Privacy

• We ask for an email, a username and a password. Nothing else is required.
• Your username and your sneezes are public. Your email is not.
• We have never sold your data and are not going to.
• Closing your account does not erase your email or username — they stay reserved forever, on purpose.

What you hand over:

• Your email address. Used to sign you in, to reset your password, and to be the one account you are allowed.
• Your username. Public. Invite links use your account, not this name, so a rename does not break them.
• Your password. Scrambled before it is saved, in a way that cannot be undone. Nobody here can read it, us included, which is why a forgotten one has to be reset rather than looked up.
• A payout wallet address, if you add one. One address per account, so it also serves as a check that one person is not running several.

What builds up as you use the site:

• When you joined, and the last time you opened the app — the second one decides whether you are still eligible for Shares.
• Which member’s link you arrived through, if you arrived through one, and who arrived through yours.
• Your Shares, claims, payouts and any funding you have done, plus the audit record of each draw showing who was in it. These are financial records and the books have to balance against them.
• If you fund by sending ETH yourself rather than by card, the address you sent it from and the transaction it arrived in.
• Your sneezes, and the reactions you have given other people.
• Every username you have held, kept as a list.

What we never ask for: your real name, your address, your date of birth, a phone number, an ID document, bank details, or a reason you need money. There is no application here, so there is nothing to hold.

Your username is public. It appears on your sneezes, on the referral leaderboard and next to funding you have chosen not to make anonymous. Pick it with that in mind — and if you would rather not be recognisable, do not use your own name.

Your sneezes are public to anyone, signed in or not, for as long as they live. Your email address is never shown to another member.

This one is easy to miss, so it gets its own section. Payouts are sent as ETH on the Base network, which is a public blockchain. Every payout to your address — the amount and the date — is visible to anyone, forever. We cannot delete it, edit it or hide it, and neither can anyone else. That is how the network works, not a choice we made.

So if the address you give us is already tied to your name anywhere else, your CatchFlu payouts become tied to your name too. A fresh address, used only for this, keeps the two apart.

We use one essential cookie, and it is the one that keeps you signed in. It arrives when you log in and lasts 30 days unless you log out sooner. There is nothing to opt out of here: refusing it and not having an account are the same thing.

Your browser also remembers three small preferences. These sit on your own device and are never sent to us:

• who referred you, so they still get the credit if you wander off to read something before signing up
• that you have already seen the menu open itself once
• that you dismissed the “add to home screen” card

We also use Google Analytics, which sets its own cookies to count visits and show us which pages get used. Beyond that there are no advertising cookies, no ad networks and no tracking pixels — nothing here follows you to other websites.

Your IP address is used to stop one person hammering the login form or the sneeze page. It is counted for a short while and never written to our database. We keep no record of who visited from where.

The single exception: if you fund by card, your IP is passed to Coinbase as part of starting that payment, because they require it to secure the quote.

Only the companies needed to actually run the thing, and only with what each of them needs:

• Neon hosts our database, so everything described above physically lives on their servers.
• Resend sends our email. Right now that is password resets only, so they see your address and the reset link.
• Coinbase handles funding by card: they receive the deposit address and your IP, and their own privacy terms cover the payment itself.
• Google Analytics receives usage data about pages and visits.
• The Base network receives your payout address and the amount, publicly and permanently, as above.

We do not sell your data, rent it, trade it, or hand it to anyone for advertising. If we are ever legally compelled to give something up we will tell you, unless we are forbidden from telling you.

• Sneezes: deleted from the database for good shortly after their clock runs out. The short delay is a moderation window, not storage.
• Password reset links: stored as a hash, useless after one hour.
• Your session: 30 days, and killed immediately when you change your password or log out.
• Money records — funding, Shares, claims, payouts: kept. These are the books, and books that delete themselves cannot be checked.
• Your email, username and rename history: kept permanently, including after you close. Why, below.

Closing signs you out for good, drops any Share you hold, takes you off the leaderboard and stops your sneezes appearing. What it does not do is erase you, and it would be dishonest to imply otherwise.

Three things stay, each for a specific reason:

• Your email address, so the account cannot be closed and signed up again as a second one. Free the address and “one email, one account” stops being true, which makes the draw gameable by anyone patient enough.
• Your username at the time you close, so nobody can sign up as the person who just left. Names you used before that can be taken by someone else. Invite links use an account id, not the handle.
• Your money records, because they are part of a balance sheet that has to keep adding up after you have gone.

The practical consequence, stated once more because it surprises people: you cannot rejoin later with the same email address. Closing is meant to be a wall rather than a pause.

Mail support@catchflu.org and you can ask us to send you a copy of what we hold about you, correct anything wrong, or delete what we are able to delete. We will tell you honestly which parts we cannot remove and why, rather than going quiet on the awkward half of the request.

Passwords are scrambled before they are saved and never held in a form anyone can read. Everything you send us travels over an encrypted connection. Changing your password signs out every device that was using the old one, which is the whole point of changing it.

None of that is a promise that nothing can ever go wrong. If something does go wrong with your data, we will tell you what happened rather than hope you do not notice.

Accounts are for adults, so we are not expecting to hold data about children. If you believe a child has an account here, mail support@catchflu.org and we will remove it.

The date at the top moves whenever it does. If a change means something materially different happening to your data, we will say so on the site rather than leave you to spot a new paragraph.