Debatable is a voice-first adversarial-argument trainer. To make that work, we collect the minimum we need: a sign-in identity (if you sign in), the debate rounds you generate, and the technical signals every web app collects. We don't sell your data and we don't run ad trackers. Voice audio is streamed peer-to-peer to OpenAI's Realtime API and never stored on our servers. If you sign in, we may send you a handful of account emails, every one of which has a one-click unsubscribe. We may license an anonymized corpus of debate rounds to AI research organizations, but only for accounts that opt in via profile settings and confirm they are 18 or older; it is off by default. See §6 for the full terms.
Debatable ("we", "us", "our") operates the web app at itsdebatable.com. The service is run by an independent developer based in the United States. The contact address for privacy questions, data-access requests, and deletion requests is aidandavidhollinger@gmail.com.
If you sign in, we receive your Google account email address and display name via Google OAuth (handled by Firebase Authentication). We do not see, store, or transmit your Google password. We use this to identify your account across sessions, attribute usage against your free or paid quota, and let you save rounds to your profile.
You can use the app anonymously without signing in. In that case we have no identifier for you beyond a randomly generated session ID held in your browser and the technical signals listed below. Anonymous voice-round transcripts and ratings may be stored under that random session ID so we can improve judging and model quality; they are not saved to a profile, linked to an email, or included in the licensed research corpus.
When you generate a case, run a rebuttal, request a judge ballot, or hold a typed or voice debate, we store the prompt, the AI's reply, the motion, the format, and the timestamp in our database (Google Firestore). This feeds two product features:
If you want a specific round removed from this loop, email us with the round identifier and we will delete it.
If you are signed in and have generated enough rounds, a nightly automated pass reads your recent rounds and writes a short (~150 word) summary of how you argue: signature moves, strengths, weaknesses, topic affinities. This fingerprint is stored against your account and injected into future AI prompts so the opponent and judge adapt to you. It is visible to you on your profile ("How I think as a debater"), is never shown to other users, and is deleted with your account. The first time one is generated we may send you a one-time email previewing it. If you want the fingerprint deleted or the pass turned off for your account, email us.
If you start a voice round, your microphone audio is captured by your browser and streamed directly to OpenAI's Realtime API over WebRTC using a short-lived ephemeral token that our server mints. Our servers are not in the audio path; we do not record, buffer, or store your raw audio. After the round ends, the text transcript produced by OpenAI's speech-to-text is sent back through our server so the same learning loop described above can apply. OpenAI's handling of audio is governed by OpenAI's privacy policy.
Some surfaces are social, and what you post there is visible to others by design: sparring waitlist posts (your display name plus an optional note, visible to signed-in users), leaderboard entries (display name and record), and the public disclosures board (visible to everyone). Before a disclosure post publishes, its text is run through an automated AI moderation check for harassment, doxxing, and spam; posts that fail are blocked. Direct messages you send to another user to organize a round are stored in our database and visible only to the two participants. All of this is deleted when you delete your account. Don't put anything in a public post you wouldn't want indexed.
If you sign in, we may send a small number of account emails through Resend: a first-round welcome, an occasional activity digest, a win-back note if you've been away, sparring-night and match notifications (someone accepted your invite, a DM arrived, a round you signed up for is starting), and the one-time style-fingerprint email described above. Every email has a one-click unsubscribe link scoped to that stream, and there is a global email opt-out that silences everything. We do not send third-party marketing and we do not share your email address with advertisers.
Some pages offer browser push notifications (for example, to tell you a sparring match was found while the tab is in the background). These only work if you explicitly grant the browser permission prompt. If you do, we store the push subscription token your browser issues; it is deleted when you delete your account, and you can revoke the permission at any time in your browser settings.
While the product is in public beta, every tier is free and we do not collect payment information; checkout is disabled server-side. When billing turns on for the announced tiers, payment will be processed by Stripe (and by Razorpay for users paying in Indian rupees). We never see your full card number, CVC, UPI credentials, or bank details. The processor returns to us a customer ID, the last four digits of your card, your billing country, and the subscription status. Their handling is governed by Stripe's privacy policy and Razorpay's privacy policy.
