Privacy Policy

What you give us

You can read VNTYPL8 without an account. Browsing, searching and reading plates, guesses and comments require no sign-in and no personal information.

If you create an account, that is handled by Clerk, our authentication provider. Depending on how you sign up, Clerk passes us your email address, a display name or username, and a profile image if you have one. We store a copy of that so we can show who posted what and contact you about your account. We never see or store your password.

If you post, we store what you post: plates you add, guesses and comments you write, votes you cast, and photos you upload. Plates, guesses, comments and photos are public — anyone can read them, and they appear on your profile page. Votes are not shown to other people, but they do count toward the scores that are.

If you use the contact form, we receive the name, email address and message you type into it so we can reply.

What we collect automatically

We use Umami for analytics. It runs on our own server, sets no cookies, and does not follow you between sites or build a profile of you. It records page views in aggregate — which pages are visited, roughly where in the world from, and which site sent you. It does not record your IP address or anything that identifies you personally, and it only runs on the live site, never in development.

When something breaks, we log the error so we can fix it. That log can include the page you were on and, if you were signed in, which account hit the problem.

Our hosting provider keeps ordinary server logs, which include IP addresses, as part of running and protecting the service.

Photos and automatic plate reading

When you upload a photo, we send it to Anthropic's Claude API, which reads the plate text and the issuing state out of the image so we can pre-fill the submission form for you. You can correct anything it gets wrong before you post. Anthropic processes the image to answer that request and does not use it to train its models.

Photos you post are public, and they are stored in object storage under a key we generate. Please do not upload photos of people, documents, or anything you would not want a stranger to see. A photo of a plate on a car is the point; the person driving it is not.

We look at uploaded photos. An administrator can review a photo and remove it. Removing a photo deletes the stored image and every size we generated from it.

Cookies and local storage

Clerk sets cookies to keep you signed in. Without them, sign-in cannot work.

We store your language choice in a cookie and your light or dark theme preference in your browser's local storage, so the site looks the way you left it. Neither is used to track you.

We set no advertising cookies and run no third-party ad or tracking scripts.

Who else handles your data

We use a small number of providers, each doing one job: Clerk for accounts and sign-in; Railway for hosting and the database; an S3-compatible object store for photos; Anthropic for reading plates out of photos you upload; and Plunk for sending email such as contact-form replies. Our analytics are self-hosted, so no analytics company receives your data.

We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share it for advertising.

How long we keep things

We keep your account and what you have posted for as long as your account exists.

If you delete your account, we clear your personal details immediately and keep the empty record for 30 days so that you can change your mind and get your history back. After that window it is gone.

Plates, guesses and comments you posted stay on the site after your account goes, shown without your name. This is deliberate: a guess is part of a conversation other people took part in, and deleting one person's contributions would tear holes in threads that are not theirs. If you need something specific taken down, ask us.

When you delete a comment or guess yourself, the text is removed but the empty slot stays in the thread, for the same reason: replies to it must keep making sense.

Your choices

You can edit your name, email address and profile image at any time from your profile page, which opens the account settings Clerk provides.

You can delete your own comments, guesses and photos from the pages they appear on. A plate itself cannot be deleted once it is posted — it is the thing everyone else's guesses hang off — so ask us if one needs to come down.

You can ask us for a copy of what we hold about you, ask us to correct it, or ask us to delete it. Use the contact form and we will answer.

Depending on where you live, you may have additional rights over your personal data under laws such as the GDPR or the CCPA, including the right to complain to a regulator.

Children

VNTYPL8 is not for children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect their information. If you believe a child has given us personal information, contact us and we will remove it.

Changes and contact

If we change this policy we will update the date at the top of this page. If a change materially affects what we do with your data, we will say so more loudly than that.

Questions about privacy go through the contact form on this site.