Support never buys influence over a Tally, a ranking or moderation.

The private contact form stores the kind of enquiry, your message, when it arrived, and a reply email only if you choose to provide one. Only the maintainer can read these messages. They are separate from Complaints, never published on the Globe, and never sent to the Classifier or analytics. Leave private Complaint details out.

Our scheduled cleanup removes contact messages and reply addresses after 90 days. A bot check and a temporary, keyed hash of your connection address limit spam; the address is not stored with your message. Leaving a reply address lets the maintainer contact you about your note. It does not sign you up for a mailing list.

Every Stink page has a Report button. Pick the reason that fits — hateful or threatening, someone’s private details, spam — and it goes straight to the moderation queue. Reports are anonymous, and somebody reads them.

Complaints are also checked before they are ever published, and anything with threats, slurs, personal details, or an advert in it is stored but never shown, never counted, and never put on the Globe.

The site runs on Vercel and Supabase. Complaint text is sent to Anthropic for classification and, when enabled, to OpenAI to match it with existing Stinks. This happens before we know whether the Complaint will be published. Cloudflare Turnstile checks that you are not a robot before a Complaint is accepted. Vercel Web Analytics counts page views without analytics cookies. When enabled, Sentry receives technical error locations and failure categories; request bodies, cookies, location headers, and Complaint text are excluded from those reports.

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