Privacy Policy

Effective Date: 12 July 2026

William Roberts Coaching and Advisory Ltd ("we", "us", or "our"), a company incorporated in England (company number 15629688), operates SocietySpeaks.io (the "website"). SocietySpeaks.io is a platform for community discussion and collective intelligence. We are committed to protecting and respecting your privacy. This Privacy Policy sets out how we collect, use, and protect your personal data.

Key Contacts

1. Information We Collect

1.1 Personal Data We Collect:

• First and last names
• Email addresses
• Password (encrypted)
• Profile information
• Discussion contributions and interactions
• Voting and participation data
• Payment information (processed securely by Stripe)
• IP addresses
• Browser type and settings
• Device information
• Usage data and analytics
• Content you create or share
• Communications with us
• Cookie data

1.2 Discussion Platform Data

Discussions run on our own open-source consensus engine; a small number of older discussions may use an embedded Pol.is conversation. When you participate in discussions, we collect:

• Your comments and contributions to discussions
• Your voting patterns and interactions
• Discussion participation metrics
• Group opinion clustering data
• Interaction timestamps and frequency

1.3 Participation via Embedded Widget (Partner Sites)

When you vote or interact with a Society Speaks widget embedded on a partner publisher’s site (e.g. news articles), we collect:

• Session fingerprint — a hashed value derived from your browser/device so we can associate your votes with a single participant and apply rate limits; we do not use this to identify you personally.
• Partner reference (ref) — an identifier for the publisher site (e.g. observer, time) so we can attribute participation and prevent abuse.
• IP address — when you submit a vote or report, for security and rate limiting; we may log it only as necessary for these purposes.

Lawful basis: We process this data under our legitimate interest to operate the service, prevent abuse, and provide partners with aggregated participation metrics. We do not sell this data.

Retention: Session fingerprints and partner ref are retained for the duration needed for rate limiting and analytics (e.g. 90 days for event logs). IP logs are kept only as long as needed for security (e.g. 30 days).

Your rights: You can request erasure or a copy of data we hold about you by contacting [email protected]. We will respond within 30 days. For more on your rights, see section 6 below.

1.4 Society Play (Tradeoffs) Game Data

When you play Tradeoffs at /play, the game stores your choices and the state of the society you build. This is behavioural data about how you respond to fictional pressure — not your political views, not your real-world beliefs.

• Choice log — the sequence of choices you made through a scenario, including a timestamp for each turn and an identifier for the scenario. We use this to compute your outcome, your streak, and to detect patterns the game can reflect back to you on the outcome screen.
• Society state — the running stats (prosperity, trust, fairness, stability, plus four hidden stats) updated by your choices. This is derived from your choice log and is reset at the start of each new run.
• Optional society name — a short text you can choose to label your society. Stored against your run only; never shared in analytics or with third parties.
• Session fingerprint — the same hashed value used for anonymous voting elsewhere on Society Speaks (see 1.3). It lets us recognise you across plays in the same browser so your streak persists, without requiring an account.
• User ID — if you have signed in, your runs are attached to your account so they survive cookie clears and follow you across devices.

What we do not store:

• We do not store your real political opinions. Your in-game choices reflect a five-minute thought experiment, not your views.
• We do not link your game data to your activity on partner news sites or to advertising profiles. Tradeoffs has no advertising.
• We do not send the optional society name you type into our analytics pipeline (PostHog). Only a boolean flag (named or default) is recorded.

Lawful basis: Legitimate interest for anonymous play (so the game functions, streaks persist, and we can improve scenario balance from aggregate patterns) and contract performance for logged-in accounts (so we can deliver the features tied to your account).

Retention:

• In-progress runs that go inactive are marked abandoned after 24 hours. Their data is kept for 30 days for debugging, then deleted.
• Completed runs are retained for 24 months so the streak, the outcome screen, and any share link you posted continue to work. After 24 months we anonymise (drop the fingerprint and user link) and keep only aggregated, non-identifying outcome data.
• Account-linked runs are kept for the lifetime of your account. They are deleted when you delete your account.
• Aggregate cohort statistics (e.g. "27 percent of players chose to borrow today") are derived from completed runs and stored indefinitely in non-identifying form.

Your rights:

• Logged-in players: Delete your account and we cascade-delete every run, outcome, and streak record attached to it within 30 days.
• Anonymous players: Email [email protected] with the run UUID from any share link, or your browser fingerprint cookie value (visible in your browser developer tools as the ss_voter_client_id cookie). We will purge the associated runs within 30 days.
• Export: Email the address above and we will return a copy of every run and outcome attached to your account or fingerprint, in JSON format, within 30 days.

Sharing your outcome: When you click "Share" on the outcome screen, the link contains your run UUID. Anyone with that link can view your outcome page. Treat the share URL the same way you would treat a private link — it is unguessable but not encrypted.

Bridge to discussions: The outcome screen may link to a related Daily Question or Discussion on Society Speaks. Following that link is a normal page visit; it does not transfer your game data to the discussion side of the platform.

