Privacy Policy

Effective 24 August 2026

mainscreen.tv is operated by an individual based in Austin, Texas, USA. This page describes what the site collects, what it doesn't, and what happens to a video URL and a payment once you submit one.

What this site collects directly

• A single cookie, to count visits: a 400-day cookie holding only a timestamp, no identifier. It cannot tell two browsers apart from each other, and nothing reads it but this Worker's own visit counter (it is not accessible to page scripts).
• The video URL you submit, and its Total Bids - stored for as long as the Season it belongs to is kept in the Hall of Fame archive, which today is indefinitely.
• If you use the admin kill switch (operator only), the calling address and the reason given are logged. This is the one place this site stores an address at all, and it is for authenticated operator actions, never for a visitor.

There are no accounts. Submitting a video is: paste a URL, optionally place a Bid, pay through Stripe. This site never asks for your name or email - it doesn't have a field for either.

What this site does not collect

• No account, login, or persistent visitor identity of any kind.
• No analytics or tracking scripts - nothing like Google Analytics, Meta Pixel, or similar.
• No name, email, address, or phone number, from anyone just browsing or submitting a video.

Stripe (payments)

A Bid is paid through a Stripe-hosted Checkout page - payment details (card number, billing address, etc.) go straight to Stripe and never reach this site's own servers. What this site sends Stripe is the video's metadata (its URL, platform, title, and the credited handle read off the video's own page) so the receipt and confirmation make sense - never anything about you personally beyond what Stripe itself collects to process the payment. Stripe's own privacy policy governs what it does with that.

YouTube

Looking up a pasted video URL sends the video's ID to YouTube's Data API, so this site can show you the video's title, thumbnail, duration, and the channel it's credited to before you pay. That request identifies this site to YouTube, not you.

Playback happens in a YouTube video player embedded directly in the page. That embed is loaded by your own browser connecting straight to YouTube, under YouTube's own privacy policy - YouTube can set its own cookies and see your IP address the same way it would on youtube.com itself. This site has no visibility into and does not control that connection.

Cloudflare (hosting)

This site runs on Cloudflare Workers. Cloudflare sees every request the way any host does, and this site uses your connecting IP address for two narrow, temporary purposes: rate-limiting abuse of the video lookup and payment endpoints, and capping how many live-viewer connections one address can hold at once. Neither is stored beyond that immediate check - the one exception is the operator-only kill-switch log described above.

TikTok and Instagram

Only YouTube video URLs are accepted at the moment (ADR-0006). TikTok and Instagram support exists in the code but is not reachable from submission, so no data is sent to either platform today. If and when that changes, this policy will be updated to describe it before it goes live, not after.

How long things are kept

A Season's Submissions move to the Hall of Fame archive when the Season ends rather than being deleted, so a video's rank and Total Bids stay viewable as history. The visit-count cookie expires after 400 days. There is no bulk data-export or account-deletion flow, because there is no account to export or delete - there is nothing tied to you specifically to remove. If you'd like something looked at, email the address below.

Children

This site is not directed at children and is not intended for anyone under 18 - see the age requirement in the Terms of Service.

Changes to this policy

If what this site collects or who it's shared with changes, this page will be updated and the effective date above will change with it. Significant changes will also be reflected in the site's changelog where one exists.

Contact

Questions about this policy can be sent to support@mainscreen.tv.