Privacy Policy
Last updated: August 28, 2026. This policy explains what Vetall does with personal data, both for people who hold a Vetall account and for Reddit account holders who are assessed.
1. Who we are
Vetall ("we", "us") operates the Vetall browser extension and the website at vetall.app. For the purposes of the UK GDPR and the EU GDPR we are the controller of the personal data described below. You can reach us at [email protected] for any privacy question, and at [email protected] to exercise the rights in section 9.
2. The two kinds of people in this policy
Vetall is unusual in that it processes personal data about two distinct groups, and your rights depend on which one you are:
- Account holders. People who create a Vetall account and install the extension. You gave us your data directly.
- Assessed Reddit accounts. People whose public Reddit activity is summarised into a score because a Vetall user asked about them. You did not give us anything and did not ask to be assessed. Section 5 is written for you, and you have the full set of rights in section 9, including erasure.
3. What we collect from account holders
| Data | Why | Legal basis |
|---|---|---|
| Name and email address | To create and identify your account, sign you in, and contact you about your subscription | Performance of a contract |
| Password (stored only as a salted hash, never in readable form) | To authenticate you | Performance of a contract |
| Time zone, reported once by your browser | So timestamps display in your own clock rather than server time | Legitimate interests (a usable product) |
| Plan, check counters, billing period history, refund history | To enforce plan limits and calculate fair refunds | Performance of a contract |
| Payment card type and last four digits, Stripe customer and subscription identifiers | To take payment and show you your own billing history. We never receive or store your full card number; Stripe handles it directly | Performance of a contract |
| Session and security records: IP address, browser user agent, sign-in tokens | To keep you signed in and to detect abuse | Legitimate interests (security) |
| Your watchlists and your saved deep-dive reports | To provide the features you paid for | Performance of a contract |
| Support correspondence you send us | To answer you | Legitimate interests |
We do not use cookies for advertising or analytics. The cookies we set are strictly necessary ones: a session cookie and a CSRF security token.
4. What the extension does on your device
The extension holds your sign-in token, your settings, and a short local list of your recent checks in your browser's own storage. It requests three host permissions and nothing more:
- reddit.com, to place badges next to usernames and to read the public profile you ask about, using your ordinary logged-out-equivalent view of public pages;
- vetall.app, to reach our API;
- arctic-shift.photon-reddit.com, a public Reddit archive queried from your browser to fill gaps in a public history.
The extension does not read your Reddit private messages, does not act on your behalf on Reddit, does not read pages on any other website, and does not require your Reddit password. We never see your Reddit login.
5. Assessed Reddit accounts: what we process about people who never signed up
When a Vetall user asks about a Reddit account, your browser reads that account's public Reddit activity and reduces it to numbers before anything is sent to us. We want to be exact about what that means.
5.1 What is sent to our servers
- The public Reddit username.
- Numeric and boolean measurements only: account age in days, post and comment karma, whether the account is a moderator, verified or suspended, how many items were sampled, the ratio of posts to comments, the proportion of removed content, average comment score, proportions of controversial and NSFW content.
- A sample of up to 50 public comment extracts, each truncated to roughly 300 characters, with the subreddit name, score and age. This sample is used to produce the assessment and is not stored; it is discarded once the assessment is generated.
5.2 What we store about an assessed account
- The username, the score, the tier, up to three short observed patterns, a one-line recommendation, a confidence level, and the numeric measurements above.
- When it was assessed, when it should be re-checked, and how often it has been looked at.
- Where a paying user ran a deep dive, the resulting written report, which describes patterns in that account's public activity in prose. That report is visible only to the user who paid for it.
We do not store the verbatim comment text used to produce an assessment. We do not attempt to identify the person behind a Reddit account, and we do not combine Reddit activity with data from anywhere else.