1.5 Email Newsletter Link Measurement

When you are subscribed to one of our email newsletters (such as the Daily Brief or Daily Questions) and you follow a link from an email to our site, that link carries a signed reference to your subscription. We store this in a first-party cookie (ss_subref, retained for up to 180 days) and use it to connect your email subscription with your activity on the site — for example, whether readers of an email went on to read or vote.

• Purpose: measurement only — understanding which email content leads to reading and participation so we can improve what we send. It is never used for advertising and is never shared with third parties.
• What is linked: your subscriber record (email address) and anonymous site activity such as page visits and votes.
• Email engagement data: our email provider (Resend) also tells us when emails are delivered, opened (via a tracking pixel), or bounce. We treat open data as approximate and use it in aggregate.
• Your choices: unsubscribing stops all measurement tied to future emails. You can delete the ss_subref cookie in your browser at any time. To have the stored link between your subscription and site activity erased, email [email protected] and we will remove it within 30 days.

2. How We Use Your Information

We use your information to:

• Provide and improve our community discussion platform
• Enable meaningful dialogue and collective intelligence gathering
• Process your payments and subscriptions
• Send service updates and notifications
• Provide customer support
• Analyze usage patterns and improve user experience
• Generate insights from community discussions
• Ensure platform security and prevent abuse
• Comply with legal obligations

Open Source Code, Your Data

The Society Speaks platform is open source under the AGPL-3.0 licence: anyone may inspect, run, and modify the code, and anyone who deploys a modified version must publish their changes, so our methodology stays publicly auditable.

The data is treated separately from the code. Individual votes and responses are never sold and never licensed to anyone. Only aggregate, anonymised patterns — what participants agree on, where they divide, and how collective judgement shifts over time — may be licensed to institutions, and that revenue keeps the public platform free and advertising-free.

3. Data Processing and Storage

Your data is stored at rest in the United Kingdom: our primary database runs on Neon (PostgreSQL) in London, and uploaded files and backups are stored in Amazon Web Services S3 in London. The application itself runs on Render in Frankfurt, Germany (EEA). Discussion data is processed by our own open-source consensus engine in accordance with applicable data protection laws.

Our Service Providers and Subprocessors

We work with carefully selected service providers who help us deliver our platform:

Name	Location	Purpose
Render	Germany (EEA)	Application hosting
Neon	United Kingdom	Primary database (PostgreSQL)
Amazon Web Services (S3)	United Kingdom	File storage and database backups
Redis Cloud (Redis Ltd)	United Kingdom	Transient cache, sessions and rate limiting (Redis)
Stripe	USA	Payment processing and subscription management
Resend	USA	Email communications and transactional messaging
PostHog	EU	Product analytics
Google (Tag Manager / Analytics)	USA	Site analytics and usage tracking
Sentry	EU	Error monitoring and diagnostics
Anthropic	USA	Translation and content generation (public statement text only; no account identifiers)
CookieYes	Global	Cookie consent management
Pol.is	USA	Legacy embedded discussions only

4. Discussion Platform and Public Content

SocietySpeaks.io is built on the principle of open dialogue and collective intelligence. When you participate in discussions:

• Your contributions to discussions are public by default and visible to other users
• Your voting patterns contribute to collective opinion mapping
• Your interactions help generate group insights and patterns
• Discussion data is processed by our open-source consensus engine to identify areas of consensus and disagreement
• Comments and votes cannot be retroactively deleted from group analysis once submitted

5. International Data Transfers

Your data is stored at rest in the United Kingdom (database, uploaded files and backups) and processed by our application in the European Economic Area (Germany). Some of our service providers — for example Stripe, Resend, Google and Anthropic — process limited data in the United States, as set out in the subprocessor table above.

Where data is transferred outside the UK or EEA, we ensure appropriate safeguards are in place through:

• The UK International Data Transfer Agreement or the UK Addendum to the EU Standard Contractual Clauses
• The UK Extension to the EU–US Data Privacy Framework, where the provider is certified
• Appropriate security measures and data protection agreements with our service providers
• Compliance with UK and EU data protection laws

6. Your Rights

Depending on your location, you have the following rights regarding your personal data:

• Access your personal data
• Correct inaccurate data
• Request deletion of your personal data (subject to discussion platform limitations)
• Object to processing of your data
• Data portability
• Withdraw consent
• Lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority

Please note: Due to the collective nature of our discussion platform, while you can delete your account, your anonymous contributions to discussions may remain as part of the collective dataset.

7. Data Security

We implement appropriate technical and organizational measures to protect your personal data, including:

• Encryption of data in transit and at rest
• Access controls and authentication
• Regular security assessments
• Employee training and confidentiality agreements
• Incident response procedures

8. Data Retention

We retain your personal data for as long as necessary to provide our services and comply with legal obligations. Specifically:

• Account information is retained while your account is active
• Discussion contributions remain part of the collective dataset
• Payment information is retained as required by law
• Usage logs are retained for security and analysis purposes

9. Children's Privacy

Our services are not directed to children under 16 years of age. We do not knowingly collect personal data from children under 16.

10. Changes to This Privacy Policy

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. We will notify you of any material changes by posting the new Privacy Policy on this page and updating the "Effective Date" at the top.

Contact Us

If you have any questions about this Privacy Policy or our data practices, please contact us at: