Privacy

This page says what plopslop stores, why it stores it, how long it keeps it, and how to get rid of it. It covers plopslop.com and nothing else. Last updated 24 August 2026.

This is a draft under legal review. The parts marked below are not settled yet. Everything it says about what plopslop stores was read from the code that runs the site on the date above.

Signed out, plopslop stores almost nothing

The whole site reads without an account. Signed out, plopslop stores nothing about what you open. Your followed topics, muted words, country, theme, and the topics you tap most sit in your browser and never reach the server.

Voting is the one exception. A vote is stored on the server, keyed to a random id your browser made for itself. The server salts that id and stores only the hash. It holds no name, no address, and nothing that points back to you.

What an account stores

Your account itself:

• your username, which is public on the leaderboard
• a scrypt hash of your password, never the password itself. Accounts made with a username carry no email address at all, which is also why there is no password reset and no way to recover a lost password.
• your Google email address and your Google account id, only if you chose to sign in with Google
• a salted hash of the device cookie your browser carried at signup
• the date the account was created

Staying signed in:

• one row per signed-in device, holding a hash of the session token, when it was made, when it expires, and when it was last used

Keeping bots and password guessing out:

• failed sign-in attempts, as a count and a timestamp against a salted hash. The username, the email, and the network address are reduced to a hash with a server secret before anything is written. None of the three is ever stored in the clear.
• one row per puzzle the signup form hands a browser, holding a random salt, the answer, and an expiry. Those rows say nothing about the person solving them. The puzzle is served by plopslop, so no third-party captcha sees your visit.

What you set:

• followed topics, muted keywords, and country

What you open, signed in:

• each article you open from plopslop, with the time
• the weights that learning produces, one per topic, source, and country

Votes:

• one row per article you voted on, holding up or down and the time, keyed to the salted browser token above rather than to your account

Every call you make in the game:

• the article, your call of slop or top, and the time
• the slop score the system showed you at that moment, and whether your call matched the system
• how many milliseconds you took to answer
• whether you opened the article before you judged it
• how sure you said you were, and the points the round paid
• how many other players had already judged that card, whether you agreed with them, and whether the round showed you the estimate afterwards
• which detector and which version produced the score you saw
• which round of the sitting it was, and a random id for the browser tab so rounds can be grouped
• which pool the card was drawn from and how likely it was to be dealt, so the shape of the deck can be corrected for later
• whether you challenged the result

Every card the game deals you:

• the article, its place in the deck, the tab id, and the time. This is how plopslop can tell a card you skipped from a card you never saw.

What sits on your device

Cookies, all of them unreadable to scripts in the page and none of them shared with anyone:

• the session cookie, so you stay signed in. Your browser holds it for up to 365 days, and the server stops accepting it 90 days after you last use it.
• the device cookie, one random id that lasts 400 days. It exists so one browser cannot create accounts in bulk.
• two cookies that live for 10 minutes during Google sign-in, one holding a random nonce that blocks a forged sign-in and one holding the page to send you back to. Both are cleared when sign-in finishes.

plopslop sets no other cookies. Your topics, muted words, country, theme, and the tally of topics you tap stay in your browser storage and are never sent anywhere. The random vote id lives there too, and the only time it leaves your browser is when you cast a vote.

Why plopslop holds each of these

Each purpose stands on its own. Nothing here is bundled into one blanket consent.

• Running your account. The username, the password hash, the Google identity, and the session rows exist so you can sign in and stay signed in.
• Running the game and the leaderboard. Judgments and dealt cards produce your score, your accuracy, and your rank, and they stop the same article being judged twice for points.
• Keeping abuse and bots out. The hashed attempt counters, the signup puzzle, and the device hash cap how many accounts one browser or one network can make and how fast passwords can be guessed.
• Making the feed yours. Your preferences, the articles you open while signed in, and the weights learned from them order your feed. This only ever happens on an account, and the account page says so.
• Improving and calibrating plopslop's detection. Judgments from many players are the human check on the detector. They are used to measure where it is wrong and to train and evaluate later versions.
• Publishing aggregate statistics. Counts and rates drawn from many players, such as how often people match the detector, get published as numbers about the crowd.

In the words the law uses: running the account and the game is what you signed up for, keeping abuse out and improving the detection are plopslop's legitimate interests, and the training and aggregate use of judgments rests on the licence in the terms.

To be completed before launch. A lawyer needs to confirm the legal bases named in this section against the GDPR and India's DPDP Act, and say whether any of them should instead be handled as an explicit consent at signup.

Your judgments become training data

This is the plain version. plopslop is building a record of how people judge machine writing, and the game is where that record comes from. Every call you make is stored and used to test plopslop's detection, to train and evaluate later versions of it, and to publish aggregate results. That is the point of the game rather than a side effect of it.

