Privacy Policy

Welcome to BatComments. We respect your privacy and are committed to protecting your personal data. This privacy policy explains how we collect, use, and safeguard your information when you visit our website, use our application, or interact with our services.

By accessing or using BatComments, you agree to the practices described in this Privacy Policy. If you do not agree with our policies and practices, please do not use our platform.

We collect several types of information from and about users of our website, including:

• Account Information: When you create an account, register, or log in, we collect your authentication credentials. If you choose to sign up or log in using Google OAuth, we securely receive specific profile data from your Google account, which includes your full name, email address, profile image, and a unique Google ID.
• User-Generated Content: Comments, upvotes, downvotes, tags, and other content you post on the platform.
• Technical Data: IP addresses, browser type, operating system, and device information automatically collected when you access our platform.
• Usage Data: Information about how you navigate and interact with BatComments, including timestamps and pages visited.

We use the information we collect to provide and improve our services. Specifically, we use your data to:

• Create, authenticate, and manage your user account.
• Display your public profile and user-generated content (like comments and votes) to other users.
• Provide customer support and respond to your inquiries.
• Monitor and analyze trends, usage, and activities to improve the platform's user experience.
• Detect, investigate, and prevent fraudulent transactions, spam, and other illegal activities.

BatComments uses cookies, web beacons, local storage, and similar technologies to ensure our platform functions securely and to personalize your experience.

Strictly Necessary Cookies: We utilize an essential session cookie (bat_user_session) to manage your authentication, keep you securely logged in, and protect against Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) attacks. Because this cookie is strictly necessary for the core functionality and security of the platform, it is exempt from prior consent requirements.

Local Storage & Session Preferences: We use your browser's local storage to save functional preferences, such as your user interface theme (light or dark mode), and to maintain your recent search history for your convenience. Additionally, we use temporary session storage to remember your exact scroll position on various feeds, profiles, and post pages (e.g., bat_scroll_[category], bat_scroll_profile_[tab], bat_scroll_post_[id]) and to ensure seamless, continuous navigation during the login process (e.g., is_auth_flow, has_refreshed_auth). This data remains strictly on your device, is not used for cross-site tracking, and session data is automatically cleared when you close your browser tab.

Advertising & Analytics Cookies: For non-essential cookies, such as those used to serve personalized advertisements, we deploy a certified Consent Management Platform (CMP). If you are located in regions governed by specific privacy laws (such as the EEA or the UK), this CMP will ask for your explicit consent before any non-essential cookies are loaded on your device.

We implement standard, commercially reasonable security measures to protect your personal information, username, login credentials, and stored data from unauthorized access or disclosure.

Third-Party Content Syncing: We do not store raw YouTube comments or metadata indefinitely in our databases. To respect creator rights and comply with third-party platform policies, our system regularly synchronizes with the original source videos. If an original YouTube video is deleted, removed, or if the creator disables the comment section, the corresponding curation on BatComments will also be automatically deleted from our platform.

30-Day Data Archive:To protect users from accidental data loss and to assist in investigating platform abuse, BatComments maintains a secure, 30-day "recycle bin." When you delete your account, modify your profile, or delete user-generated content, the data is removed from public view and moved to this isolated archive.

Exactly 30 days after deletion, this archived data is automatically and permanently purged from our active databases and cloud storage systems.

Depending on your location, you may have certain legal rights regarding your personal data, including:

• The right to access, update, or delete the information we have on you.
• The right to rectification (correcting inaccurate data).
• The right to object to our processing of your personal data.
• The right to request data portability.

To exercise any of these rights, please contact us using the information provided in the Contact section. We may ask you to verify your identity before responding to such requests.

We may update our Privacy Policy from time to time to reflect changes in our practices or for other operational, legal, or regulatory reasons. We will notify you of any changes by posting the new Privacy Policy on this page and updating the "Last updated" date at the top. You are advised to review this Privacy Policy periodically for any changes.

If you have any questions, concerns, or requests regarding this Privacy Policy or how we handle your data, please reach out to our legal department: