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Privacy policy · Last updated September 10, 2026

What we keep, and what we never keep.

This is the whole policy: the short version first, then every chapter. No legalese where plain words do the job, and nothing collected without a reason you can read here.

In short

  • No ads, no data brokers.

    We never sell or rent personal data, and no advertising network runs on the site.

  • Voting stays anonymous.

    When you play a link you were sent, your votes, swipes and guesses attach to a random browser id, never to a name or an email. IP addresses are hashed with a salt that changes daily, and the raw address is never stored.

  • Card details never reach us.

    Paddle.com, our merchant of record, takes payment. We receive a receipt id, your email and what you bought — nothing from the card.

  • Analytics without profiles.

    We count pages, clicks and load times to see what works and what breaks. No session recordings, no cross-site tracking, no advertising identifiers.

  • Only the email you asked for.

    Sign-in links, the results you subscribed to, and one launch note if you joined the waitlist. No newsletter.

  • You are in control.

    Ask for a copy, or the deletion, of everything we hold with one email. Deleting an account removes its polls, decks, comparisons and lists.

The short version is a summary. The chapters below are the document.

I

Who is responsible

Name Battle (babynamebattles.com) decides how the personal data described here is used — in the language of privacy law, the “controller”. Name Battle is the trading name of a sole proprietorship, based in Kyiv, Ukraine. For anything in this policy, write to support@babynamebattles.com.

This policy covers the website and the emails it sends. It does not cover Paddle’s checkout, which has its own privacy notice, or the sign-in provider you choose.

II

What we collect, and why

We collect little, and only for a reason you can see. Nothing here is collected “in case it is useful later”.

  • Account details

    Your email address, plus the name and picture your sign-in provider shares.

    WhenOnly if you create an account, by magic link or with Google
    WhyTo sign you in and keep your shortlist and games across devices
    How longUntil you delete the account

  • What you make

    Vote pools, swipe decks, comparisons, tournaments, saved names and notes.

    WhenWhen you create it
    WhyTo run the game and show it to the people you send the link to
    How longUntil you delete it, or the account

  • Your family details

    The month your baby is due, whether you know the sex, your surname, a middle name you are trying, your US state, and any older siblings' first names you enter. Before you have an account it stays in one cookie on this device and reaches us only when you save it. A due month is health information, and it is kept because you chose to type it, for as long as it is useful to you.

    WhenOnly if you fill them in on Start or in your dashboard
    WhyTo time what we show you and check a name against the rest of the family
    How longUntil you clear the form, or delete the account

  • Votes, swipes and guesses

    A random cookie id and a salted, daily-rotated hash of the IP address.

    WhenWhen you play a link someone shared with you
    WhySo one person counts once, and to stop automated voting
    How longThe hash cannot be reversed; the raw address is never stored

  • Emails you give us

    The launch waitlist, “tell me when voting ends”, the results digest. Sending the email does not by itself erase the address: a “tell me when voting ends” subscription lives as long as the poll or reveal game it belongs to and goes when that game or its owner's account does, and a waitlist address stays on the list after the launch note precisely so we cannot write to you twice. Ask us and we remove it sooner.

    WhenOnly when you ask
    WhyTo send exactly what you asked for
    How longUntil the game it belongs to goes, or you ask us to remove it

  • Purchase record

    Receipt id, email, product and date, passed to us by Paddle.

    WhenWhen you buy Unlimited
    WhyTo switch Unlimited on and answer questions about the order
    How longThe receipt outlives the account, with you unlinked from it

  • Usage analytics

    Pages viewed, clicks, load times, browser and device type, country, a random device id. Some of it is kept here rather than at our analytics provider — which name was saved, which game was finished — and while you are signed in those rows carry your account id, so they are not anonymous to us. They are deleted after 90 days, and immediately if you delete the account — with one exception, the rows that record a suggestion you turned down, which are kept for as long as the account so that the suggestion stays turned down. The share links you open are never recorded: the id is stripped out of the address before anything is written down.

