ProudToBe — Privacy Policy

1. Who is responsible

The data controller is Tomasz Mariusz Borek, sole trader (ditta individuale), Via Duca degli Abruzzi 113, Taranto, Italy, VAT number (Partita IVA) IT03496100730, reachable at hello@proudtobe.online.

This policy explains what we collect when you use https://proudtobe.online, why, how long we keep it, who else touches it, and what you can do about it. We wrote it to be read, not skimmed.

2. The short version

• To keep a page we need your e-mail address. That is the only personal data we require. You can vote and try a page for 24 hours without giving it.
• Everything on your public page is public because you published it. So are your points, votes received, referrals, place in the ranking, member number and the number of visits to your page.
• We do not store your IP address with your account, your votes or your visits. Where we must tell one visitor from another, we keep short-lived scrambled keys instead (section 3.5 and 3.6).
• We do not sell data, do not show ads, and do not use third-party advertising trackers.
• The Service is free; we do not process payments.

3. What we collect and why

3.1 Account data

E-mail address. Used to sign you in (one-time code or link), to send you account e-mails (new device sign-in, account deletion confirmation, reminders about your page, and the optional weekly summary, which you can switch off in Settings) and as the identity of your account. Legal basis: performance of the contract.

Google sign-in. If you continue with Google, Google sends us your e-mail address, a verified-e-mail flag and a stable Google account identifier (sub), which we store so that a later change of your Google e-mail does not lock you out. We do not receive your Google password or contacts. Legal basis: performance of the contract.

Time zone and language. Your browser tells us the time zone and the language of your device. We store the time zone with your account to count your free vote and your daily points per calendar day and to send reminders at a sensible hour; a changed time zone applies from the following day. We store the language to show the Service and to send e-mails and notifications in your language. Legal basis: performance of the contract.

Guest accounts. If you vote or make a page before signing in, we create a guest account that holds no e-mail address and no name: only an identifier kept in a cookie in your browser, your votes and the page you made. A temporary page stops being shown after 24 hours unless you confirm an e-mail address. Legal basis: performance of the contract.

Sessions and devices. For each signed-in session we keep a hashed session token, the browser description (user agent) and the country reported by our hosting provider at sign-in, so that you can see your devices in Settings and sign the others out. We do not keep the IP address. Legal basis: performance of the contract and our legitimate interest in account security.

3.2 Your page

Everything you enter in the page builder and publish — display name, photo, cover, category, city and country, languages, links, texts, images, video and other modules — is public and shown to anyone who opens your page, the rankings, search results, link previews and share cards. Only you decide what goes on your page; unpublished drafts are visible to you alone. Legal basis: performance of the contract; for optional fields, your choice to publish.

3.3 Votes, points and referrals

We record every vote given (who gave it, to which page, when) and every referral and its verification state. For daily points we record, per account and per day, that you were signed in, that you gave your vote, and on which other pages you opened a video or a link (the page and the day, not what you watched). This is the ledger of the game; without it there is no ranking and no way to audit or reverse fraud. Your name appears next to a vote only where the Service shows it, never your e-mail. Legal basis: performance of the contract; legitimate interest in the integrity of the ranking.

3.4 Notifications

If you allow notifications in your browser or in the installed app, we store the push subscription your browser gives us (an address at your browser's push service and the keys needed to encrypt the message). We use it only to remind you of your daily vote and of your page's results. You can switch notifications off at any time in your browser settings. Legal basis: your consent.

Following a page. A visitor can follow a page without an account. We then store, for that page, the push subscription of the visitor's browser, the browser description and the language, and use them only to announce a new video or post on that page. Unfollowing, or switching notifications off in the browser, removes it. Legal basis: your consent.

3.5 Visits and statistics

When someone opens a page, their browser sends us a signal that counts one visit and, once per day per browser, one unique visitor. Uniqueness is determined by a marker stored in the visitor's browser (localStorage), not by IP address. On the homepage the same role is played by the cookie ptb_hv, which contains only the current date and no identifier. We also count clicks on the links of a page (via our /go/ redirect), video plays, which section of a page was clicked and the traffic source when the address carries a utm_source tag. We also count the country of the visit (as reported by our hosting provider), the app or site the visitor came from (from a short fixed list, for example Instagram, TikTok, search) and clicks on each product of a shop section. All of these are counters per page and per day, with no visitor identifier and no IP address. We do not build profiles of visitors and we do not link visits to accounts. Legal basis: legitimate interest in providing statistics to page owners with a minimal footprint on visitors.

Link-in-bio visits. A page earns at most one point a day from visits that come from outside ProudToBe (see the Terms, section 6). To count a visitor once and to keep bots out, we set the cookie ptb_vid (a random identifier), run an invisible Cloudflare Turnstile check on the page, and store for each counted visit: the page, the day, the source from the list above, and two scrambled keys made from the cookie and from the visitor's network and browser. The keys are produced with a secret that changes every day, so they cannot be turned back into an IP address and cannot be compared from one day to the next. They are erased after 30 days. Visits from data-centre networks and from automated browsers are not recorded. Legal basis: legitimate interest in the integrity of the ranking.