Your username is attached to your judgments inside plopslop, because that is how the leaderboard and the judged-once rule work. It is not attached to anything published. Published results are counts and rates about many players. If plopslop ever releases a dataset of judgments, it will carry the judgments without usernames and without email addresses.

What is public about you

Your username, your score, how many rounds you have played, your rank, and the accuracy figure the leaderboard shows. Nothing else about you appears anywhere on plopslop. There are no profile pages.

No trackers, none at all

plopslop runs no third-party analytics, no advertising scripts, no social widgets, no tracking pixels, and no fingerprinting. Fonts are served from plopslop's own server. There is no analytics product on this site at all, so nothing about your visit is measured for anyone. The single time another company is involved is if you choose to sign in with Google, which tells Google that you signed in to plopslop.

Accounts are for adults

You need to be 18 or older to create an account. The game measures how accurate each player is and ranks players against each other, and plopslop will not run that on children. India's DPDP Act treats everyone under 18 as a child and does not allow behavioural monitoring of them, which is what per-player accuracy and a leaderboard are. If plopslop learns that an account belongs to someone under 18, the account is deleted. Reading plopslop needs no account and is open to anyone.

How long each thing is kept

• Account, preferences, learned weights, reading events, judgments, and dealt cards. Kept while the account exists. Nothing here expires on its own today.
• Sessions. A session stops working 90 days after you last use it, and 365 days after it was issued. Signing out deletes that session row. Signing out everywhere deletes all of them.
• Failed sign-in counters. Cleared the moment you sign in successfully. Otherwise the counter stops counting once its window passes, between 10 minutes and 24 hours depending on the endpoint. Those rows hold no readable data, and plopslop has no scheduled job that sweeps them yet.
• Signup puzzles. Valid for 10 minutes, single use, and deleted an hour after they expire.
• The device signup counter. A device may create 2 accounts in 30 days. The salted device hash behind that limit stays after the window passes.
• Votes. Kept as long as the article is in the database. They are keyed to a browser token rather than to you.
• Backups. The database is dumped nightly. 14 daily copies and 8 weekly copies are kept, so the oldest copy is at most 56 days old.
• Server logs. Standard web server request logs record network addresses, as every web server does. They exist to keep the site up and to trace faults, and nothing in them is joined to an account, a vote, or a judgment. plopslop's own code writes no email address, password, session token, or network address into a log.

To be completed before launch. Set and state a retention period for server request logs, and add a scheduled sweep for stale rate-limit rows so this section can name a number instead of describing the mechanism.

Deleting your account

The account page has a delete button. It runs at once and takes the account row, the username, the password hash, the Google identity, every session, your preferences, your learned weights, your reading events, every judgment you made, and every card you were dealt.

Being honest about what deletion cannot undo:

• A model already trained on your judgments keeps what it learned. There is no way to untrain a model on one person's rows.
• Aggregate numbers already published stay published. They cannot be recalled.
• Votes are keyed to a browser token rather than to your account, so they stay. Signing out rotates that token, which starts a fresh one.
• Backups taken before the deletion hold a copy until they age out, which is at most 56 days.
• The device signup counter keeps its salted hash, so deleting an account does not hand back the slot it used.

Your rights

Wherever you read from, plopslop treats these as yours: to know what is held about you, to get a copy of it, to correct it, to delete it, to object to a use of it, to withdraw a consent you gave, and to complain to a regulator. Readers in the EU and the UK have these under the GDPR. Readers in India have them under the DPDP Act.

What works today, without asking anyone:

• The account page shows the identity plopslop holds for you and lets you change your preferences.
• The delete button removes everything listed above, in one step.
• Signing out everywhere ends every session at once.

Two gaps, stated rather than glossed over. There is no button that exports your judgments as a file yet. A username is set once and cannot be edited, so the only way to change it is to delete the account and make another.

To be completed before launch. Add a contact address for privacy requests, a route for people to complain, and the name of the person or company answering them. The mailbox has to receive mail before it is named here, because a policy that lists a dead address is worse than one that lists none.

A reader in the EU or the UK may complain to their national data protection authority. A reader in India may complain to the Data Protection Board of India.

Where plopslop runs

plopslop runs on one rented virtual server, with its own database on that server. Nightly backup copies go to Google Drive. plopslop is run from India, so data reaches India wherever you read from.

To be completed before launch. Name the country the server sits in, name Google Drive as the backup processor with its terms, and have a lawyer set out the transfer basis for readers in the EU and the UK.

Changes to this page

The date at the top changes whenever this page does. A change that affects what plopslop collects or what it does with it will be said plainly at the top rather than slipped into a paragraph.