Privacy Policy

Effective date: September 8, 2026

NoiseGate is committed to protecting your privacy. This Privacy Policy explains how NoiseGate collects, uses, shares, retains, and protects personal information when you use the Service. The rules governing your use of the Service, including your acknowledgment of NoiseGate's automated quality-control and Signal Score processes, are set out in our Terms of Service.

1. Information we collect

Account information

✦Email address — used for authentication, account confirmation, password resets, and other necessary account or Service communications.

✦Display name

✦Password — stored as a secure hash, never in plaintext

Content you create

✦Posts: question text, question type, answer options, and any context images you upload

✦Responses: selections, ratings, rankings, or short text answers you submit to others’ posts

Behavioral data

To maintain result integrity, NoiseGate automatically collects:

✦Response timing — used as one factor in NoiseGate’s behavioral quality controls, including evaluating response timing relative to the content presented

✦Attention check results — pass/fail flag (see Section 4 for full disclosure)

✦Signal Score — a numeric reputation calculated from your response history and quality

Technical & usage data

✦IP address (collected automatically by our hosting provider, Vercel)

✦Browser type and operating system

✦Pages visited and features used

✦Session duration

Content reports

If you report a post or response, or if content you created is reported by another user, NoiseGate collects:

✦The identity of the user who submitted the report

✦The specific post or response being reported, and the reason given for the report

✦For content you own that is reported, an association between the report and your account, used to notify you and to enable moderation review

Legal and rights-enforcement information

If you submit a copyright infringement notice, counter-notice, or other legal or intellectual property complaint, we may collect the information you provide in that submission, including your name, contact information, signature, and statements concerning the claim.

2. How we use your information

✦To create and maintain your account

✦To provide core product functionality: publishing posts, collecting responses, displaying results

✦To calculate signal clarity, confidence tiers, and your Signal Score

✦To filter low-quality responses using behavioral quality controls (see Section 4)

✦To review reported content and, where necessary, remove content that violates our Terms of Service — a limited number of authorized NoiseGate personnel may access reported content and related account information for this purpose

✦To send transactional emails: account confirmation and password resets

✦To improve the product using aggregated, anonymized usage data

✦To comply with legal obligations

✦To respond to copyright, intellectual property, legal, and rights-enforcement requests and comply with applicable legal procedures.

3. Data sharing & third parties

We do not sell your personal information or share it with advertisers. We disclose personal information to service providers that process information on our behalf as necessary to operate and support the Service. Our current service providers include:

Supabase

Our database, authentication, and file-storage provider. Supabase processes account information, post data, response data, and related information on NoiseGate’s behalf. NoiseGate has accepted Supabase’s Data Processing Agreement.

Vercel

Our hosting and deployment platform. Vercel processes IP addresses and request metadata for all users who access the application.

Vercel Analytics

Provides aggregated, privacy-focused page-view and usage analytics. Vercel Analytics does not use cookies and does not track you across other websites.

Resend

Our transactional email provider. Processes email addresses solely for sending account confirmation and password reset emails.

GitHub

NoiseGate uses GitHub for source-code hosting and development. NoiseGate does not use GitHub to store or process NoiseGate user data.

We may change or add service providers as the Service evolves. We will update this Privacy Policy when changes to our service providers materially affect how personal information is collected, used, or disclosed.

Legal and rights-enforcement disclosures

We may disclose information contained in copyright notices, counter-notices, or other legal requests to affected users, complaining parties, service providers, courts, governmental authorities, or others where reasonably necessary to process the request, enforce our rights, or comply with applicable law.

4. Automated quality controls & silent filtration

NoiseGate uses behavioral quality controls to assess and filter potentially low-quality responses. Certain quality checks may occur without advance notice to respondents.

✦Attention checks are presented on a randomized cadence rather than during every response session.

✦Response timing may be evaluated using a dynamic threshold that takes into account the amount of content a respondent was required to read, rather than a single fixed response-time threshold.

✦Responses that do not meet applicable quality thresholds may be flagged and excluded from filtered results.

✦If a respondent fails an attention check, the Service may notify the respondent that the response may not count toward their overall score and provide a link to additional information about NoiseGate’s methodology.

✦Post owners may access or export response data showing whether a response was flagged. Respondents are identified to post owners only by an anonymized user identifier rather than by their name or other directly identifying account information.

This filtration is a core product function. It exists to protect the integrity of signal results. Additional information about these quality controls and your acknowledgment of their use is provided in the Terms of Service.

