Privacy Policy
Last updated: 15 October 2026
Who we are
Sidez is run by Benli Kagan, based in Israel. Questions about your data: benli.kagan@gmail.com. This policy covers the Sidez website and the Sidez Android app (package app.sidez.twa), which opens the same website in an Android shell.
The short version
Sidez is a polls app run by two people. We collect what the app needs to work, to rank your feed and to keep abuse out. We don't sell your data and we don't use it for ads. Apart from the companies that host, deliver or back up Sidez for us (listed under “Where it lives”), nobody outside the two of us can see what is private. You can download a copy of your data, and delete your account and what is tied to it, from Settings.
Some things stay after you delete your account. They are listed plainly under “What stays after you delete your account”. The two that matter most: our nightly backups, which we never delete, and the record of anything reported as child sexual abuse material or as another serious breach, which we keep for a year.
What we collect
- Your account: your email address (from Google or your sign-in link), your username, and a display name, a bio, a profile picture and your interests. If you sign in with Google, we copy your Google name, and the address of your Google profile picture, into your profile when you choose a username, and your name is then public until you change it in “Edit profile”. Google also gives our sign-in provider an identifier for your Google account.
- Sign-in records: for each device you are signed in on, our sign-in provider keeps when you signed in, a description of the browser, and the network (IP) address it connected from, until you sign out or delete your account.
- Your date of birth: asked once at signup to check you are 16 or older. It is never shown to anyone and never used for anything else. It is included in the file you can download, so you can see what we hold.
- Your time zone and language: while you are signed in, your browser tells us your time zone (so a streak day is your day and notifications stay out of your night) and whether it reads Hebrew or English (so the feed can favour polls you can read). At the start of every visit, signed in or not, we also record the languages your browser reports.
- Your streak and your daily ten: the number of days in a row you have voted, your longest run, the day of your last vote, and the ten polls we picked for you each day (kept for 14 days).
- What you do in the app: your polls, votes, skips, likes, comments, hashtags, the people and tags you follow, the people you block or mute, your chat messages, and your recent searches (the last 50 when you are signed in; logged out, they stay in your browser).
- Photos you add: a poll can carry one photo. Your phone shrinks it and saves it again before sending, which removes the location data a camera stores in it. It is stored at a public address, so anyone with the link can load it, and caches can keep serving it for up to an hour after it is gone. We don't store your Google profile picture: your profile points to it, and it is loaded from Google's servers.
- Chat messages: text only, between two people. We read a message only when someone reports it. If you unsend a message it disappears for both of you, but we keep the original until your account is deleted, so a report about it can still be reviewed.
- Reports: when you report something, we keep what you chose and any details you wrote, and who sent it. The person you report is never told it was you.
- Feed signals: which polls you saw, roughly how long each was on your screen before you acted (“dwell time”), taste scores per topic and hashtag that the app works out from your votes, skips, likes, comments and searches, and a short-term search intent (per topic, hashtag and person) that halves every few hours.
- Your searches, for the feed: each search you make (the words, the topics and hashtags it pointed to, how many polls it found, and which results you opened, voted on or skipped) is kept for 30 days, then deleted. It nudges your feed towards what you searched for, and the nudge fades within about a day. Searches made while logged out are kept the same way, with nothing that identifies you.
- What searches mean: the words people search for, and the polls they then open, teach the app what a search is about. That is kept as totals per search phrase, with no link to who searched.
- Device and analytics events: what you do in the app, with timestamps: a poll viewed, a vote or skip, a share tapped, a search made (never the words), how far down the feed you went, how long a visit lasted, how fast you made your first vote, and whether you saw or accepted the install and notification offers. When you are signed in these are tied to your account; when you are not, to the random cookie id below. We keep them for 90 days.
- A random id in a cookie: your first visit gets one, so the app can keep your votes together before you have an account. It is a random number and nothing else: no name, no address, no tracking across other sites, and your browser only ever sends it back to us, never to a script on the page. It lasts a year. Votes you cast without an account are kept against that id until you create an account, when they become yours. If you never do, they stay. When you create an account, the id is kept on your profile, so a feature we are testing shows you the same version afterwards, on that device and any other, instead of switching you halfway through. It is not used to identify you, and it is in your data download.
- A scrambled form of your network address, when you vote without an account: we count votes per network for about two days, so one person can't vote hundreds of times by clearing their cookies. The address itself is not kept: it is turned into a fixed-length code using a secret key only we hold, so the code can't be turned back into the address without that key. It is never shown to anyone, and the counts are deleted within about two days (24 to 52 hours).
- Your network address, in general: like any website, our hosting and database providers see the network address your device connects from. We don't use it to work out where you are. Apart from the scrambled code above and your sign-in records, we don't keep it, and we hold it in memory for about a minute to slow down abuse.
- Email you send us: if you email us, including to report something, we receive your address and what you write, and keep them as long as we need to deal with it and to show that we did.
We don't collect your location, and we never read your phone's address book. We don't ask for your phone number or payment details. The only contacts we hold are the follows listed above. The app has no advertising or third-party analytics code in it.
Why we collect it
We use your data to run the app (accounts, polls, chats, moderation, keeping abuse out and meeting our legal duties), to rank your feed, to measure how the app is used (for example how many people come back), and to send the notifications you turn on.
We don't use your data for ads and we don't sell it. We don't hand it to anyone except the companies listed under “Where it lives”, which host, deliver or back up Sidez for us.
Who can see what
Your polls, comments, username and profile are public in the app. Profile and poll pages can be opened by anyone with the link, signed in or not, and search engines may list them. Who you follow and who follows you is not private either. Who you have blocked or muted is.
Your skips, likes, searches, interests, date of birth and taste scores are private: other users can never see them. Your votes are private too, except as described under “Your votes”. We, the two people running Sidez, can look up one person's recent searches and what the feed has learned about their taste, to check and tune the feed.
Chats are between the two people in them; we read a chat message only when someone reports it. When you unsend a message, delete a comment or hide a poll it disappears for everyone else, but we keep a copy until your account is deleted so a report about it can still be reviewed.
Your votes
Your votes are private. Nobody can see which side you picked, and the app only shows you totals. There is one exception, and only if you turn it on: Settings → “Show my picks to people who follow me”. The people who can then see your picks are the people who follow you. With it on, they can see which side you picked on a poll you both answered. It is off until you switch it on, and turning it off hides your picks again.
Without it, the most anyone sees is a count such as “3 people you follow chose B”, shown only when at least three of the people you follow have voted. If all of them picked the same side, a count like that tells you how each of them voted.
Where it lives
Everything above is stored with Supabase (our database, sign-in service and photo storage; US East, N. Virginia), and the app is served by Vercel (US East, Washington, D.C.). We also use:
- Resend (US), which sends the sign-in link email. It sees your email address and the link.
- GitHub, which holds a nightly backup copy of our database in a private repository that only we can open. We never delete old backups. So when you delete your account it is gone from the app, but it stays in every backup made before you deleted it, and those backups are kept indefinitely.
- Google, if you choose Google sign-in: Google tells us your email, name and picture, and knows you signed in to Sidez. People who see your profile picture load it from Google's servers, so Google can see that their device asked for it.
- Your browser's push service, if you turn notifications on: Google (Chrome and Android), Apple or Mozilla, which relays an encrypted notification to your device.
Supabase, Vercel, Resend and GitHub host, deliver or back up Sidez for us. We use no third-party advertising, analytics or tracking companies.
On your device
Besides the cookie above, Sidez keeps small things in your browser: your text size, a vote waiting for you to finish signing in, which polls you have already seen, how many days in a row you have voted while signed out, whether you have dismissed an offer, and a saved copy of up to 30 screens you opened so they can open again without a connection. They stay on your device until you clear the site's data in your browser. Deleting your account does not clear them.
Notifications
If you turn them on, we keep the address your browser gives us for sending to that device, which switches you have on, and a line per notification sent: what kind, which day, and whether you opened it. That last part is how we tell a useful notification from a nuisance. At most two a day, never between 23:00 and 08:00 where you are. The text of each notification (for example “Your 5-day streak”, or the start of one of your poll's questions) is encrypted on our server before it is sent through the push service your browser uses: Google's for Chrome and Android, Apple's, or Mozilla's. They can't read it, but they do learn that a message was sent to your device, and when. Turning notifications off in Settings deletes your device's address from our records.
Reports and safety records
We keep reports, and a record of what we did about them. If something is reported as child sexual abuse material, or as another serious breach of our rules or the law, we may take it down and keep a copy of it for a year, even if the person who posted it then deletes their account. The copy is kept privately and only the two of us can open it. It holds the poll, its photo, the account that posted it (username, display name and when it joined), and what was reported about it, but not who reported it.
We keep it for a year from the day we take it down, or from the day we report it to an authority if that is later, and for longer if an authority asks us to. After that we delete the photo and the content, at our next review, and keep only a note that it happened. We may give such content, and the details of the account that posted it, to the authorities where the law requires or allows. How to report something, and what we do, is on our child safety page.
How long we keep it
Your account data lasts as long as your account does. Some things are kept for less: app events 90 days; the searches the feed learns from, and what it learned from them, 30 days; a daily ten, 14 days; the scrambled network code, about two days; your list of recent searches until you clear it (we keep the last 50). Your sign-in records last until you sign out or delete your account.
When you delete your account, your profile, polls, photos, votes, likes, comments, chats (both sides of them), taste scores, searches and search intent, notification settings and history, sign-in records, email address and event history are removed at once. Photos can linger in caches for up to an hour.
What stays after you delete your account
- Backups. The nightly backups of our database are never deleted. Your data stays in every backup made before you deleted your account, and we have no way to remove it from them.
- Reported content. A copy of anything taken down after a report, and the record of the account that posted it, for a year (see “Reports and safety records”). The backups hold the text of that record too.
- Activity recorded against the cookie before you had an account. It expires within 90 days, and once your account is gone the app no longer links it to you.
- Votes cast without an account that were never claimed. They stay against the cookie id.
- Totals other people share. A poll's vote count, and what a search phrase turned out to mean, are sums across everybody. Your part goes; the total stays, one smaller.
- Logs kept by our providers. Our hosting and email providers keep their own short logs, from an hour to about a month, which we don't control.
- Copies on a device. Anything saved on a phone (see “On your device”) stays there until it is cleared.
Deleting your data, and getting a copy
Settings → “Delete account” removes your account and what is tied to it, permanently, in one tap plus a typed confirmation. What stays is listed above. If you can't sign in and want your account deleted, the account deletion page explains how.
Settings → “Download my data” gives you a JSON file with your profile (including date of birth, time zone and language), streak, polls, votes, likes, comments, follows, the messages you sent, searches and search intent, and your notification settings and history, once an hour. It does not include your skips, taste scores, event history, followed tags, blocks, mutes, reports you filed, notifications inside the app, or messages other people sent you.
Who can use Sidez
Sidez is for people aged 16 and over. We ask for a date of birth when you create an account and don't let anyone under 16 sign up. The date is what you tell us; we can't check it.
Contact
Questions about your data: benli.kagan@gmail.com. What's allowed here is in the community rules. When we change this policy, we change the date at the top.