5.3 Our legal basis, and the balancing test behind it
We rely on legitimate interests (Article 6(1)(f) UK/EU GDPR). The interest is preventing fraud against people transacting with strangers online, which is a purpose the GDPR itself recognises. We have carried out a balancing assessment, and the safeguards that follow from it are built into the product rather than promised in this document:
- only public activity is ever read, on pages anyone can open;
- verbatim text is discarded rather than retained;
- assessments are shown privately to the person who asked. There is no public directory, no leaderboard, and no ranking, so an assessment cannot become a public accusation;
- assessments describe patterns of behaviour, never the identity, character or protected characteristics of a person;
- an account with too little history returns "not enough to judge" instead of a confident guess;
- anyone can contest an assessment, request its deletion, or object to being assessed at all, without needing a Vetall account, and requests are decided within one month (section 9).
If you are an assessed account holder and you believe this balance is wrong in your case, you can object under section 9 and we will stop, unless we can show compelling legitimate grounds that override your interests.
5.4 Special category data
We do not seek out, infer or record special category data (such as health, sexuality, religion, politics, race or trade union membership), and our scoring criteria are limited to behavioural signals such as account age, posting rhythm, repeated text, removed-content ratio and subreddit spread. If a public comment sample incidentally contains such information, it is used only transiently to generate the assessment and is not retained.
6. Automated processing
Assessments are generated automatically by an AI model with no human reviewing each one. We disclose this on every verdict.
A Vetall score is intended as one input into a human decision about whether to engage with a stranger, and by itself it does not produce a legal or similarly significant effect on anyone. It must not be used as the sole basis for any decision with a serious effect on a person, and section 4 of our Terms of Service prohibits exactly that. If you are an assessed account holder, you may ask us for human review of any assessment about you under section 9; we will look at it ourselves and correct or erase it where appropriate.
7. Who else processes this data
We do not sell personal data, and we never have. We share it only with the processors and services needed to run the product:
| Recipient | Purpose | What reaches them |
|---|---|---|
| Anthropic | Generating assessments and reports | The distilled measurements and the transient comment sample, plus the username |
| OpenAI | Standby only, used if the primary AI provider is unavailable | The same as above, only during such an outage |
| Stripe | Payments, subscriptions and invoices | Account holder billing details. Card numbers go to Stripe directly and never reach us |
| Our hosting and infrastructure providers | Running the servers, database and network | All stored data, at rest on their infrastructure |
| Verifying that someone controls the account they are asking us to act on | Only the fact that you signed in and approved it; we receive your username and no other profile data, and we discard the token immediately | |
| Arctic Shift (public Reddit archive) | Filling gaps in public Reddit history | The username being looked up, requested from the user's own browser |
These providers act as our processors under contract, or as independent controllers where they determine their own purposes (Stripe, for payment compliance). Some of them process data outside the UK and EEA, in which case transfers are covered by the UK International Data Transfer Addendum and the EU Standard Contractual Clauses, or by an adequacy decision.
We will also disclose data where we are legally required to, and to establish or defend legal claims.
8. How long we keep things
| Data | Kept for |
|---|---|
| Assessment of a Reddit account | It goes stale on a schedule based on how active the account is, from about a week for a very active account to about two months for a dormant one, and is refreshed or discarded from there. Assessments nobody has looked at recently are not refreshed at all. |
| Deep-dive reports | The ten most recent versions per account, per user, until that user deletes their account |
| Account holder records | For as long as you have an account, then deleted or anonymised, except records we must keep for tax and accounting law (typically up to six or seven years for invoices) |
| Sign-in tokens | Expire automatically and are pruned daily |
| Appeals | Ninety days after they are resolved; an unresolved appeal is kept up to a year, then removed regardless |
| Completed erasure requests | Ninety days |
| Suppression records | A username plus an end date, which is the minimum needed to honour your request. A deletion cooldown lasts 30 days; an upheld objection lasts 12 months and can be renewed by you at any time before it lapses |
9. Your rights
Whether or not you hold a Vetall account, and whether or not you are in the UK or EU, you may ask us to:
- Access the personal data we hold about you, and receive a copy;
- Correct anything inaccurate;
- Erase it. For an assessed Reddit account this removes the assessment, every stored report about it, any watchlist entry naming it, and unlinks it from our internal cost records. Requests are decided by a person, normally within days and always within one month. Afterwards the account is not assessed for at least 30 days. Once that lapses it could be assessed again if someone asks, because we then hold nothing and the assessment would be made afresh from public activity as it stands at that time. You can delete again whenever you like, as often as you like, free;
- Object to being assessed at all. If upheld we delete what we hold and stop assessing the account for 12 months, renewable by you. A person weighs each objection, and an account carrying a live assessment that others rely on to avoid fraud weighs against it. If we refuse, we tell you the grounds and how to complain;
- Restrict or object to our processing, including objecting to the legitimate interests basis in section 5.3;
- Port the data you gave us, in a machine-readable form;
- Ask for human review of an automated assessment;
- Withdraw consent where we relied on it, without affecting what came before.
Account holders can use the account pages, and Analyst subscribers can export their own reports at any time.
If you hold an assessed Reddit account and have no Vetall account, use the data options page. You first show us the account is yours, in whichever of these two ways suits you:
- Send a one-time code from the account in a Reddit chat message. You tell us the username and what you want, we give you a short code, and you send it to our Reddit account in a private chat message. Nothing is posted publicly and nothing on your profile changes. Only the holder of an account can send from it, which is what makes it proof. A person confirms your code, normally within a day, and the page you started from updates by itself at each step.
- Sign in with Reddit. You authenticate on reddit.com, approve the "identity" permission, and Reddit tells us your username and nothing else. We never see your Reddit password, never read your posts or messages, and cannot act as you. This route settles immediately.
This step protects you, because without it anyone could delete or suppress the record of any account, including yours. Naming an account on the form does nothing by itself: nothing happens until your code arrives from that account or Reddit confirms you. Once the account is shown to be yours, a person decides the request, normally within days and always within one month, and the answer reaches you as a Reddit chat message and on the page you started from. Deletion requests are granted in all but exceptional cases; where we refuse anything, we give the grounds and the routes open to you. If you can do neither, for example because the account is suspended, email [email protected] and we will verify you another way. To contest an assessment rather than remove it, use the dispute form; verified holders also get an immediate re-assessment.
Where you use the chat route we keep the username, your chosen option, the reference code, anything you wrote, and the date, for as long as the request is open and then as part of our record that we handled it. Your chat message stays where Reddit keeps it; we run nothing that reads Reddit on your behalf, and we do not store your other Reddit activity.
We respond within one month, which we may extend by two further months for complex requests, telling you why. There is no charge unless a request is manifestly unfounded or excessive.
If you are unhappy with how we have handled your data you can complain to the UK Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk, or to your local supervisory authority in the EEA. We would prefer you raised it with us first.
10. Security
Data is encrypted in transit. Passwords are stored only as salted hashes. Access to production systems is limited to those who need it. We never receive full card numbers. No system is perfectly secure, and we do not claim otherwise; where a breach is likely to result in a risk to people's rights, we will notify the relevant supervisory authority within 72 hours and affected individuals where the risk is high.
11. Children
Vetall is not directed at children and is not for anyone under 16. We do not knowingly create accounts for children. If you believe a child has created an account, contact us and we will remove it.
12. If you are in California
We do not sell or share personal information as those terms are defined by the CCPA/CPRA, and we have not done so in the preceding twelve months. California residents have rights to know, delete, correct and to limit use of sensitive personal information; the mechanisms in section 9 serve those rights, and we will not discriminate against you for exercising them.
13. Changes
If we change this policy in a way that materially affects you, we will tell account holders by email or in-product notice before it takes effect. The date at the top always reflects the current version.
Contact
Privacy questions and rights requests: [email protected]. Everything else: [email protected].