This Privacy Policy explains what information Lightning Vote collects, how we use it, and the choices you have. It applies to your use of Lightning Vote.
Account information: your email address (from our sign-in provider, Auth0), your chosen public username, and an optional display name and profile picture URL.
Content you provide: posts, captions, titles, GIF selections (referenced by GIPHY ID only - we do not store the underlying GIF image data), links, poll votes, and any reports you file about other posts.
Legal acceptance records: which version of our Terms of Service, Privacy Policy, and Community Guidelines you accepted or acknowledged, and the UTC date and time you did so. This is stored against your account so we can maintain a clear history of what you agreed to and when.
Security and session information: when you sign in, we store a hashed (not raw, not reversible) copy of your IP address and browser user-agent string against your session, used only to help detect suspicious activity and to rate-limit repeated sign-in attempts. We do not use this information for advertising or analytics.
Analytics: Lightning Vote does not currently integrate any analytics service. If that changes, we will update this Policy first.
Lightning Vote sets one first-party session cookie to keep you signed in. It is HttpOnly and secure, and is not used for advertising or tracking.
Lightning Vote uses or may use Google AdSense to display advertising. Google and its advertising partners may use cookies, web beacons, and similar technologies, and may use identifiers such as your IP address, to serve ads and measure their performance, including - where legally permitted - to personalize the ads you see based on your visits to this and other sites.
You can learn more about how Google uses information from sites that use its services at policies.google.com/technologies/ads, and you can review your ad personalization options at google.com/settings/ads or, in some regions, aboutads.info/choices. Any regional cookie-consent or ad-personalization-consent tool Lightning Vote may add in the future is a separate mechanism from the required Terms/Community-Guidelines agreement described in our Terms of Service - accepting our Terms never implies consent to personalized advertising where such consent is separately required by law.
We use the information above to operate Lightning Vote: to create and secure your account, to display your posts and username, to let you participate in polls and Impeach & Oversight reviews, to process reports and moderate content, to display advertising as described in Section 3, and to comply with legal obligations.
Lightning Vote uses third-party services to operate, including GIPHY (GIF search/hosting), Auth0 (sign-in), Cloudflare (hosting, security, and Turnstile bot protection), Google AdSense (advertising), and various public and commercial providers of news, market, and legislative data. Each is governed by its own privacy practices.
Lightning Vote does not sell personal information for money. Advertising providers such as Google may process or receive certain identifiers and usage information as described in this Policy. Where applicable law treats particular advertising disclosures as a "sale" or "sharing," Lightning Vote will provide the choices required by applicable law. Beyond this, we share information only with the service providers above as necessary to operate Lightning Vote, or when required by law.
Posts you remove are marked removed rather than immediately deleted from our systems, so that report and moderation history remains intact; a report about a post is kept even if the post is later removed. Signed-in users can request account deletion themselves from Account Settings. The request requires verification by a code sent to the account email; after successful verification, the account enters a deletion-pending state and is processed for deletion soon afterward. Certain moderation or report records, and anonymized historical content, may be retained where required by our retention model. To request deletion of content, or for questions about the process, contact support@lightning-vote.com.
You can review and update your display name and username at any time in Account Settings. For questions about your data, or to request access, correction, or deletion, contact support@lightning-vote.com.
Lightning Vote is not directed at children under 13, and you must be at least 13 to create an account. We do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 13.
We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. The version and effective date at the top of this page reflect the version currently in effect.
Questions about this Privacy Policy can be sent to support@lightning-vote.com.