Privacy

This page covers every site on the Revealed network: revealed.social and the shows that run on it, such as Games Revealed, Off the Console and th3brink. It says what we collect, why, who else handles it and how long we keep it. It is written to be read, and it is not legal advice. Last updated October 1, 2026.

Who runs Revealed

Revealed is run by James Brinkerhoff, an individual based in the United States. He decides what happens to the data described here and is responsible for it. If that changes, for example when a company takes over running Revealed, this page will say so and name who.

The short version

You can read every public page without an account.
One Revealed account works on every site in the network. Accounts are created through revealed.social.
We don't sell or rent your data, and we don't use advertising trackers.
Our analytics run on our own server and set no cookies.
A few pages load images, video or audio from other companies, listed below.

Analytics

We run our own copy of Umami, an analytics tool, on our own server. It sets no cookies and does not follow you to other sites. For each page view it records the page, the site that sent you, your browser, operating system, device type, screen size and language, and a rough location (country and city) worked out from your IP address. It keeps an anonymous visitor ID, not your IP address. Anything in a page address that looks like a sign-in token or an email address is removed before it is sent. If your browser sends a Do Not Track signal, nothing is recorded. We look at the results as totals. There is no automatic deletion of analytics data yet.

Things other companies load on some pages

A few pages load something from another service. When they do, your browser connects to that service directly, so it sees your IP address and browser, as any website you visit would:

YouTube (Google): video thumbnails on video pages and show home pages, and a video player where a page embeds a trailer or a video. The player is YouTube's privacy-enhanced version (youtube-nocookie.com).
The podcast host: podcast cover art, for example on Off the Console and revealed.social, loads from the show's podcast host (Castopod, stored on Linode/Akamai cloud storage).
OP3 (op3.dev): when you play a podcast episode, the audio request passes through OP3, an open podcast statistics service, on its way to the podcast host.
Retailers: some pages carry affiliate links, for example to Amazon. If you click one, the retailer knows you came from us. Nothing is sent unless you click.

If you make an account

Accounts are created through revealed.social and work on every site in the network. We store:

your name, your @handle and your email address, which are all required to sign up, and a display name if you set one;
your password, stored hashed (scrambled one way, so it cannot be read back), if you use one;
whether you have confirmed your email address;
if you add a passkey: its public key and details of the device or password manager that holds it (its type and model).

Your @handle, or your display name if you set one, is what other people see. Your name is not shown publicly unless you choose it as your display name.

Signing in. Each time you sign in, and on each site you then use while signed in, we keep a session record with your IP address and your browser's user agent (a line of text that names your browser and operating system). That keeps you signed in, and lets a sign-out on one site end the others. A session expires about 7 days after you last used it, and signing out deletes it. Expired session records are not cleaned up on a schedule yet. One is removed if your browser sends it again; otherwise it stays until your account is deleted.

Sign-up checks. To slow down automated sign-ups, we count recent sign-ups from your IP address in the server's memory. That count is not saved anywhere.

Account emails. We email you to confirm your address, reset your password, sign you in with a link, and tell you when a passkey is added to or removed from your account. Account emails sent from revealed.social or Off the Console currently arrive branded as Games Revealed, because neither has an email address of its own yet.

Member emails. If you are a member of a show, the show can email you member updates at your account email. Each has an unsubscribe link. Links in them go through the same click-recording redirect as newsletter links (see below).

Follows, likes and saves. We store the shows and people you follow, what you like and save, and your notifications. If you report something, we store the report (what you reported, the reason and any note) with your account. If you play a show's quiz while signed in, we store your score for the day. Reports and quiz scores are deleted with your account.

If the site personalizes what you see

While you are signed in, we record which items you opened - once per item per day - and build up a picture of the topics you tend to read, along with any genres or content types you pick. That is used for one thing: ordering your feed so the stuff you care about is nearer the top. It is never sold, never shared, and never used to target advertising. It is on by default and you can turn it off in your account settings, which stops new signals being recorded. Deleting your account deletes the whole profile with it.

