Privacy policy
SummaRank is a ranking and comparison service operated by SummaRank LLC. This policy describes information handled through our website and connected mobile apps. The same account, rankings, votes and community features are shared across supported devices.
Information we collect
We handle the account information you provide, such as your email address, username and profile settings, along with votes, feed posts, comments, replies, write-ins, pages you create and pages you choose to track. We also record searches, page visits, link clicks and technical errors to operate the service, understand usage and prevent abuse. Hosting and authentication providers receive technical information needed to handle requests, such as IP addresses and browser information. Avoid putting sensitive personal information in searches or public contributions.
Accounts and sign-in
Supabase provides our account authentication, including email/password sign-in and supported social sign-in options. If you choose Google or Apple sign-in where available, the provider supplies account identifiers, your email address and any basic profile information you authorize. Apple may provide a relay email address instead of your personal email. We use these details to create or sign you into your SummaRank account and manage account access. We do not request access to Gmail messages, Google Drive files or contacts. Your Google or Apple password is not provided to SummaRank.
Optional contact discovery
When contact discovery is available, adult members can separately choose to be found by their verified account email or an optional verified phone number. Both choices start off. These details are not added to public profiles, and adding a phone does not change sign-in. Setup can be skipped. Device contacts permission is separate from being discoverable. Google sign-in does not import contacts.
After you choose to find friends, the app can send a limited set of selected email addresses or internationally formatted phone numbers to our protected matching service. Contact names, notes, birthdays and photos stay on your device. We process the selected identifiers transiently and do not save your address book or include its contents in analytics. Results contain public SummaRank profiles, not the matching email or phone. Matching does not automatically follow, message or invite anyone.
We store server-keyed matching hashes linked to your account and your discovery choices. These hashes are pseudonymous, not anonymous. Email discovery checks current verified account details. Optional phone verification sends your number to Twilio Verify when activated, which processes verification texts and codes under its own retention policy. We retain a phone matching hash, its last four digits and its verification expiry, not the full phone number or code. Verification expires after 90 days unless repeated; expired phone records and ten-minute challenges are removed by scheduled maintenance. Removing your phone or deleting your account removes its matching records immediately. Turning off discovery prevents new matches but does not erase previously seen public profiles or follow relationships.
Photos you upload
Profile pictures and photos attached to feed posts are public. Only upload images you own or have permission to share, and avoid photos containing sensitive personal information. Uploaded images are processed and stored through Cloudflare and sent to OpenAI for automated safety checks before publication. You can replace or remove your profile picture in Settings, and remove a feed photo by deleting its post. Profile pictures do not replace the researched contender images used in rankings.
A feed post can include up to three photos. We remove embedded photo metadata during processing. An approved upload that is not attached to a published post expires after 24 hours and is queued for removal; a processing or storage interruption can delay removal. Permission to access your device's photos does not give us access to your whole photo library.
Following, bookmarks and private messages
Public profiles show member contributions and follower/following counts and lists. Bookmarks, tracking, declared interests, notification choices, blocks and private activity are account settings, not public profile history. Adult members can send private messages and share links to rankings or posts. People you do not follow may appear as message requests. Messaging is not available to teen accounts. You can change who may message you, decline requests, mute a conversation, block another member and report abuse.
Messages are stored on our servers and are not end-to-end encrypted. We limit access to participants and may review reported content for safety or to operate the service. Do not send sensitive financial, medical or identity information in messages. Read receipts are optional. Blocking hides the conversation from the blocked participants but is not an instruction to delete its stored messages.
Mobile notifications
Where push notifications are available and you grant device permission, we store a push delivery token encrypted on our servers, together with a private installation identifier, device platform and expiry. Expo and the relevant Apple or Google push service process notification delivery. Push payloads use generic alerts and an activity identifier, not message text or your email address. Lock-screen alerts and badge counts may still reveal that you have activity. Delivery is not guaranteed and can be delayed. Push registrations expire after 60 days unless renewed. You can turn off device permissions or remove the registration when signing out; your shared notification, mute and quiet-hours preferences also apply. Quiet hours do not erase activity inside your account.
Age and teen accounts
We ask for your date of birth when creating an account or when an existing account does not yet have an age category. With Google or Apple sign-in, this check may happen after provider authentication but before completing SummaRank sign-in. Once the age category is saved to your account, we do not ask again when you sign in. We use it to determine whether account access is available and whether teen safeguards apply. We retain an age category, not your full birth date. Account access is not available to children under 13. Accounts screened as 13–17 cannot enable sensitive-content access and do not receive interest-based Quick Vote or Feed ordering. We do not use known teens’ activity for targeted advertising.
Your feed
For accounts confirmed as adults, the default feed prioritizes rankings and related topics based on searches that resolve to a ranking, tracked rankings, declared interests, feed posts and votes. Following shows followed members' posts and reposts; Tracked highlights tracked rankings and their published-order changes. Freshness, community activity, close contests and topic variety also influence the default order. We keep up to 100 recently searched ranking IDs for up to 90 days, rather than storing your raw search wording for feed personalization. Sensitive-content topics are not used as interest signals, and your search and tracking history is not shown to other members. Signed-out visitors and accounts without a confirmed adult age category receive ordering based on freshness, community activity and variety instead. You can clear account-based search interests in community preferences without deleting votes or tracked pages.
