Privacy
Privacy Policy
How Topicle collects, uses, and protects your personal information.
Information We Collect
When you create an account, we collect your email address and a username you choose. If you sign up through Google, we receive your Google account email and display name. Google sign-in may be offered as a prompt on the page rather than a button; either way you choose your own username on a Topicle screen, and no account is created until you finish it. We do not collect your date of birth or birth year.
When you use Topicle we collect the content you create (posts, comments, votes, messages), information about the communities you create or moderate, and reports you submit. Moderators of a community can see a list of its members who have posted or commented there, including when each member joined, unless you turn off Show me in community member lists in your settings. Members who have not posted or commented in that community are included in a total but not named, and we do not include members we know to be under 18.
We collect your IP address when you interact with the platform. For most purposes (rate limiting, abuse prevention, vote manipulation detection), IP addresses are hashed with a server-side salt before storage, meaning we cannot recover the original address.
Our web server also keeps a standard access log of requests to Topicle, whether or not you are logged in. Each entry records the unhashed IP address the request came from, the time, the page or resource requested, the response, the referring page, and your browser's user agent. We use this log only to keep the service secure and working, for example to investigate abuse, attacks, and errors. It is kept for a limited period (currently about 30 days), after which older entries are deleted automatically, and it is not used for advertising.
For account security, we store your unhashed IP address, approximate country, and internet service provider alongside your active login sessions. This allows you to review your sessions in Settings and detect any unauthorized access. Session data including raw IP addresses is automatically deleted after 30 days.
In the specific case of confirmed or suspected child sexual abuse material, we preserve identifying information about the account involved, including unhashed IP addresses and timestamps, for the purpose of reporting to law enforcement and child protection authorities. This narrow exception is necessary to comply with our legal obligations and to protect children, and such records are retained only as long as needed for that purpose.
When you open a community's page while logged in, we record the timestamp of that visit. This data is retained for up to 90 days and is used for two things only: to weight your own subscribed home feed under the Depth sort, so subs you've recently visited rank slightly higher, and, in the mobile apps, to help choose which discussion a suggested-discussion notification points to (see Suggested Discussion Notifications below). It does not affect the /all view, individual sub pages, or any other sort. It is never shared, never used for advertising, and is deleted when your account is deleted. You can disable this entirely in Settings (the Boost subs I've recently visitedtoggle under Content), in which case no further visit data is recorded, any existing visit history is deleted immediately, and suggested discussions no longer consider it.
When Highlight new comments is on and you open a discussion while logged in, we record when you last read it, so comments posted since then can be marked as new on any device you use. Each record is kept for 7 days after your last visit to that discussion. It is never shared, never used for advertising, and is deleted when your account is deleted. You can turn this off in Settings (the Highlight new comments toggle under Comments), in which case no further records are made and existing ones are deleted immediately.
When you are logged in, we record which posts appeared on screen while you browse a feed. We use this to avoid repeatedly showing you posts you have already seen and to improve how feeds are ranked. The per-account record of posts you have seen is retained for up to 7 days and then deleted automatically. We also keep a running total of how many times each post has been shown across all accounts; this total is not linked to your account. You can use Topicle without logging in, in which case none of this is collected.
The Topicle mobile apps send us crash and error reports so we can find and fix problems. A report describes the app version, the operating system version, the device model and the technical details of the problem, and may include a short list of the screens and buttons used shortly before the problem, identified by fixed names, never by content you typed or viewed. Reports are not stored against your account and are deleted automatically after 30 days.
On iPhone and iPad, Topicle may ask you to share an age range from your Apple Account using Apple's age range feature, and on Android, where available, we may request a similar age signal from Google Play. You choose whether to share. The store gives us only a range (for example “16 or older”) and whether it was set by you or by a parent or guardian, never your date of birth. We use it to confirm that you meet Topicle's minimum age of 16 and, where the law requires it, to complete a required age check or to respect a parent's or guardian's approval. If the range shows you are under 16, your account is restricted to reading. In regions where the law does not require an age check, declining has no effect on your account. To confirm that a response came from the genuine Topicle app, we also receive technical verification data from the store, including an app installation identifier.
Anonymity & Pseudonymity
You may browse public content on Topicle without creating an account or otherwise identifying yourself. To create an account, post, comment, vote, or use any account-based features, we require a verified email address: fully anonymous operation of these features is not practicable for safety, moderation, and security reasons.
You may use a pseudonym for your account; we do not require your real name. The username you choose is the identifier visible to other users, while your email address is used only for account-related communication and is not displayed publicly.
Content Safety Scanning
We automatically scan user-generated content (including posts, comments, and profile information) using a combination of pattern-matching systems and AI-based classification to detect content that may violate our community guidelines or applicable law. This includes scanning for content related to self-harm, suicide, and eating disorders, in compliance with our obligations under applicable online safety legislation.
This processing is carried out on the basis of (a) our legal obligations under online safety legislation, and (b) our legitimate interest in maintaining a safe platform for all users, including minors who may access the service.
Our automated systems assign a confidence score to flagged content. Content flagged by automated systems is reviewed by a human moderator before any permanent action is taken on your account. Content may be temporarily hidden pending review. You will be notified if action is taken on your content or account as a result of this process.
We also scan user-generated content for signals that may indicate a user is below the minimum age for the service. This processing is necessary for compliance with age-related regulatory requirements.
Content analysed by our scanning systems is processed in accordance with the data minimisation principle. Matched text and pattern data are retained only for as long as necessary to complete the review process and maintain compliance records. Where post or comment text is sent to a third-party AI service for classification, only the text is transmitted, with no user identifiers included in the request.
To prevent the distribution of child sexual abuse material, we also check images and videos uploaded to Topicle against records of known illegal content. This check uses perceptual hashing. Our own servers calculate a mathematical fingerprint (a hash) of the uploaded media and send only that fingerprint, not the media, to child protection organisations and specialised hash-matching services for comparison against fingerprints of known illegal material. The media itself is never sent to those recipients, and the fingerprint cannot be used to reconstruct or view the original media. This processing is carried out to comply with our legal obligations and to protect children.
Direct Messages
Direct messages are private to the people in the conversation. They are never shown publicly, and community moderators cannot see them. Topicle staff do not routinely read or moderate direct messages. Messages are not end-to-end encrypted: we store them on our servers so they can be delivered to each device you use.
Topicle staff read the contents of a conversation only when one of its participants reports it, when investigating suspected spam, scams, or other abuse of the messaging feature, when needed to protect someone’s safety, or where required by law. A report shows staff the recent messages in the reported conversation. Otherwise, each time staff open the contents of a conversation, they must record a reason, and the access is logged.
Some automated checks run on direct messages without anyone reading them. Links are checked against known unsafe sites, and a message containing a dangerous link may be refused or have the link removed. Images are checked against known child sexual abuse material as described under Content Safety Scanning, and are screened for explicit or violent content so they can be blurred for the person receiving them. Sending patterns are checked for spam. When an account is flagged for spam, a short excerpt of the message concerned may be shown to the staff reviewing the flag.
When you report a conversation, the reported messages may be sent to Anthropic to help with review, as described under Information Sharing. If you turn on notifications, the text of a new message may be included in the notification, which is delivered through the push notification service your device or browser uses. How long we keep direct messages is explained under Data Retention.
How We Use Your Information
- To provide and operate the platform
- To send verification emails and password reset links
- To enforce our rules and prevent abuse through rate limiting
- To support the moderation system (reports and enforcement actions)
- To scan content for potential safety concerns using automated tools and AI classification
- To generate link thumbnails for posts
- To display your active sessions so you can detect unauthorized access
- To determine your approximate location (country) using GeoIP lookup
- To collect anonymous, privacy-focused usage analytics
- To record when you visit Topicle from a link in a digest email, so we can slow down and eventually stop sending digests you don't use. We do not use tracking pixels or read receipts in our emails.
- To occasionally suggest a live discussion by notification in the mobile apps, chosen from the communities you follow and related ones, and to slow down and pause those suggestions when you do not open them (see Suggested Discussion Notifications below).