If you take part in a community section

Where a site here has one (Games Revealed does today), we store what you submit - a news tip, a review or a reply - along with the account that sent it, and the points you earn for taking part. Anything approved is shown publicly with your display name on it, never your name or your email address. Your name is copied onto what you submit, and the people who run the show see it beside your contribution in their Studio inbox.

Memberships and tips

Payments are handled by Stripe. You enter your card on Stripe's page, and we never see or store your card number.

Memberships: the creator is the seller. When you join, a customer record with your email address and your Revealed account ID is created on the creator's own Stripe account. Memberships started before this setup also have one on our Stripe account. We keep a record of each membership: the show, its status and its billing period.
On-stream credits: if you are an active member of a show that streams, your display name (or @handle) can scroll past in the show's on-stream credits. You can opt out on your account page on revealed.social.
Tips: you don't need an account. Stripe collects your email address and card on its own page. If you add a name or a message, we store them with the tip, and they are sent to Stripe with the payment, on the creator's Stripe account, where the creator can see them.

If you sign up for a newsletter

We store your email address, which show's newsletter it is, how you signed up and the choices you made. We also store the IP address and browser (user agent) of the request that signed you up. That is there so that if someone signs up other people's addresses, we can see where it came from and stop it. The list is never sold or rented to anyone, including a sponsor or an advertiser.

Engagement: links in a newsletter issue go through our own redirect, which records the first time each reader clicks a link in that issue. Each issue also carries a tiny image that counts how many times the issue was opened in total, not who opened it.
Lapsing: if you don't click anything in an issue, we may later mark you as lapsed and stop sending to you. Signing up again starts it again.
Unsubscribing: every newsletter has an unsubscribe link, and it stops the mail at once. We keep your record, marked unsubscribed, with its email address, IP address and browser, so that the unsubscribe keeps being honoured. If you want the record deleted entirely, ask us.
Your account: if it uses the same email, your newsletter subscription is linked to your account. Deleting the account does not delete it. Unsubscribe to stop emails.

We also keep a log of the emails we send you: your address, and the delivery reports our email provider sends back.

If you use a contact or pitch form

Where a site has a contact form, it stores the topic you picked, your name, your email address, your organization if you give one, what you wrote, and the page you sent it from. That's so a message can't get lost.

Where a site has a pitch form (for games, hardware or stories), it stores your name, email address, company and role if you give them, what you are pitching (its name, type, platforms, release and embargo dates, and whether keys or review units are available), any press-kit or asset links, your message, and the page you sent it from.

If you follow a show from the fediverse

Some shows (Games Revealed today) publish to the fediverse - Mastodon and similar services. If you follow one from another server, we store your account's public address and its inbox address so we can deliver posts to you, plus a log of what your server sends us: which account, what kind of activity, and what we did with it. For a follow we keep the whole message; for replies, likes and boosts we keep no content. Posts we deliver are kept by your server under its own rules.

th3brink's link page

When you click a link on th3brink's link page, we count it: which link, when, the domain of the site that sent you, and the kind of device. No IP address, cookie or account is recorded.

Cookies and your browser

We only set cookies a site needs to work, which is why there is no cookie banner:

Signing in: your session cookie, and short-lived cookies used while signing in across sites and with a passkey.
Preferences: on revealed.social and in the Studio, your theme and whether the side menu is pinned. On th3brink's home and schedule pages, a tz cookie holds your time zone (for example America/New_York) for a year, so times show in your zone.
For people who run a show: short-lived cookies used while connecting YouTube or the desktop app, and the admin sign-in.

Your browser also keeps a few things on your device that we don't receive: a store cart until you check out, and, for people who run a show, unsaved drafts.

Other companies that handle data for us

Vultr hosts the one server that runs every site here, with its databases, analytics and logs. Everything this page says we store is stored there, apart from what is listed under Cloudflare and Stripe, and Resend, which keeps copies of the emails it sends.
Cloudflare runs our domain names (DNS), stores uploaded media and our nightly database backups (its R2 storage), forwards mail sent to our addresses, and runs the AI gateway the Studio's AI features use.
Resend sends our emails: account emails and newsletters. It gets your email address and the message, and reports back on delivery.
Stripe processes memberships and tips. It gets your email address and payment details, and for a tip any name and message you add.
Anthropic (through Cloudflare's AI gateway) and Cloudflare Workers AI process show content for the Studio's AI features. No reader data is sent to them.

How long we keep things

Your account and what belongs to it (follows, likes, saves, sessions, reading profile, points): until you delete the account.
Newsletter records: until you ask us to delete them. Unsubscribing marks the record; it does not delete it.
Payment records: kept for accounting, as described under "What stays, and why".
Contact and pitch messages, the email log, tips, analytics, link-page clicks and fediverse records: we don't delete these on a schedule yet. Ask us and we'll delete what the law lets us.
Error logs: warnings and errors go to our own logging system with email addresses and known kinds of keys and tokens removed. Each log entry is deleted after 30 days. A short summary of each distinct error, scrubbed the same way, is kept with no end date, together with the account IDs of the people it affected, so we can track it until it is fixed. The server's own logs roll over as they fill up; a refused newsletter sign-up is logged there with its IP address and browser.
Backups: nightly backups are kept on our server for 7 days and in off-site storage (Cloudflare R2) for up to 30 days. Occasionally a copy is taken to the operator's own computer for maintenance. So something deleted can remain in a backup after it is gone from the site.

Deleting your account

You can do it yourself, from the account page on any show's site. What goes: your account and sign-in methods (password, passkeys, sessions - you are signed out everywhere), your follows, likes, saved articles, points, notifications, reports, quiz scores and reading profile. In a community section, replies still waiting for review are deleted. Everything else you contributed - news tips and reviews whether published, waiting or turned down, and replies that were approved or turned down - is kept with your name and the link to your account removed. If you wrote under an author byline, the byline keeps its name on what it published; only its link to your account is removed. Deleting your Revealed account cancels every membership immediately: access ends at once, and the rest of the current period is not refunded.

What stays, and why

Some records are kept for accounting and legal reasons, and they still hold the details you gave when you paid: the record of each membership payment (kept for the creator's accounts, no longer linked to your account); the customer record on the creator's own Stripe account (and on ours, for a membership started before this setup), which keeps the email you paid with; and any store order, which keeps its email and shipping address. Our log of the emails we sent you keeps your address, and an error summary may keep your account ID (see "How long we keep things"). A newsletter subscription linked to your account is unlinked, not deleted, and keeps sending until you unsubscribe; the record stays, as described above, until you ask us to delete it. If you were a member of a site before it moved here, the member record we imported may also remain. Ask us if you want any of these removed where the law lets us. If you run or co-host a show here, ask us to close it or hand it over first.

If you run or co-host a show

The Studio stores what you need to run a show: the connection to your YouTube channel (a stored, encrypted sign-in token used to upload videos), any other social accounts you connect, the desktop apps you approve (a device label), and the media you upload, which is stored on Cloudflare R2. The Studio's AI features send show content - drafts, notes, transcripts, images you upload, product and source text - through Cloudflare's AI gateway to Anthropic or to Cloudflare Workers AI. They never send subscriber, member, message or account data.

Your choices and requests

Some things you can do yourself at any time: turn personalization off, opt out of on-stream credits, unsubscribe from a newsletter, and delete your account.

For anything else - to find out what we hold about you, get a copy of it, correct it, or have something deleted (a newsletter record, a message you sent us, an old session) - email us at the address below, from the email address the request is about, and say what you want. There is no self-serve export yet: James handles each request by hand. We may ask you to confirm the request comes from you. You don't need to give a reason.

Children

Revealed is not meant for children under 13. You need to be at least 13 to make an account.

Changes

When this page changes, the date at the top changes with it.

Contact

Email support@revealed.social about anything on this page.