How information is used and shared
We use account and activity information to provide rankings, apply voting rules, display member contributions, personalize adult accounts, deliver account emails and provide requested tracked-page notifications. Service providers process information needed for these purposes: Cloudflare hosts the website, database and images; Supabase provides authentication; Resend delivers emails; and OpenAI, Brave Search and Serper support research, content processing and safety checks. Search wording and relevant content may be sent to research or safety providers. Signing in with a social provider does not require sending your social profile to those research services.
Profile names and contributions may be visible to other visitors who can access the site. Your profile settings control whether recently created pages appear on your public profile. Tracking preferences and your account email are not intended as public profile information. Information may also be disclosed when required by law or necessary to protect the service and its users.
Cookies and external links
To prevent abuse and control research costs, we use a signed guest cookie and private, keyed hashes of account and network identifiers. These checks limit generation, uploads, comments and analytics requests, including failed attempts. We do not store raw IP addresses in these rate-limit records or use them for advertising. Short-term attempt records are normally removed within two days; active research reservations may remain until the job is resolved.
We use cookies or browser storage for sign-in, age safeguards, preferences, recently viewed rankings and other site functionality. Our first-party usage analytics use a random browser-session identifier and information about events such as searches, page views and commercial-link clicks. Analytics may include search wording; the separate feed-interest history stores ranking IDs rather than raw wording. Retailer, booking and other external links take you to services with their own privacy practices. Some links use affiliate tracking and may earn us a commission. See our affiliate and research disclosures.
We load CJ Affiliate's link-automation script to route eligible shopping and booking clicks through programs we have joined. Loading this third-party script makes a request to CJ's service, which can receive technical information such as your IP address and browser information. CJ page-based impression reporting is not enabled. We do not provide your email address, account ID, search history or individual interest profile as a CJ tracking identifier.
Amazon Associates, Expedia, Viator and eligible CJ Affiliate advertisers may track referrals through commercial links. Tracking links contain partner or campaign identifiers and may contain the destination or search terms needed to find the relevant product, employer or travel listing. Partners may receive your IP address, browser information, referral information and subsequent activity on their own services, and may place or recognize cookies under their own policies. We do not send your SummaRank email address, account ID or individual interest profile in Amazon affiliate-link parameters. A link to a company does not by itself mean that we have an approved affiliate relationship with that company.
Browser and email choices
For accounts confirmed as adults, we also keep the account identifier and most recent activity time to count monthly active registered users. This record does not contain browsing history, IP addresses or email addresses, is not shared with advertisers, and is removed when you delete your account. Records inactive for more than 90 days are removed when the activity cleanup runs. Anonymous browser sessions are counted separately and are not reported as unique people.
You can block or clear cookies and browser storage through your browser settings, although doing so may sign you out or affect site features. Clearing browser storage does not delete account information held on our servers. You can stop tracking a ranking from your account and use the unsubscribe link in tracked-ranking emails. These choices do not prevent necessary account or security messages. Manage retailer cookies and advertising preferences directly with the relevant service; changing those settings does not delete your SummaRank account.
Retention and your choices
Our activity-analytics cleanup removes events older than 90 days, and our error-log cleanup removes errors not seen in the last 30 days. These cleanups run when the relevant logging functions operate. Adult feed search interests are limited to 100 ranking IDs and 90 days. These limits do not apply to published rankings, research records, account records or public contributions, which are retained as needed to operate the service, maintain rankings and address security or legal requirements. Service-provider logs, caches and backups can have separate retention periods.
To permanently delete your account, open Profile → Settings → Delete account permanently. Read both warnings, verify ownership with the short-lived code sent to your account email, and type DELETE. Account deletion cannot be undone. Your sign-in account, username, bio, profile picture, tracked rankings, alerts, age category, content preferences and account-based personalization are removed. If a service-provider deletion temporarily fails, sign-in is disabled immediately and final deletion is retried automatically.
Deletion also removes follows, blocks, bookmarks, shared preferences, private activity, push registrations and private conversations involving the deleted account, including their messages for both participants. It does not remove copies that a recipient has saved outside SummaRank. Do not delete your account merely to sign out.
Account deletion does not delete your published posts, comments, replies, ranking votes, write-ins, shared ranking pages or photos attached to feed posts. Retained contributions are detached from your profile and displayed under “Deleted account.” Information inside your text or photos may still identify you. Remove your own feed posts and attached photos before deleting your account if you do not want them retained; after deletion you cannot edit them or regain ownership. Your old username is reserved against impersonation. We retain limited pseudonymous security records to block old account sessions and keyed hashes to reserve deleted usernames and enforce monthly vote limits; email-based vote-limit hashes are removed after the applicable month. No account email or profile details are retained in these security records.
For access, correction, removal of identifying content or other privacy-rights requests, email privacy@contact.summarank.com. Please do not send passwords, identity documents or sensitive financial information in your initial request. We may need to verify ownership. Removing Google or Apple access does not by itself delete your SummaRank account or contributions. Caches, service-provider logs and backups may retain information for their separate retention periods, and deletion cannot remove copies already saved or shared by others.
Security and processing locations
We use access controls and service-provider safeguards to protect information, but no online service can guarantee absolute security. Our providers may process information in the United States or other countries where they operate. Privacy rights and available remedies depend on applicable law; contact us with a request or concern about your information.
Contact and updates
For privacy questions or account requests, contact SummaRank LLC at privacy@contact.summarank.com. We may update this policy as the service changes and will update the date above.
Business mailing address: SummaRank LLC, 500 N Broadway, Suite 129, Jericho, NY 11753.