Information Sharing
We do not sell your personal information.
Members (anyone signed in to a Topicle account) are never shown Google ads, and members' data is never shared with advertisers. Apart from the ads shown to some signed-out visitors, described under Ads for Signed-out Visitors below, we do not share your data with third parties for advertising purposes. Information may be disclosed if required by law or to protect the safety of our users.
If you sign in with Google, Google may receive information about your authentication session in accordance with their own privacy policy. Separately, when Google sign-in prompts are switched on, every logged-out visit to Topicle loads a sign-in script from Google, so your browser contacts Google on those page views whether or not you go on to sign in. That script is not loaded once you are signed in, and it is not loaded at all while the prompt is switched off. We use the Resend email service to deliver verification and notification emails. We use MaxMind GeoIP databases to determine approximate location from IP addresses. We use Umami for privacy-focused, cookie-free usage analytics that does not track individual users. For content safety classification, moderation assistance, summaries, and translation, we may send the text of posts, comments, reported private messages, and appeal submissions to Anthropic, a US-based AI service, for analysis. No usernames, user identifiers, IP addresses, or contact details are included in these requests. Where the analysis assists review of a report, appeal, or moderation action, general account statistics, namely account age and karma score, may be included for context. Under Anthropic's API terms, this data is not used to train AI models. By using Topicle, you acknowledge that this involves the transfer of content data to a recipient located outside Australia.
When you search for a GIF in the comment composer, your search terms are forwarded to our licensed GIF provider without any user identifier, IP address, or other account information. GIFs you post are copied to and served from our own infrastructure, and GIF previews in the picker are served through our own content delivery network, so the provider never receives requests from your device.
To help detect coordinated inauthentic activity such as automated spam, the text of posts and comments may also be sent to a US-based AI-text detection service for analysis. Only the content text is sent, with no user identifiers, IP addresses, or account information included in the request. By using Topicle, you acknowledge that this involves the transfer of content data to a recipient located outside Australia.
To detect known child sexual abuse material, perceptual hashes (non-reversible mathematical fingerprints) of uploaded images and videos are sent to a child protection organisation located in Canada and to a specialised hash-matching service located in the United States for comparison against records of known illegal content. We do not send the media itself, only the fingerprints. By using Topicle, you acknowledge that this involves the transfer of these fingerprints to recipients located outside Australia.
Age assurance checks are performed by Verifymy Limited (trading as VerifyMyAge), a specialist age verification provider located in the United Kingdom. In regions where the law requires age assurance, we may confirm your age eligibility in the background using your account email address, without any action from you: we share the email with the provider in encrypted form to attempt a check, and the provider does not retain it. If that background check does not resolve your age, or is not available in your region, you can complete a verification yourself using a method such as a selfie or an identity document. Any selfies, identity documents, or biometric data used during verification are collected and processed by the provider directly and never reach Topicle. We receive and store only the outcome of the check, the verification method used, the time of the check, and an audit identifier for it. These checks involve the transfer of your email address to a recipient located outside Australia.
If Topicle is involved in a merger, acquisition, restructuring, or sale of assets, your personal information may be transferred as part of that transaction. We will give reasonable notice through the platform or by email before any such transfer takes effect, and any successor entity will be required to handle your information in a manner no less protective than this Privacy Policy until any future updates are notified to you.
Ads for Signed-out Visitors
Signed-out visitors to the Topicle website in Australia, New Zealand and the United States may be shown ads served by Google AdSense. Ads are clearly labelled. They are not shown in the Topicle mobile apps, and members are never shown Google ads. Visitors in other countries, and visits that arrive from one of Topicle's own paid campaigns, are not shown these ads, and their browsers do not load Google's ad script.
When a page shows these ads, your browser loads Google's ad script and contacts Google directly. Google receives your IP address and browser details (such as your browser's user agent and the address of the page you are viewing) and may set or read cookies in your browser. Topicle requests non-personalised ads, which Google does not select using your past browsing; Google uses cookies on these ads for purposes such as limiting how often an ad is shown, aggregated ad reporting, and preventing fraud and abuse.