5. Signal Score

Every NoiseGate user has a Signal Score — a numeric reputation calculated from your response history and quality. Your Signal Score is:

✦Visible to you in the navigation bar

✦Displayed as one of five tiers: Seedling 🌱, Growing 🪴, Flowering 🌸, Established 🌿, or Trusted 🌳

✦Used internally to weight responses in filtered results — high-trust scores carry more weight

✦Included in your data export if you request a copy of your data

If we ever use your Signal Score for automated decisions that significantly affect your access to the platform, we will disclose this and provide a right to human review, as required by applicable law.

6. Respondent anonymity

By default, post owners are not provided with respondents' names or other directly identifying account information. If a respondent has chosen to make their handle publicly visible through their account settings, that handle may be shown alongside their response to the post owner and to other users viewing the post. Respondents may change this setting at any time. Results may be presented in aggregate through the Service, and post owners may also export response-level data associated with anonymized user identifiers. These exports may include information indicating whether a response was flagged by NoiseGate's quality controls.

Anonymized user identifiers are used to distinguish response records where a respondent has not chosen to display their handle publicly.

NoiseGate also offers an optional public garden feature. If you choose to make your garden public through your account settings, your signal score, account tenure, and earned achievements become visible to anyone with the link, without requiring them to log in. Your handle is shown as part of your public garden only if you have also chosen to display it publicly; otherwise it is shown as "Anonymous." You may disable public garden sharing at any time through your account settings.

7. Data retention

✦Account data: retained while your account is active and deleted when you delete your account, subject to any limited retention required for legal, security, fraud-prevention, or other legitimate purposes.

✦Post data: retained while your account is active; you may delete individual posts, which removes all associated responses

✦Response data: retained while the applicable response and user account remain active. If you delete your account, all posts you created and associated data are deleted. Responses you submitted to posts created by other users are retained to preserve the accuracy of those results, while all data associating them to your account (username, handle, etc.) is administered an anonymized code upon deletion, and furthermore completely dissociated from your previously existing account.

✦Behavioral / Signal Score data: retained while your account is active; deleted with your account.

✦Server and access logs: retained in accordance with the applicable retention practices of our hosting and infrastructure service providers.

8. Your rights

NoiseGate provides users with reasonable ways to access, correct, export, and request deletion of personal information associated with their accounts.

AccessYou may request a copy of personal information associated with your account.

DeletionYou may delete your account and associated data.

CorrectionYou may update certain account information through the Service or contact us to request correction.

Data portabilityWhere available, you may request a copy of your account data in a reasonably usable format. Post owners may also export certain post results through functionality provided by the Service.

These options are provided as part of NoiseGate's privacy practices and do not constitute an admission that any particular privacy law applies to NoiseGate.

Where applicable law provides you with additional privacy rights, NoiseGate will honor those rights as required by applicable law. This may include rights available to California residents under the California Consumer Privacy Act and California Privacy Rights Act, where those laws apply to NoiseGate, and rights available under the GDPR or UK GDPR where those laws apply to NoiseGate's processing activities.

We will use commercially reasonable efforts to respond to verified privacy requests promptly and within any timeframe required by applicable law.

To submit a privacy request, contact us at: hunter@teamhat.org

9. Cookies & tracking

Authentication cookies

Supabase uses session cookies to maintain your login state. These are strictly necessary and cannot be opted out of without losing access to your account.

No advertising cookies

NoiseGate does not use advertising networks, tracking pixels, or third-party analytics that track you across websites. We do not sell or share your data for advertising purposes.

10. Data security

NoiseGate uses reasonable technical and organizational measures designed to protect personal information. Current safeguards include:

✦Password hashing through Supabase Auth;

✦HTTPS/TLS encryption for data transmitted through the Service;

✦Row Level Security (RLS) controls designed to restrict database access; and

✦Separation of service-role credentials from client-side code and public repositories.

No method of transmission or storage is completely secure, and NoiseGate cannot guarantee absolute security. We may update our security measures as the Service and its infrastructure evolve.

If we experience a breach involving personal information, we will provide notices to affected individuals and governmental or regulatory authorities as required by applicable law.

11. Children's privacy

NoiseGate is intended only for users who are 18 years of age or older. If you are under 18, you may not create an account or submit personal information through the Service.

NoiseGate does not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13. If we learn that we have collected personal information from a child under 13, we will take appropriate steps to delete that information in accordance with applicable law.

If we learn that an account belongs to a user under 18, we may terminate the account and delete associated information in accordance with our Terms and applicable law.

12. Changes to this policy

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. If we make material changes, we will provide notice through the Service, by email, or by another reasonable method, as appropriate, and update the effective date at the top of this page. We encourage you to review this Privacy Policy periodically for updates. Where required by applicable law, we will provide additional notice or obtain consent before materially different processing practices take effect.

13. Contact

Questions about this Privacy Policy or want to exercise your data rights?

Contact us at: hunter@teamhat.org

✓ This document is periodically reviewed by a licensed attorney.

Terms of Service →