    WhenOn every visit, unless you say no
    WhyTo see what works and what breaks
    How longRaw events 90 days, then counts only

  • Support conversations

    WhenWhen you write to us
    WhyTo answer you
    How longAs long as the conversation needs

The legal bases, for readers in the EU and UK: running the games and the account you asked for (contract); keeping votes honest, keeping the site working and measuring what breaks (legitimate interest); the emails you opt into (consent, withdrawable at any time); and records of purchases (legal obligation).

III

Cookies and local storage

The site sets a handful of cookies, none of them for advertising and none of them shared with other websites. Vercel Analytics and Speed Insights, which count page views and load times, set no cookie at all.

  • nb_anon

    PurposeA random id, so your free-plan games and limits stay attached to this browser
    Lifetime1 year

  • nb_voter

    PurposeA random id, so each person votes once per poll
    Lifetime1 year

  • authjs.*

    PurposeSigns you in and protects the sign-in form. Set only when you sign in
    LifetimeUntil you sign out, or 30 days

  • nb_profile_draft

    PurposeThe family details you typed on Start before you had an account, so the form is still filled in when you come back
    Lifetime180 days

  • nb_cr

    PurposeWhether your country means we have to ask before setting the analytics cookie. Holds a 1 or a 0 — never your location
    Lifetime1 year

  • ph_*_posthog

    PurposeA random analytics id, so a return visit counts as one visitor rather than a new one. The only optional cookie here, and the only one that needs your permission
    Lifetime1 year

Only one of them is optional, and only one needs asking about: the analytics cookie. Read this from the EEA, the UK or Switzerland and you are asked before it is set, and nothing analytics-related loads until you answer. Read it from anywhere else and it is set by default — but “Cookie settings” at the bottom of every page turns it off wherever you are, and turning it off stops the analytics code loading at all rather than merely asking it to be quiet. The rest of the cookies above are what makes the site work: without them it cannot tell one voter from another or keep you signed in, so there is nothing honest to offer a switch for.

A few things stay in your browser’s local storage rather than on our servers, so they never leave your device unless you sign in and choose to import them:

  • nb:guest-favorites

    What it holdsNames you saved before signing in

  • nb:recent-names

    What it holdsYour recent searches

  • nb:letter-explorer

    What it holdsYour filters on the A–Z pages

  • nb:surname

    What it holdsThe last name you typed into a head-to-head or a comparison, so the two agree with each other. It stays on this device unless you save it to your account

  • nb:middle

    What it holdsThe middle name you were trying out alongside it, on the same terms

  • nb_consent

    What it holdsYour answer to the cookie question

Blocking or clearing cookies will not stop you browsing; it will sign you out and forget which games belonged to this browser.

IV

Payments

Purchases are made through Paddle.com, our merchant of record and authorised reseller. Paddle takes the payment, issues the receipt, charges any tax due and holds the card details; they never pass through our servers. Paddle tells us that a purchase happened, the email it was made with, the product and a receipt id, and that is what switches Unlimited on. Paddle’s privacy notice governs what Paddle holds.

V

Who else touches the data, and where it lives

We do not run our own servers. These companies process data on our behalf, under contract, for the one job named here:

  • Vercel — hosts the site and its content delivery network; Vercel Analytics counts page views without cookies.
  • Neon — the database.
  • Resend — sends the emails: sign-in links, the welcome note, the confirmation of a purchase and the notice when one is refunded, poll results and the nudges that go with a vote you started, the reveal game’s invitations and its summary, the weekly note, the once-a-year note when new national statistics land, and the launch email.
  • PostHog — product analytics (pages, clicks, load times), in its US cloud. Requests travel through our own domain; session recording, heatmaps and surveys are switched off in the code that ships, not merely left unused. It is the one thing on this page you can refuse — see the cookie question below.
  • Paddle — payments, as above.
  • Google — only if you choose to sign in with Google, and only to confirm who you are.