Third-party vendors, including Google, use cookies to serve ads based on a user's prior visits to this website or other websites. Google's use of advertising cookies enables it and its partners to serve ads to users based on their visit to this site and/or other sites on the Internet. Because Topicle requests non-personalised ads, the ads shown on Topicle are not chosen this way, but those cookies may still be present in your browser. You may opt out of personalised advertising by visiting Google's Ads Settings. Alternatively, you can opt out of some third-party vendors' uses of cookies for personalised advertising by visiting www.aboutads.info. The cookies of other third-party vendors or ad networks may also be used to serve ads on Topicle; you may visit those vendors' websites, or www.aboutads.info, to opt out of the use of cookies for personalised advertising. For more about how Google uses information from sites that show its ads, see How Google uses information from sites or apps that use its services.
To learn whether showing ads changes how people use Topicle, signed-out visitors who could be shown ads are placed at random in one of two groups: one group is shown ads and the other is not. A cookie named plc_b holds a number from 0 to 99 that decides the group. It holds no identifier, is kept for one year, and cannot be read by scripts on the page. A visit that arrives from one of Topicle's own paid campaigns receives a cookie named plc_x, holding only the value 1, so that no Google ads are shown for the rest of that browser session; it is deleted when you close your browser.
While you browse signed out in one of those two groups, the page keeps a short record in your browser's sessionStorage under plc_s: your group, the day your visit started, how many pages you have viewed, and the time of your latest page. Each page you view sends us your group, whether you are on a phone or a computer, the day your visit started and that page count. When you open the sign-up panel, your group and the day your visit started are also kept under plc_fa for up to two hours, so that a sign-up finished after signing in with Google or Apple is counted against the right group; it is removed once the sign-up is counted. sessionStorage is cleared when you close the tab. We also count, for each ad position, whether an ad was displayed, left empty, or blocked. This counting is first-party (it is sent only to Topicle), is stored only as daily totals with no identifier, IP address or account attached, and is deleted after 90 days. Your browser may also send us automatic security reports when a page blocks, or would block, content; from these we keep only the type of rule involved and the website the blocked content came from, as daily totals, for 30 days.
To learn how many places on the site could carry a sponsor, every signed-out page view of a feed or a discussion, in any country and in either group, also tells us which sponsor positions that page offered: the kind of page, the community it belongs to (if any), whether you are on a phone or a computer, and the positions themselves. We add the country your request comes from. These counts are kept only as daily totals by page, community, country and device, with no identifier, IP address or account attached.
Topicle also sells sponsor placements directly to businesses. Sponsors are shown only to signed-out visitors of the website, in any country, and are labelled Sponsored. They are first-party: the sponsor's text and images are served by Topicle, and your browser does not contact the sponsor or any advertising network to show them. Which sponsor appears is chosen only by the page you are viewing (its community, or the site's main feeds), the country your request comes from, and whether you are on a phone or a computer. Topicle does not use personal data or your browsing history to choose sponsors.
To report to each business how often its sponsor was shown and clicked, to limit how many times a day one visitor is shown the same sponsor, and to detect invalid traffic, each time a sponsor is viewed or clicked we record the sponsor, its position on the page, the time, whether you are on a phone or a computer, the country your request comes from, a random number your browser makes up for that one page view (it is not stored in your browser and is not reused on any other page), and a hash. The hash is made from a shortened form of your IP address (the first three parts of an IPv4 address, or the first half of an IPv6 address), your browser's user agent, and a secret value that changes every day. Each day's secret value is deleted a few hours after that day ends, so a stored hash cannot practically be linked to another day's hashes or traced back to an address. These records are kept for 90 days; the totals made from them are kept.
When you click a sponsor, your browser first goes to a Topicle address, which records the click as described above and then sends you on to the sponsor's website, where the sponsor's own privacy policy applies. If the sponsor chose it, the address you are sent to carries tags naming Topicle and the sponsor's campaign, so the sponsor can see the visit came from Topicle; it carries nothing about you.
