Privacy policy

Pickly (usepickly.com) is a small independent project run by Arno Boenders in Belgium, who is responsible for the data described here. For questions or requests about your data, use the contact form.

• Polls. The question, options, pictures and settings you enter. Anyone with a poll's link can see it, so don't put anything private in a poll.
• Votes. Your ballot, stored under a random code, not your name or IP address. The code comes from a cookie in your browser, or from your account if you're signed in, so you can change your vote later.
• Accounts. Your email address and a scrambled (hashed) version of your password. While you're signed in, we keep your session along with the IP address and browser it was started from, to keep your account safe. If you sign in with Google, we get your name, email address and profile picture from Google, and keep its sign-in tokens encrypted. We don't use those tokens to read anything else from your account.
• Email addresses for results. If you ask for an email when a poll closes, your address is used for that one email and deleted once it's sent.
• Invited voters. When a poll's creator invites you by email, we store your address with that poll to send the invite and up to two reminders, and note whether you've voted (not how). Replies go to the creator. These addresses are deleted once the poll closes. If you unsubscribe, we forget your invites and keep only a scrambled (hashed) version of your address, so we never email you an invite again.
• Reports and messages. What you write when you report a poll or use the contact form, plus the email address you give us to reply to.
• IP addresses. Used briefly to stop abuse, like too many polls or uploads from one connection. These counters expire within an hour.

Pictures you add to a poll are stored with the poll and anyone with the link can see them. Before a picture is saved, it is sent to OpenAI's moderation service to check it for unsafe content, such as nudity or violence. OpenAI only checks the picture; according to its terms for this service, it doesn't use it to train its models. Uploaded pictures that never end up in a poll are deleted after a day.

If you tap “use my location” to see how far away places are, your location stays in your browser and is used to work out the distances there. When you search for places, what you type (and the area you're searching near) is sent through our server to the map services below. We don't store it.

If you add Pickly to Claude or another AI assistant, the assistant sends Pickly only what a poll needs: the question, the options and when it closes, or the link of a poll whose results you ask for. Pickly never receives the rest of your conversation. Polls made this way are stored like any other poll and aren't linked to an account. What you write in the chat is handled by the assistant's provider under its own privacy policy.

To see which pages and templates people use, Pickly counts page views, clicks on links and buttons, and when a poll is created or a vote is cast. It's stored in our own database and nobody else gets it. Each count keeps the page, what was clicked, the site that linked here, the kind of device and the country, but never your address, your name or what you typed in a poll. If you're signed in, it's linked to your account, and that link is removed when you delete your account.

To count unique visitors, your connection and browser are scrambled into a code that changes every day, so it can't be traced back to you or follow you from one day to the next. No cookie is used for this. Counts are deleted after about 13 months.

• pickly_voter remembers your votes in this browser, for a year.
• A session cookie keeps you signed in, for up to 30 days.
• pickly_unlocked remembers which password-protected polls you opened, for 30 days, so you type each password only once.
• Your light or dark mode choice is kept in your browser's storage.

These are needed for the site to work, so there's no cookie banner. We don't use advertising or analytics cookies.

• Cloudflare hosts the site, stores pictures and sends account, invite and results emails. It also runs Turnstile, the bot check on the contact form. Our emails load their fonts from Google Fonts when you open them.
• Neon hosts the database, in Frankfurt (EU).
• Upstash keeps the short-lived counters that stop abuse.
• OpenAI checks uploaded pictures for unsafe content.
• Google confirms who you are, only if you choose to sign in with it.
• Photon, Overpass and OpenFreeMap (built on OpenStreetMap) power place search and maps. Map images load straight from OpenFreeMap, so it sees your IP address. Place names also come from Overture Maps, which we keep a copy of, so searching them shares nothing.

Some of these services are based in the United States. Where data leaves the EU, it's covered by the safeguards those services offer, such as the EU's standard contractual clauses.

Polls and their votes stay until their creator deletes them from “My polls”. Polls made without an account can be removed on request. Accounts stay until you ask us to delete yours. We delete the polls you made along with it, unless you'd like them kept.

You can ask to see the data we have about you, to correct it, to have it deleted, or to have it sent to you, and you can object to how we use it. Send a request through the contact form and you'll get an answer within a month. If you're not happy with how we handle it, you can complain to the Belgian Data Protection Authority (Gegevensbeschermingsautoriteit / Autorité de protection des données).