Політика конфіденційності
🚧 Це чернетка, ще не перевірена юристом. Текст поки лише англійською.
Востаннє оновлено: 2026-08-26
Who we are
Rate My City is operated by Red Cookie OÜ, Kaupmehe 8, Tallinn, Estonia. For any privacy question or request, contact [email protected]. This policy is written to reflect the EU GDPR, since the operator is based in Estonia and the service is available to visitors worldwide.
What we collect
When you sign in with Google, we receive your name, email address, and profile picture. We also store the OAuth tokens Google issues for that sign-in (via our authentication provider, Auth.js), so we can keep you signed in without asking you to re-authenticate constantly.
Beyond that, we store what you do on Rate My City: the city you set as your "home city", your reactions (like / dislike / neutral) to cities, any written reviews and photos you post, votes you cast on other people's reviews (useful / not useful), your survey answers about your home city, and your display preferences — language and light/dark theme — kept either in a cookie (if you're not signed in) or, for language, on your account as well.
Like virtually every website, our infrastructure (see "Who we share it with" below) processes your IP address and basic request metadata (timestamp, user agent, requested page) as part of normal operation, for security and abuse prevention. We also use that data, together with the pattern of your reactions, to detect coordinated attempts to manipulate city ratings — see "Abuse & attack detection" below. We don't use any of this for advertising or behavioral profiling.
If you write a review or home-city post and someone views the page in a different language than you wrote it in, we send that text to an AI service (see "Who we share it with" below) to translate it. The translation is generated once, cached, and reused for later viewers — we don't re-send your text on every view. Anyone viewing a translation can also choose to see your original wording instead. The same AI pipeline separately writes short factual description text for some cities (population, country, that kind of thing) — that's not your personal data, but we mention it here because it uses the same third-party service.
Why we process it, and on what legal basis
To run the core product — showing your reactions and posts, remembering your preferences, enforcing one reaction per city per account, translating content into a viewer's chosen language — because it's necessary to perform our contract with you (GDPR Art. 6(1)(b)). To keep the platform trustworthy — detecting coordinated vote-manipulation and other abuse, see "Abuse & attack detection" below — and to moderate uploaded photos and text before they go public, on the basis of our legitimate interest in running a functioning, non-abusive service (Art. 6(1)(f)). Where we ever ask for anything beyond this — e.g. optional marketing communication, should that ever exist — we'll ask for your consent (Art. 6(1)(a)) separately and clearly.
Who we share it with
Google, as our sign-in provider. Cloudflare, which fronts the site as CDN and WAF, hosts user-uploaded photos via Cloudflare R2 / Cloudflare Images, and by necessity processes your IP address to do so. OpenRouter, an AI routing service, when we translate a review/post or write a city description — OpenRouter forwards that text to whichever underlying AI model provider is configured at the time, which can vary; per OpenRouter's own privacy policy (openrouter.ai/privacy), OpenRouter itself doesn't use it to train models, though the specific model provider it routes to might, depending on which one is configured. The application itself runs on infrastructure we operate ourselves rather than a third-party cloud platform. We do not sell your data, and we do not share it with advertisers.
International transfers
Cloudflare operates a global network, so your data may be processed outside the EU/EEA as part of routing and security. This is covered by the Cloudflare Customer Data Processing Addendum (incorporated by reference into Cloudflare's customer terms — see cloudflare.com/cloudflare-customer-dpa), which includes the EU Standard Contractual Clauses as its transfer mechanism. OpenRouter is a US company, and translating a review/post or generating a city description may send that text to servers in the US or wherever its underlying model provider processes requests; OpenRouter's privacy policy states it relies on the EU Standard Contractual Clauses for this.
How long we keep it
Account and content data (reactions, reviews, photos, review votes, survey answers, home city, home city posts) for as long as your account exists. You can delete your account and the content tied to it at any time; see "Your rights" below. A cached translation of your review/post is deleted the moment you edit that review/post (a fresh one is generated the next time someone views it in that language) and, like the rest of your content, when your account is deleted. The language and theme cookies are set to expire after 1 year if you don't revisit the site; they are refreshed each time you change either preference.
Security
We don't store passwords — authentication is handled entirely by Google via OAuth. Traffic to the site is served over HTTPS. Access to the production database is restricted to the people operating the service. Photos you upload are sent directly from your browser to Cloudflare R2 object storage using short-lived signed upload URLs, and every post is held for manual review before it appears publicly.
Abuse & attack detection
Reactions are one-per-account and drive a public score, which makes coordinated manipulation ("vote brigading") and automated/bot traffic a direct integrity risk to the product — see §5 of our Terms of Service. To guard against this, we analyze reaction activity — timestamps, IP-derived signals, and request metadata already described above — for patterns consistent with coordinated manipulation or automated abuse, such as an unusual concentration of reactions to one city from a narrow IP range, region, or time window. This analysis is automated, but on its own it only flags activity for our review: it does not suspend an account or remove content by itself. Any resulting suspension or removal is confirmed by a person, per our Terms of Service, §6, and you can always contact us to ask about a decision affecting your account. We don't use this analysis for any purpose other than protecting the platform's integrity — never for advertising or profiling — and it relies on data we already collect rather than any additional category of personal data. Legal basis: our legitimate interest in running a trustworthy, non-manipulable service (GDPR Art. 6(1)(f)).
Your rights
Under the GDPR you can request access to, correction of, or deletion of your personal data, ask us to restrict or object to processing, and request a portable export of your data. Two of these are self-service: sign in and visit your account page to download a full copy of your data as a file (access & portability), or to permanently delete your account and everything tied to it (erasure) — deletion takes effect immediately and can't be undone. For correction, restriction, an objection to processing, or anything else, contact [email protected]. You also have the right to lodge a complaint with your local data protection authority (in Estonia, the Andmekaitse Inspektsioon) or the authority in your own EU member state.
Cookies
We currently use a small number of strictly necessary/functional cookies — none used for advertising, analytics, or cross-site tracking, so none legally require consent under current guidance. We still show a short notice about them the first time you visit (the banner at the bottom of the screen) rather than waiting until we're required to. If that changes — e.g. we ever add analytics — this section and that banner will be updated to ask for your consent first.
city-vibes-locale— remembers your chosen interface language. Set when you pick a language, or automatically on first visit based on your browser's language settings. Expires after 1 year.city-vibes-theme— remembers an explicit light/dark theme choice, if you've made one (otherwise your OS/browser preference is used and no cookie is set). Expires after 1 year.city-vibes-cookie-notice-ack— records that you've dismissed the cookie notice, so it doesn't reappear on later visits. Expires after 1 year.- Session/authentication cookies set by our sign-in system (Auth.js) once you sign in with Google — these keep you logged in and protect against cross-site request forgery. They're deleted when you sign out or expire on their own after a period of inactivity.
Children
Rate My City is not directed at children under 16 and we don't knowingly collect data from them. If you believe a child has created an account, contact us at [email protected] and we'll remove it.
Changes to this policy
If this policy changes materially, we'll update the date above and, where required, let signed-in users know.