Privacy Policy

Payola LLC of 1550 Wewatta St, Denver, CO 80202, USA is the controller of the personal data described here. For privacy questions or requests, write to privacy@payola.lol.

This policy covers payola.lol and its API. It does not cover any site you reach by clicking a listing (§6).

Nothing you type, because there is nothing to type. Reading the board and clicking links produces the following, and only the following:

The first three rows are measurement, and they run only if you accept it (§4). Decline, or simply never answer, and none of them are written: no cookie, no click record, no presence row. The last row is not measurement and is not consent-gated — it never leaves the server’s memory.

The salt is a server-side secret. The hash is truncated deliberately: it carries enough bits to recognise a repeat visit and not enough to be a durable identity. We cannot reverse a visitor hash into an IP address or a cookie value.

Our hosting and database providers keep their own operational logs, which may include IP addresses, for their own security and diagnostic purposes (§7).

We do not collect your name, email address, postal address or phone number, and we have no way to contact you. That is a deliberate trade: it means we hold almost nothing about you, and it also means we cannot recover a lost browser console session or reach you if something goes wrong.

Where real payments are enabled, Stripe, Inc. (United States) collects and processes your payment details directly, as its own controller, under its own privacy policy. What comes back to us is a session reference and whether it was paid.

There are no analytics cookies, no advertising cookies, and no third-party tags. The typefaces are served from our own domain — they are bundled at build time, so displaying this page makes no request to a font provider.

Until you answer the dialog, none of the measurement runs: the page sends no presence heartbeat, following a listing writes no click record, and no pv cookie is set. Choosing “Essential only” keeps it that way. Nothing on the board is withheld either way, and refusing takes exactly one click, the same as accepting.

You can change your mind at any time from the Cookies link in the footer of every page, and you can clear or block either cookie in your browser. Clearing pc simply means we ask again.

For people in the UK, EEA and other regions with equivalent law, our legal bases under the GDPR are:

• Performance of a contract — listing data, payment records and the owner credential. Without them we cannot run the listing you paid for.
• Consent — storing and reading the pv cookie, and the click and presence records derived from it. Nothing in this category happens before you accept, and withdrawing is one click in the footer. Withdrawal stops the processing from that moment; it does not undo counts already recorded.
• Legitimate interests — rate limiting, security and fraud prevention, which run on the request itself and write nothing durable. Our interest is in keeping the board standing; the data is pseudonymous, minimal, and not used to profile you or to target advertising.
• Legal obligation — retaining transaction records where tax or accounting law requires it.

We rely on consent only for the measurement described in §4 — none of it is advertising or cross-site tracking, but it is not necessary to deliver the board either, so it is asked for rather than assumed. You may object to processing based on legitimate interests (§9).

• Icons. A listing’s icon is displayed from the listed site’s own server. Your browser therefore requests that file directly from a third party, which will see your IP address, your user-agent, and the fact that you loaded the board. We do not control what those servers log.
• Clicks. When you follow a listing, we redirect you and add a ref=payola parameter to the outbound URL, so the destination can see that you came from here. Everything after that is between you and them, under their privacy policy.
• Submitted targets. When a listing is created we fetch the target once from our own servers to find its icon, identifying ourselves as PayolaBot. That request appears in the target’s logs as coming from us, not from you.
• Our public API. The board, including listing labels, taglines and handles, is published at a public endpoint. Anything visible on the board is available to anyone. Owner tokens are never included.

We keep the number of third parties small. Ours are:

• Our hosting provider — Vercel Inc. (United States), which serves the site and keeps request logs.
• Our database provider — Neon Inc. (United States), which stores everything in §2 and §3.
• Our payment processor — Stripe, Inc. (United States), where real payments are enabled.

Each is bound to process data on our instructions, or, in the payment processor’s case, acts as its own controller for the payment itself. We do not sell personal information, we do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising, and we do not disclose it to anyone else except where we are legally required to, where we need to establish or defend a legal claim, or as part of a merger or sale of assets — in which case this policy travels with the data.

These providers may process data outside your country, including in the United States. Where required, transfers out of the UK or EEA rely on the European Commission’s standard contractual clauses or an adequacy decision.

Depending on where you live, you may have the right to access the personal data we hold about you, to correct it, to have it deleted, to restrict or object to how we use it, to receive it in a portable form, and to complain to a data protection authority. In the UK that is the Information Commissioner’s Office; in the EEA it is your national supervisory authority. Californian residents have equivalent rights of access and deletion, and the right not to be discriminated against for exercising them — and we neither sell nor share personal information as those terms are defined there.

We respond to requests within one month, or as your local law requires, and we charge nothing for them.

Traffic is served over HTTPS. The visitor cookie is HTTP-only and, in production, secure-flagged, so scripts cannot read it. Visitor identifiers are salted and truncated before storage. Owner tokens are generated from a cryptographically secure random source. Card data never touches our infrastructure.

No system is perfectly secure, and we cannot guarantee that ours is. The owner console uses an HttpOnly, secure browser session; keep the browser that completed checkout signed in and do not export its cookies.

The Service is not directed at children and is not for anyone under 18. We do not knowingly collect personal data from children. If you believe a child has provided us with data, write to privacy@payola.lol and we will delete it.

We make no automated decisions producing legal or similarly significant effects about you. The only automated classification we run is a bot check on click traffic, which affects a counter and nothing else.

We do not track you across other websites, so there is nothing for a Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control signal to switch off. We honour them by not doing it in the first place.

We may update this policy. The date at the top is the date of the current version. Where a change materially affects how we use data we already hold, we will post it prominently on the board before it takes effect.

Privacy requests and questions: privacy@payola.lol. Anything else: legal@payola.lol. Our postal address for formal notices is 1550 Wewatta St, Denver, CO 80202, USA.

The commercial terms that go with this policy are in the Terms of Service.