If you hide or report a sponsor, your browser keeps a cookie named plc_h listing the short identifiers of up to 20 sponsor campaigns you hid, so that they are not shown to you again. It holds nothing else, is kept for 180 days, and is sent to Topicle with your requests so that we can leave those campaigns out. You can remove it by clearing your cookies. A report you send is stored with its reason, any details you add, and a one-way hash of your IP address, so that the same report is not counted twice.
Advertisers
If you book sponsor placements through Topicle Ads, we keep the advertiser details you give us: your business name and logo, your website, your country, your legal business name and ABN if you add them, and the email address for receipts. We also keep your campaigns, the ads you submit (every version), the review decisions we make about them, and the delivery counts we report to you, which are totals by day, placement, device and country and never say who saw or clicked an ad. Your advertiser account belongs to your Topicle account, and Topicle staff can see these details to review and support your bookings.
Payments are handled by Stripe, our payment processor. You enter your card on Stripe's page, so Topicle never receives your full card number; Stripe tells us the card's brand, its last four digits, and whether a payment or refund went through. Stripe processes your payment details under its own privacy policy. We check the web pages your ads link to from our own servers, recording whether the page loaded, where it ended up and its title.
We keep receipts, refunds and the bookings they relate to for as long as Australian tax law requires, including after you stop advertising or close your account.
Topicle Supporter
Topicle Supporter is a paid membership available on the Topicle website. Payments are handled by Airwallex, our payment processor. You enter your payment details on Airwallex’s page, so Topicle never receives your full card number. When you first pay, we give Airwallex your email address, your Topicle username, the country you told us you live in, and an internal identifier for your account. Airwallex tells us your card’s brand, its last four digits, its expiry date, the country that issued it, your billing country, and whether each payment or refund went through. Airwallex processes your payment details under its own privacy policy, may process them outside Australia, and may email you directly about a payment.
The tax rules that apply to a sale depend on where the buyer lives. So that we can apply them, each time you buy a membership or a gift we record the country you tell us you live in, the country and region we estimate from your IP address (we do not store the IP address itself for this purpose), and the card’s issuing and billing countries. If these do not support the country you told us, or point to a country where we do not sell memberships, we may refund the payment instead of providing the membership.
We also keep your membership records: your plan, when it started and renews, payments, refunds and cancellations (with the reason, if you give one), the renewal terms you agreed to and when, your receipts, and copies of the emails we send you about your membership, including the address each was sent to. Receipts show your username, the card brand and last four digits, and the amount. Emails about your membership, such as receipts, payment problems and renewal reminders, are sent whatever your email preferences are, because they are about a purchase, and some of them are required by law.
If you give someone a membership, we record who gave it to whom. The person receiving it gets an email and a notification that name you, unless you choose to give it anonymously, in which case they say “Someone”. A gift receipt names the recipient’s username.
Awards are public. Anyone, including signed-out visitors, can see how many awards a post or comment has received and who gave them, unless the giver chose to give an award anonymously or one of you has blocked the other. Your profile shows how many awards you have received, never who gave them.
While you are a supporter, your profile shows a badge with the month you first supported Topicle and how many months you have been a supporter, and your hover card shows a gold ring around your avatar and the same count. You can hide the badge, which also hides the ring and the count, in your settings. Topicle staff can see your membership and payment records, the location information described above, and who gave every gift and award, including anonymous ones, so that they can support you, process refunds and meet our tax obligations.
Ko-fi Supporters
If you donate to Topicle on Ko-fi, Ko-fi sends us a record of the donation. We keep the name you gave Ko-fi, your message, the amount and currency, the donation type, the time, and whether you marked the message private. We do not keep your email address: we store a one-way hash of it instead, which lets us recognise a later donation from the same address. We never receive your card or bank details, which Ko-fi and its payment providers process under their own privacy policies. We may also add donation records ourselves from an export of our Ko-fi account.
We use these records to work out which Topicle account a donation came from, so that we can add a Ko-fi supporter badge to that account. We look for a Topicle username in your message, and when the donation arrives we check whether the email address Ko-fi sent matches the verified email address of a Topicle account, before we store only its hash. A match is only a suggestion: Topicle staff decide whether to add the badge. Once an account has the badge, a later donation from the same email address is added to that account’s record without review. Topicle staff can see these records, including messages you marked private on Ko-fi. The amount and your message are never shown publicly.
The Ko-fi supporter badge appears on your public profile, like other profile badges. You can hide it from your profile in your settings.
AI Training & Web Scraping
We do not sell or license your content to third parties for the purpose of training artificial intelligence or machine learning models. We instruct known AI training crawlers (such as those operated by OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and others) not to access user content through our robots.txt directives, and block them at our network edge where practicable. These crawlers may read only our own static pages that describe Topicle, such as this policy, our Terms of Service, our Rules, and our About and download pages, which contain no user content.
We continue to allow search engines and AI assistants to retrieve pages when a person is actively searching or asking a question, so that Topicle remains findable and can be cited in results. These requests fetch public pages in real time and are not used to build training datasets. Because these controls rely in part on third parties honouring our directives, we cannot guarantee that every automated system will comply.
Direct Marketing
We do not use your personal information for direct marketing. If this changes in the future, we will only do so where permitted by law, and with your consent where required by the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) or the Spam Act 2003 (Cth). In every case you will be given a clear, prominent, and free opt-out, and we will provide notice before any such use begins.
Suggested Discussion Notifications
The Topicle mobile apps can occasionally send you a notification suggesting a live discussion on Topicle. The discussion is chosen from the communities you follow, from communities related to them or in the same categories, and, if you follow no communities of your own, from whatever is most active across Topicle. This is not direct marketing: the suggestion is always a conversation on Topicle itself, never a product, an offer, or a third party. The notifications are delivered silently, only during the evening in your device's time zone, and never more often than every few days. A suggestion you do not open makes the next one later, and three unopened in a row pause them for 45 days.
To choose a discussion we use the communities you subscribe to, together with the categories and related communities of the ones you chose yourself; the communities you have recently visited (the same visit record described under Information We Collect, which the Boost subs I've recently visitedtoggle controls); your content and language settings; and the current time zone of your device, which the app sends us when it registers for notifications so that a suggestion arrives in your local evening and never overnight. The time zone is stored with that device's notification registration, is not a location, and is removed when the registration is. We do not suggest a discussion you have posted in, commented on, voted on, saved, hidden, or marked not interested, one you opened on the website while logged in, one that recently appeared in a feed you browsed while logged in (a record we keep for up to 7 days, as described above), or one from a community you have muted or marked not interested. We do not currently record which discussions you open in the mobile apps, so a suggestion can occasionally point to a discussion you have already read there.
We measure whether the feature is worth keeping. When an account first becomes eligible, it is randomly assigned either to receive suggestions or to a comparison group that receives none, and we record whether the account returned to Topicle within seven days. This measurement uses no information beyond what is described here, and the assignment is not used for anything else.
You can turn suggestions off with one tap on the notification itself, or at any time in Settings under Notifications. Marking a suggestion “Not interested” also stops suggestions from that community for 60 days.
Data Security
Passwords are hashed using bcrypt before storage. Authentication tokens are signed with ES512 (ECDSA) cryptography. All user-generated HTML content is sanitised to prevent cross-site scripting. Uploaded images are validated at the byte level to block malicious file types. Security headers are applied to all responses.
When you upload an image, we re-encode it and strip embedded metadata, including EXIF data such as GPS location and camera information, before it is stored. The original file you uploaded is discarded after processing, so location and device details embedded in your photos are not retained on our servers or exposed to other users.
Data Breach Notification
In the event of an eligible data breach (as defined under Part IIIC of the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth)), we will notify affected individuals and the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) as required by the Notifiable Data Breaches scheme. Notifications will describe the nature of the breach, the kinds of personal information involved, and recommended steps you can take to protect yourself.
Children’s Privacy
Topicle is not intended for use by anyone under 16 years of age. We do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 16. If we learn that we have collected personal information from a person under 16, we will delete it.