Every request to the site logs the standard web-server fields: IP address, user agent, the URL requested, the referrer, and a timestamp. We use these to rate-limit abuse, debug failures, and produce aggregate usage statistics. For anonymous rate limiting, your IP address is used as a short-lived counter key in Upstash Redis; those counters expire automatically within 24 hours and are never joined to your account or your rounds. Anonymous session IDs are hashed before rounds are stored under them. Raw access logs are retained for up to 30 days by our hosting provider (Netlify).
The app uses your browser's localStorage and sessionStorage to remember your preferences (theme, last-used format, draft text, anonymous-session quota counter) and uses cookies set by Firebase Authentication to keep you signed in. We do not set advertising cookies. We do not use Facebook Pixel or other third-party cross-site tracking pixels on the app. For first-party product analytics (which screens are visited, which features are used, where users get stuck) we use Firebase Analytics, Google Analytics 4, and GoatCounter (a privacy-focused, cookie-free pageview counter). Microsoft Clarity is wired into the codebase for optional session-replay and heatmaps, gated behind a project ID; as of the date above no project ID is set, so it does not load or collect anything. You can clear all of this at any time by clearing site data for itsdebatable.com in your browser, and you can opt out of GA on the broader web via Google's opt-out add-on.
We use the following sub-processors to deliver the service. Each is bound by its own privacy and security commitments at the links below. We do not authorize any of them to use your private content to train their public foundation models. Provider-side enterprise / API agreements (which we operate under) generally exclude API-submitted data from training; you should review each provider's policy for the current details.
| Provider | Purpose | Policy |
|---|---|---|
| Google Firebase | Authentication, Firestore database, hosting of your saved rounds and profile, Firebase Analytics for first-party product analytics. | Firebase privacy |
| Google Analytics 4 | First-party product analytics (pageviews, feature events). Property ID is account-scoped to Debatable; data is not shared for advertising. | Google privacy |
| Netlify | Static site hosting, edge functions, request logs. | Netlify privacy |
| Anthropic | Claude AI brain (case generation, rebuttals, judging). | Anthropic privacy |
| OpenAI | GPT AI brain; Realtime voice; text-to-speech fallback. | OpenAI privacy |
| Google AI | Gemini AI brain. | Gemini terms |
| xAI | Grok AI brain. | xAI privacy |
| DeepSeek | DeepSeek AI brain. | DeepSeek privacy |
| OpenRouter | Open Lab brain pool (Hermes, Mistral, Qwen, Llama). | OpenRouter privacy |
| ElevenLabs | Premium text-to-speech (Pro tier). | ElevenLabs privacy |
| Inworld | Optional premium text-to-speech (Pro tier). | Inworld privacy |
| Cartesia | Optional premium text-to-speech (Pro tier A/B). | Cartesia privacy |
| Resend | Sending account and notification emails. | Resend privacy |
| Upstash | Short-lived rate-limit counters (expire within 24 hours). | Upstash privacy |
| GoatCounter | Privacy-focused, cookie-free pageview analytics. | GoatCounter privacy |
| Stripe | Payment processing (when billing is active). | Stripe privacy |
| Razorpay | Payment processing for INR payments (when billing is active). | Razorpay privacy |
| Daily.co | Video rooms for live human-vs-human debates. | Daily privacy |
When you start a typed round, only the brain you select is called. When you start a voice round, your audio goes only to OpenAI Realtime; at higher difficulty settings, the motion (not your audio or identity) may also be sent to several other brains in parallel to prepare research notes before the round starts. When you run an AI-judged ballot, the panel may call several brains in parallel as documented on the round page.
If you use the BYOK tier, you provide your own Anthropic API key. We store the key encrypted at rest, scoped to your account, and use it only to call the Anthropic API on your behalf for rounds you initiate. We do not use BYOK keys for other users. You can rotate or delete the key at any time from your account settings. BYOK is Anthropic-only; we will refuse cross-provider keys with a labeled error.
