Privacy

Would You Goon? is designed to collect as little as the research permits. It would be convenient to state that the site collects no data whatsoever. That claim would be false: assessments, reactions, anonymous identifiers and basic security information are all data.

What is true is narrower, and is set out below.

• No public account is required to participate.
• No name is required to vote.
• No email address is required to vote.
• There is no public identity, profile, username or follower system.
• There is no comment system, and nothing you write is ever published.
• Submissions to the Institute — nominations, correspondence, rights requests and photographs — are covered separately below.

On first visit the server issues an opaque, randomly generated identifier and stores it in a first-party cookie named wyg_session. The cookie is HttpOnly, SameSite Lax, Secure, and expires after one year.

The identifier contains no personal information. It exists so that one visitor holds one current assessment per subject and can revise it, which is a requirement of the statistics rather than a means of recognizing anyone.

Clearing browser storage discards the identifier. Assessments already recorded remain in the dataset, and the browser begins a new anonymous identity. This limitation is accepted deliberately.

Against an anonymous session identifier, the Institute stores:

• the assessment score for a subject, and the time it was given or revised;
• emoji reactions added to a subject;
• subjects skipped;
• the fact that a share action occurred, and through which channel;
• anything you choose to send through the submission form, which is described in the next section.

The Institute's database records no IP address, no user-agent string and no browser fingerprint against assessments or sessions.

That statement concerns this application's own records. It is not a claim that no such information exists anywhere: hosting and content-delivery infrastructure necessarily processes connection metadata, including IP addresses, in order to serve requests and resist abuse, as all web infrastructure does. Such processing is transient and operational. Measurement is a separate matter, and is set out immediately below.

Traffic to this site is counted using Cloudflare Web Analytics. It sets no cookie, writes nothing to browser storage and does not fingerprint visitors, so nothing it does requires consent. Cookies set by the hosting platform are a separate matter, and are described below.

What it reports is limited to:

• which page was loaded, and the site that referred the visit;
• country, browser, operating system and device type;
• how long the page took to load;
• whether a request appears automated, so that bot traffic can be excluded.

No identifier is created for a visitor, so one visit cannot be linked to another, and none of it can be joined to an assessment. A visit is counted as a page view arriving from somewhere else, rather than by recognizing who arrived — which is the whole reason the measurement can be this uninformative about you.

This site is built and served through a hosting platform, which injects a measurement script of its own and sets cookies that are not part of this application's source code. They are set out here because a privacy notice covering only the parts its author chose is not a description of the site.

• session-id — a randomly generated identifier the platform's analytics uses to group page views within a single visit. It expires after thirty minutes and is written by script rather than by the server, so it is not HttpOnly.
• __dpl — set by the platform's delivery network, to keep a visitor on one deployment of the site.
• __cf_bm — a bot-management cookie set by Cloudflare, which sits in front of the platform. It expires after thirty minutes and exists to tell automated traffic from human traffic.

The platform's script records page views and page-loading performance, and reads the browser's user-agent string and the referring address. It reports to this site's own domain rather than to a third one, and it replaces the values of a list of sensitive field names — passwords, tokens, email addresses, payment and order details among them — with asterisks before transmitting anything. Whether it can be switched off is being taken up with the platform.

The submission form accepts three things: a nomination of a subject for assessment, general correspondence, and a request concerning rights in published material. All three are free text, and all three are stored.

An email address is optional for a nomination and for correspondence. The field says so, and leaving it blank does not reduce what the Institute will do with what you sent. It is required for a rights or takedown request, because a complaint the Institute cannot answer helps nobody.

Submissions are held privately and are never published. An address supplied with one is used to reply to you and for nothing else. It is not added to a mailing list, because there is no mailing list.

A submission is relayed to the Institute by email so that it is read promptly, which means an email delivery provider processes what you sent, including an address you supplied. That is the same kind of arrangement as the hosting and content-delivery providers described above, and it is named here for the same reason.

A photograph sent through the field photography page is handled differently from the text forms: it is emailed to the Institute for review and is not stored by the site. What the site keeps is a record that permission was given: the subject, the credit name you asked for, your email address if you gave one, the file’s name and size, which version of the permission you agreed to, and when. The email, and the photograph attached to it, pass through the same email delivery provider as other submissions. Before a photograph leaves your browser it is redrawn at a smaller size, which removes the location, camera and time details a phone writes into the file; a photograph that cannot be redrawn is not sent.

Submissions are throttled per browser, using the same anonymous session identifier described above and nothing else. No challenge widget is used and no address is recorded, so the statement above about IP addresses, user-agent strings and fingerprints remains true of this form as well.

• Personal data is not sold, and is not shared for advertising purposes.
• There is no behavioral advertising system.
• There is no cross-site tracking.
• No aggressive browser fingerprinting is performed.
• No attempt is made to identify a visitor across devices.

A streamer who connects Twitch to Streamer Mode gives this page permission to read their channel's chat, and nothing else. The permission is held in that streamer's own browser and never reaches the Institute. Chat is read in the same browser to count votes: no message, name or vote from chat is sent to the Institute or kept, and chat's votes do not count toward any published figure. The one exception is the streamer's own number, typed in their own chat: it is recorded as that streamer's assessment, exactly as a vote cast on the site would be, under the same anonymous session and nothing more. Their Twitch name and id are not sent with it. Disconnecting on the Streamer Mode page forgets the permission; it can also be revoked at any time in Twitch's connection settings.

Aggregates are published: averages, medians, distributions, counts, dispersion and movement over time.

Every public page additionally carries a sample of recent assessments — a subject, and the score it was given. That sample is drawn only from a period in which at least three anonymous sessions filed an assessment, is shuffled rather than ordered, carries at most one entry per subject, and is captioned with a single coarse period rather than a time against each entry. Those four constraints exist for one reason: without them, a quiet period would show a single visitor's run of scores in sequence, which is a description of one person's taste even though no name is attached to it.

A count of the assessments a subject received in the past 24 hours is shown only once at least three anonymous sessions contributed to it.

An individual assessment is never publicly attributable to a visitor, because the Institute holds nothing capable of making that attribution.

Sharing a result may include your own score in the text you send. That text is composed on your device and shared by you; it creates no public record here.

Concerns regarding a subject, an image, attribution or personal likeness are handled through the rights and content requests channel, which is now open and accepts requests through the submission form.