Our servers are in the United States. If you read this from elsewhere, your data travels there; where the law requires it, our providers rely on standard contractual clauses or an equivalent safeguard. No artificial-intelligence service receives anything you type: the name stories on the site were written from public records, not from user data.

VI

What we never do

  • Sell, rent or trade personal data — to advertisers, data brokers or anyone else.
  • Run advertising, retargeting or cross-site tracking of any kind.
  • Record your session or replay how you used a page.
  • Show your shortlist, notes or games to anyone you did not send a link to.
  • Send marketing email you did not ask for. There is no newsletter.
  • Ask a child for anything. Accounts are for adults, and if we learn a child has given us personal data we delete it. Data about a child is a different question, and the honest answer is that some of it is here: a due month, sometimes the sex, and any older siblings’ first names a parent types in to see how a new name sits beside them. A parent enters that about their own family, it is never asked for, and it goes when the profile or the account does.
VII

Sharing and legal requests

Beyond the providers above, personal data leaves us in three cases only: when you share it yourself, by sending someone a link; when the law compels us, and then only what is compelled, after we have checked that the request is genuine; and if Name Battle ever changes hands, in which case this policy travels with the data and you will be told before anything moves.

Anything you put in a shared game — the names, a note, a poll question — is visible to everyone holding that link. Links are unguessable, but they are links: send them to the people you mean.

VIII

Keeping and deleting

We keep data for as long as the table in chapter II says, and no longer. You can delete your account yourself, from your account page, and it happens while you wait rather than within thirty days: the sign-in, the shortlist, the family details and every game you made go together, and the links you shared stop working for the people holding them. Votes other people cast in your polls are anonymous and stay counted in the aggregate. If you would rather we did it, write to support@babynamebattles.com from the address on the account. One thing survives on purpose: if you bought Unlimited, the receipt stays in our accounts — the amount, the date and the payment reference — with your account no longer attached to it, because tax law asks us to keep it and privacy law allows exactly that.

Usage events are the one thing with a clock of their own: the raw rows — which name was saved, which game was finished, and while you are signed in, by whom — are deleted after 90 days by a job that runs every night. What survives is the count, with nobody attached to it. One kind of row is deliberately left out of that sweep: the record that you dismissed a suggested name, which is kept for the life of the account, because forgetting it after ninety days would mean suggesting the same name to you again.

The results digest carries an unsubscribe link, plus a one-click List-Unsubscribe header for mail apps that support it. The other emails are one-offs you asked for — a sign-in link, the result of a poll you subscribed to, the single launch note — and stop on their own; to stop any of them early, write to us.

IX

Your rights

Wherever you live, you can ask us for a copy of your data, ask us to correct or delete it, ask for it in a portable form, object to a use of it, or withdraw a consent you gave. Write to support@babynamebattles.com from the address on your account so we can tell it is you; we answer within 30 days and never charge for it.

If you are in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom or Switzerland, these are your rights under the GDPR and its UK equivalent, and you may also complain to your national data-protection authority. If you are in California, the CCPA applies: we do not sell or share personal information as the law defines those terms, we collect only the categories listed in chapter II, and we will not treat you differently for exercising a right.

X

Security

Every page and every request is served over HTTPS. Cookies are signed so they cannot be forged, IP addresses are hashed before they are stored, sign-in uses one-time links or Google rather than passwords we would have to protect, and card details never reach our systems. Access to the database is limited to the people who operate the site. No system is perfect: if a security problem ever affects your data, we will tell you what happened and what we did about it.

XI

Changes and contact

When this policy changes, the date at the top changes with it. A change that matters to your account — a new kind of data, a new provider with access to it — is announced on the site before it takes effect, and by email if you have an account.

Questions, requests, corrections: support@babynamebattles.com. See also the terms of service and the refund policy.

That is the whole policy

Nothing above stands between you and a name. The games are free to start, and the people you invite never make an account.

Swipe with your partnerAbout Name Battle

Free to start · no account needed · everyone you invite votes in one tap