3.6 Security and abuse prevention

We use Cloudflare Turnstile on the sign-in form, on pages (invisibly, see 3.5) and when a guest votes or makes a page, to tell people from bots; Turnstile may process technical browser data under Cloudflare's privacy policy. We apply request rate limits at the edge; some limits (guest accounts, reports) use a counter keyed by a scrambled form of the IP address, which expires within two days. Links added to a page are checked against a safety filter. When you report a page we store the report. We keep an audit log of moderation actions and of any invalidation of votes or referrals, which may reference your account. Legal basis: legitimate interest in protecting the Service and its users; legal obligations.

3.7 Technical logs

Our hosting provider, Cloudflare, processes the technical data of every request (including the IP address) to deliver the site, defend against attacks and provide us with aggregated analytics. We do not store request logs with IP addresses in our own database.

4. Cookies and browser storage

We use only what the Service needs to work. There are no advertising or cross-site tracking cookies.

Because these are strictly necessary for the features you use, no consent banner is shown for them.

5. Who else sees your data

We share data only with providers who help us run the Service, under contracts that bind them to protect it:

• Cloudflare, Inc. — hosting, database, file storage, bot protection, analytics.
• Platforms you link to — when you paste a link (a video, a post, a channel, a shop or product, a Linktree page), our server fetches its public title, picture, price or list of links from that platform. The request comes from our server; no data about you or your visitors is sent.
• Resend — sending our e-mails (sign-in codes, account notices, reminders, weekly summary). Our sending region is the EU.
• Google — only if you choose to sign in with Google; and Google Fonts, which loads font files from Google's servers when a page is displayed (your browser sends its IP address to Google for that request).
• Your browser's push service (for example Google, Apple or Mozilla) — only if you allow notifications; it delivers the encrypted notification to your device.
• Embedded content providers — if a page embeds a video or audio player (YouTube, Spotify, SoundCloud, Vimeo), the provider's player loads only after you press play (video) or when the embed is displayed (audio). On the home page on a phone, the “Watch the top” view loads YouTube's player when you open it and scroll to a video; the video never starts by itself — only when you press play. From then on the provider's privacy policy applies. YouTube is loaded through its privacy-enhanced domain.

We do not sell personal data. We share it with authorities only when the law requires it.

6. Where data is kept

Our systems run on Cloudflare's network. Our database is located in eastern North America (United States) and our file storage (photos and images) in Western Europe. Transfers outside the EU/EEA — to Cloudflare, Google and Resend — rely on the safeguards provided by the GDPR: the EU–US Data Privacy Framework where the provider is certified, and standard contractual clauses.

7. How long we keep data

• Account data: while your account exists, then removed after the seven-day deletion grace period.
• Your page: while published. After account deletion the page is anonymised: display name, texts, images, links and all descriptive fields are removed; the page keeps only the numbers of the game (votes received, referrals, points, member number) under the label "Deleted member", and your address is released.
• Votes you gave: kept, because a vote is permanent and belongs to the page that received it. After deletion they are no longer linked to any personal data of yours.
• Guest accounts and temporary pages: a temporary page stops being shown 24 hours after it was made unless an e-mail address is confirmed.
• Link-in-bio visit keys: 30 days; the daily count itself is kept as part of the ledger.
• Rate-limit counters: up to two days.
• Follows: until the visitor unfollows, the browser cancels the subscription, or the page is deleted.
• Sessions: removed on sign-out, on "sign out other devices", on account deletion, or on expiry.
• Sign-in codes and links: 15 minutes.
• Push subscriptions: until you switch notifications off, your browser cancels them, or you delete your account.
• Moderation and audit records: 5 years after the action, or as long as a dispute is open.
• Backups: backups are retained for 30 days; deleted data disappears from backups when they expire.

8. Your rights

Under the GDPR you can ask us to access, correct, delete or export your data, to restrict or object to processing based on legitimate interest, and to withdraw consent where processing is based on it. Most of this you can do yourself: your page is editable in the builder, your e-mail and devices are in Settings, and account deletion is in Settings. For anything else write to hello@proudtobe.online; we answer within one month.

You also have the right to lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority — in Italy, the Garante per la protezione dei dati personali (https://www.garanteprivacy.it) — or with the authority of the country where you live.

9. Children

The Service is not intended for people under 18 and we do not knowingly collect data from them. If you believe a child has created an account, write to us and we will delete it.

10. Changes

We will announce material changes to this policy on the Service or by e-mail before they take effect. The date below tells you when it was last changed.

Last updated: 6 October 2026.