Our Firebase project is hosted on Google Cloud's multi-region US infrastructure. Netlify serves traffic from edge locations worldwide but persistent storage is in the United States. By using the service from outside the United States, you consent to the transfer of your data to the United States for processing. We rely on the standard contractual mechanisms each sub-processor publishes for international transfers.
Debatable holds an internal corpus of completed rounds (motion, side, format, the prompt that produced the AI's reply, the reply itself, your turns, voice transcripts, ratings, and judge ballots). This corpus is what the nightly learning loop reads from when it distills per-format patterns back into the AI's system prompt; that part is internal and runs on every account.
Separately, we may license an anonymized subset of the corpus to AI research organizations studying argumentative dialogue, debate pedagogy, or voice-mode language models. Anonymized in this context means stripped of your name, email, account id, IP address, and any device fingerprints; what remains is the speech itself plus structural metadata (format, side, motion, rating).
This licensing is opt-in and off by default. You authorize it by turning on "Research & training corpus" in your profile settings, which also requires confirming that you are 18 or older; rounds from users who have not made that confirmation are never licensed, and the server re-checks the confirmation before marking any round as contributable. The opt-in applies to future rounds only; rounds you finished before turning it on are never retroactively included. You can turn the opt-in off at any time in profile settings, after which no further rounds will be included; rounds that were already in the corpus under your prior consent stay subject to that consent. If you want a specific anonymized round withdrawn, email aidandavidhollinger@gmail.com with the round date and motion and we will remove it from future shipments and best-effort recall it from prior shipments. Anonymous (signed-out) traffic is never included in the licensed corpus.
Voice audio is still never stored. Only the text transcript is eligible. If you use the BYOK tier, BYOK-routed rounds are excluded from the licensed corpus regardless of the toggle, since the upstream provider's API agreement governs that data path.
Regardless of where you live, you can:
Users in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, and California have additional statutory rights under the GDPR, UK GDPR, and CCPA/CPRA. The rights above already cover the substantive list; for formal regulator-facing requests, email aidandavidhollinger@gmail.com with the words "data subject request" in the subject and we will respond within the statutory window. We do not sell or share personal information for cross-context behavioral advertising under the CCPA/CPRA definitions.
The service is not directed at children under 13. Do not create an account or use the voice round if you are under 13. Users between 13 and 18 should use the service with the supervision and consent of a parent or guardian; school-team accounts are intended to be administered by an adult coach. If we learn that we hold data for a user under 13, we will delete it promptly. Reports of suspected underage use go to aidandavidhollinger@gmail.com.
We use HTTPS everywhere, Firebase App Check on the AI brain endpoints, server-side per-IP rate limits on anonymous traffic, encrypted-at-rest storage in Firestore, and short-lived ephemeral tokens for the WebRTC voice path so the OpenAI API key is never sent to your browser. No internet service can promise perfect security; if you believe an account has been compromised, email us immediately at aidandavidhollinger@gmail.com.
The AI's case generation, rebuttals, judging ballots, scores, and feedback are produced by large language models. They are designed for debate practice and are not human judgments. The style fingerprint described in §2 is also automated: it summarizes your past rounds to personalize future ones, nothing more. Public disclosure posts pass through an automated moderation check before publishing; if your post is blocked and you believe the call was wrong, email us and a human will review it. Scores, rankings, fingerprints, and moderation outcomes are not used to make decisions with legal or similarly significant effects on you. You should treat AI output as practice feedback, not as professional coaching, legal, academic, or admissions advice. See the Terms of Service for the full disclaimer.
If we make material changes, we will update the "Last updated" date at the top of this page with a summary of what changed, and for changes that expand what we collect or share, notify signed-in users by email before the change takes effect. The current version is always available at itsdebatable.com/privacy.
Questions, deletion or export requests, security reports, or regulator-facing inquiries: aidandavidhollinger@gmail.com. We aim to respond within 7 days for general questions and within the statutory windows (typically 30 days) for formal data-subject requests.