Privacy Policy

Pancake is a comment section for live sports: one shared conversation per game, so people watching the same broadcast can talk about it together. It is run by PANCAKE LLC, based in Colorado, USA.

The short version. We collect the least we can get away with: an email address so you can sign in, a name you choose, and the comments you write. Your display name, your picture and your comments are public — anybody with a room's link can read them without an account. We do not run ads, we do not sell anything to anybody, and we do not track you anywhere else on the internet.

What we collect

When you sign in with Google, Google tells us three things: your email address, your name, and a web address for your profile photo. We do not receive your password and never see it.

When you sign up with an email address instead, we store your email address and a password. The password is handled and scrambled by our sign-in provider — it is never stored in a form we or anyone else can read, and nobody at Pancake can see it.

A name you choose. The first time you sign in, we ask what you want to be called. We deliberately only ever publish a first name or a handle — never a surname, even when the sign-in provider gives us one.

Your comments. The text you write and the time you wrote it. Each comment also stores the display name and profile photo address you had at the time you wrote it, so old comments keep the name they were written under.

Reports you file. If you report a comment, we record which comment, that it was you, when, and what we decided. We keep that record even after the reported comment is deleted — see “How long we keep things” below, which explains why.

Ordinary technical records. Our hosting providers keep standard server logs — the kind every website has — including IP addresses, for security and to keep the service running. We do not use them to build any profile of you.

What is public

Game rooms are open to anybody with the link. Reading a room requires no account at all. So:

• —Your display name, your profile picture and everything you write are public. Treat a comment the way you would treat something said out loud in a bar, not a message to a friend.
• —While you have a room open, your name and picture are announced to everyone else in that room, including people who are not signed in. That is what the “who’s here” list shows.
• —Rooms stay readable after the game ends. A link to a finished game still opens its conversation.
• —A room’s link may be shared by anyone who has it. We cannot control where it goes.

Your email address is never shown to anybody. Neither is your password, and neither is your surname.

What we do not do

• —No advertising, anywhere, of any kind.
• —We do not sell, rent or trade your information, to anyone, for any purpose.
• —No third-party analytics or tracking. Nothing in Pancake follows you to other websites.
• —No advertising or tracking cookies.
• —We do not send marketing email. The only email you can get from us is about your own account — confirming an address or resetting a password.
• —We do not use your comments to train artificial-intelligence systems.

What is stored on your own phone

Three things, and none of them is an advertising cookie:

• —Your sign-in session, so you do not have to sign in again every time.
• —How far behind your stream is — whether you have asked the room to hold comments back 30 seconds or a minute. It stays on your phone and is never sent to us, because the delay belongs to the television you are sitting in front of rather than to you.
• —Which rooms have already shown you the “streams may not be in sync” notice, so it only appears once per game.

Clearing your browser’s data for pancake.watch removes all three. The first one will sign you out.

Who else handles your information

Pancake is a small operation and runs on other people’s infrastructure. These companies process information on our behalf, under their own agreements:

We do not give your information to anybody else, except where we are required to by law, or where we genuinely believe somebody is at risk of serious harm.

How long we keep things

Comments stay indefinitely. A room is the record of what a group of people said during a game, and deleting one person’s comments years later would cut holes in other people’s conversations. If you want yours removed, ask.

Reports are kept after the comment is gone, and the reason is deliberate. Acting on a report used to delete it, which meant a record of somebody filing baseless reports vanished at exactly the moment their report was judged baseless. Reports now keep an outcome instead of being erased. So if you report a comment, that record outlives the comment.

If you ask us to delete your account, we remove your sign-in details and your comments. We may keep a minimal record that an account was removed, and reports you filed about other people’s comments, for the reason above.

Getting your information, or getting rid of it

Email Tyler@pancake.watch and ask. You can ask us to tell you what we hold about you, correct it, delete your comments, or delete your account entirely.

Two honest limits. There is no button for any of this today — Pancake has no way for you to delete your own comment or close your own account, so everything above is done by hand, by a person, when you ask. And we cannot un-ring a bell: anything you posted may already have been read, screenshotted or quoted by somebody else, and removing it from Pancake does not reach those copies.

We will answer within 30 days.

Children

Pancake is for people aged 13 and over. We do not knowingly collect anything from children under 13. If you believe a child under 13 has an account, email Tyler@pancake.watch and we will remove it and everything attached to it.

Keeping it safe

Every comment is written to the database by our own server rather than directly from your phone, and the database refuses writes from anywhere else. Passwords are handled entirely by our sign-in provider. The site is served over HTTPS.

That said, no service is perfectly secure, and it would be dishonest to claim otherwise. Please do not put anything in a comment that you would be harmed by having made public.

Changes

If we change this policy we will update the date at the top. If a change is significant, we will say so on the site rather than quietly swapping the page.

Contact

Tyler@pancake.watch — questions, requests, or anything in this policy that does not match what you have actually experienced. We would rather hear about that than not.