Privacy Policy

What we collect

When you join

• Your email address, used to send sign-in links. We don’t use passwords. If you choose “Continue with Google”, Google tells us your name, email and profile picture.
• Your profile: name, profile address (@handle), and anything you add, such as a bio, town, profile picture and header picture. These are public.
• Your ZIP code, if you add one, used only to show local weather. It is never shown on your profile.
• The date you confirmed you are 13 or older.

When you use the site

• What you post: posts, pictures, #hashtags and @mentions. Posts are public.
• Private messages you send and receive, and when you last read a conversation.
• Your activity: who you follow, cars you save, profiles you label as favorites (only you see these labels), people you block, and reports you send.
• Your settings, such as your profile theme and (for paid profiles) whether ads and news are hidden.

When you contact us or ask about a car

The contact form and car inquiry form collect your name, email and/or phone number, your message and any offer. If you’re signed in, we fill these in from your account.

Pictures

When you upload a picture we remove its hidden data (such as GPS location and camera details), resize it, and keep a fingerprint (hash) of the original file to help detect abuse.

What we don’t collect

• No analytics, advertising trackers, or third-party scripts.
• Sponsored items count clicks, but we don’t record who clicked.
• We don’t store your IP address. We use it briefly, in memory, to stop abuse (for example, too many sign-in attempts). Our hosting provider processes IP addresses to deliver the site and may keep them in short-lived operational logs.

How we keep the community safe

• Pictures are reviewed by a person before anyone else can see them. Until then, only you and Flipside staff can view them.
• Automated screening with AI. We send posts, pictures, profile names and bios, private messages, contact-form messages and car inquiries to an AI model (Claude, made by Anthropic) to look for things like threats, scams, harassment and explicit content. The AI never removes anything by itself: it only flags items for a person at Flipside to review. Your name, email and phone number from the contact and inquiry forms are not sent.
• Private messages are private, not secret. They aren’t end-to-end encrypted. Flipside staff can read a message when it’s reported or flagged by the screening above, and only as needed to handle it.
• Pictures served from our site are scanned by Cloudflare for known child sexual abuse material. We report such material to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) as the law requires.

How we use your information

• To run your account and show your profile, posts and pictures.
• To deliver messages and answer your inquiries and contact requests.
• To show local weather and news, and Flipside’s own sponsored items.
• To keep the site safe, enforce our Terms and Community Guidelines, and comply with the law.

Emails we send: sign-in links, and replies from Flipside when you’ve written to us. We don’t send marketing email.

Who we share it with

Everyone can see your public profile and posts, and search engines may list public profiles. Inquiries about our cars go to Flipside and into the software we use to manage our cars and customers.

We use these service providers to run the site. They process data for us under their own security and privacy terms, in the United States:

• Vercel: hosting the website.
• Neon: our database.
• Cloudflare: domain, picture storage and delivery, and picture safety scanning.
• Resend: sending email.
• Anthropic: the AI screening described above, and help writing our own car listings. Under its commercial terms, Anthropic does not use this data to train its models.
• Google: only if you choose to sign in with Google.

For weather, the U.S. National Weather Service receives an approximate location (rounded coordinates for your ZIP code), never your ZIP code or who you are. News headlines come from public news feeds; we send them nothing about you.

We may also share information if the law requires it, to protect someone’s safety, or as part of a sale or transfer of the business (the new owner would be bound by this policy).

Cookies

We use only the cookies needed to keep you signed in (for up to 30 days) and to protect forms against forgery. Your light/dark display choice is saved in your browser. There are no advertising or tracking cookies, so there is nothing to opt out of.

Your choices

• Edit your profile and settings any time.
• Download your data or delete your account from Account settings.
• Block people so they can’t message or follow you.
• To ask what we hold about you, or to correct or delete it, use our contact form. We answer these requests for everyone, wherever you live.

What happens when you delete your account

We delete your profile, posts, pictures, follows, saved cars, favorites and blocks, and sign you out everywhere. We keep:

• messages you sent to other people (they stay in the other person’s inbox, without your profile);
• inquiries and contact messages you sent us, as business records;
• reports you made and our moderation decisions, and a record that the account was deleted.

Otherwise we keep information while your account is open and as long as needed for the purposes above, including legal, safety and business records.

Children

You must be 13 or older to join. If we learn that someone under 13 has an account, we’ll delete it. If you believe a child under 13 has given us information, use our contact form.

Security

The site uses encrypted connections (HTTPS), sign-in links instead of passwords, and limited staff access. No system is perfectly secure; if something goes wrong that affects you, we’ll tell you as the law requires.

Changes and contact

If we change this policy we’ll update the date above, and for important changes we’ll let members know on the site. Questions? use our contact form.