Access, Correction, and Your Rights
You can update your profile information, change your email address, or change your password from the settings page at any time. You may request deletion of your account by contacting us via our contact form.
You also have the right to request access to the personal information we hold about you, and to request correction if it is inaccurate, out-of-date, incomplete, or misleading. To make a request, contact us via our contact form. We will respond within 30 days. We may need to verify your identity before responding. Access requests are free; we will not charge a fee unless the request is unusually complex, in which case we will notify you of any reasonable charge before proceeding.
We may decline a request for access or correction in the limited circumstances permitted by the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) (for example, where granting access would be unlawful, would unreasonably impact the privacy of others, or where the information relates to anticipated or existing legal proceedings). Where we decline a request, we will provide written reasons (where required) and information about how to complain.
Data Retention
Your account data is retained for as long as your account is active. If your account is deleted, we will remove your personal information (username, email, password). Posts and comments you created will remain visible with your username replaced by “[deleted]” so they are no longer linked to your identity. This de-identified content is retained on the basis of our legitimate interest in preserving the integrity of community discussions. You can delete individual comments before deleting your account if you wish to remove specific content. After account deletion, you may still request removal of specific comments by contacting us via our contact form.
Direct messages work differently. When you delete a message, it is removed from the conversation straight away, and we keep its text for 30 days so that a report about it can still be reviewed; after that, the text is erased. When you delete your account, the messages you sent stay in the other person’s conversation, no longer linked to your username, because the conversation is theirs too. Once everyone in a conversation has deleted their account, we erase its messages. If a conversation has been reported, its messages are kept until the report has been dealt with.
Hashed IP addresses used for rate limiting are retained temporarily and cannot be linked back to you. Raw IP addresses stored for session security are automatically deleted after 30 days.
Age verification records (the outcome, method, timestamp, and audit identifier of a check) are retained while your account exists, as our record that a required age check was performed, and are deleted when your account is deleted.
The full response received from Apple or Google Play when you share an age range is deleted after 30 days. We keep only the resulting age range category, and where a parent's or guardian's approval applies, the store identifier needed to act on a later withdrawal of that approval, while your account exists, and both are deleted when your account is deleted.
Records of suggested-discussion notifications (which discussion was suggested, when, and whether it was opened) are kept for 90 days. The per-evening measurement records described underSuggested Discussion Notifications (whether a suggestion was available for you that evening, and whether you returned afterwards) are kept for 180 days. Your suggestion settings, including how often you receive them and which communities you have marked not interested, and the measurement facts fixed when you first became eligible (which group you were assigned to, when, and when you first returned after that) are kept while your account exists. All of these are deleted when your account is deleted, except that a notification record still inside its 90 days loses its link to your account and expires on schedule.
Topicle Supporter payment, refund, receipt and gift records, and the location information recorded for each purchase, are kept for at least as long as Australian tax law requires (currently five years after the transaction), including after you cancel your membership or delete your account. If you delete your account, any active subscription is cancelled, and these records remain linked only to the de-identified account.
Ko-fi donation records are kept so that we have a record of the support Topicle has received. If your account is deleted, its link to your donation records is removed, and the records remain without it. You can ask us to delete your donation records through our contact form, and we will do so unless the law requires us to keep them.
California Residents
Under the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), California residents have the right to: know what personal information we collect and how it is used (described above); request deletion of their personal information; and opt out of the sale of personal information. We do not sell personal information to third parties. We will not discriminate against you for exercising any of these rights. To make a request, please use our contact form.
Complaints
If you believe we have not handled your personal information in accordance with this policy or the Australian Privacy Principles, please contact us via our contact form in the first instance. We will respond within 30 days.
If you are not satisfied with our response, you may lodge a complaint with the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) at oaic.gov.au or by phone on 1300 363 992.
Changes to This Policy
We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. Material changes will be communicated through a notice on the platform. Continued use of Topicle after changes take effect constitutes acceptance of the revised policy.
Contact
If you have questions about this Privacy Policy, please contact us via our contact form.