Privacy Policy

When you register for a Crew account and use the site, we collect:

• Account credentials— email address and a hashed, salted password (we never store your password in plaintext).
• Profile information— username, display-name format preference, and optional first name, last name, ZIP code, bio, and avatar image.
• Communications— the content of messages, forum posts, comments, presave signups, and newsletter subscriptions you choose to submit.
• Payment information— collected and processed by Stripe on Stripe-hosted pages. We store only your Stripe customer ID, current Crew rank, subscription status, and invoice metadata returned by Stripe webhooks.

• Authentication cookies set by our CMS (Payload) to keep you logged in, and a tsm_user_id identity cookie (up to 90 days) that remembers which presave profile belongs to you when you return after a Spotify handoff.
• Analytics and performance data collected via Vercel Analytics and Vercel Speed Insights — aggregated page views, Web Vitals, referrers, approximate geography, and anonymized visitor hashes. These services do not use third-party cookies and do not build cross-site advertising profiles.
• Server logs— IP address, user-agent, timestamps, and request paths kept for a short period for security and debugging purposes.

If you choose to connect an external service, we receive only the data that service returns to us:

• Google / YouTube— OAuth access token, refresh token, token-expiry timestamp, and (at your action) the channel snippet we use to render your avatar. See Section 4 for the full disclosure.
• Spotify— an anonymized Spotify user ID, a refresh token limited to the scopes you grant during presave, and your email address if you complete a presave flow.
• Stripe— customer ID, subscription status, price ID, invoice history, and the last four digits / brand of your payment method (for display purposes only). Stripe’s privacy practices are described in the Stripe Privacy Policy.

When you click Connect YouTube we ask for one OAuth scope:

• https://www.googleapis.com/auth/youtube.force-ssl — required to perform the actions you initiate from within our site: liking videos, posting comments and replies on our channel, and subscribing to (or unsubscribing from) our channel.

We do not request youtube.readonly, youtubepartner, the Gmail, Drive, Calendar, Contacts, or any other Google scope. We do not read your private videos, playlists, subscriber lists, analytics, or any data outside the actions you trigger.

Upon your authorization we receive from Google:

• A short-lived access token (~1 hour) and a refresh token used to obtain new access tokens.
• A token-expiry timestamp.
• When you interact with our comments UI: your public YouTube channel snippet (display name, profile image, channel URL) so your comment can render correctly.

These tokens are stored encrypted at rest in our Vercel Postgres database and are only accessible to (a) our server-side authentication code, and (b) the authenticated user who owns them. They are never exposed to the browser, never sent to third parties, and never used for any purpose other than executing the actions you explicitly initiate on our site.

We do not share Google user data with any third party. Google user data is also not used to train artificial intelligence or machine learning models.

Independently of your Google account, we use a server-side YouTube Data API v3 key to fetch our own channel’s public uploads playlist and comment threads so visitors can watch and read along. This request returns only public data that anyone on youtube.com can already see and is cached for up to one hour.

Your Google tokens are retained only for as long as your Crew account is active and YouTube remains connected. You can remove them at any time:

• Disconnect YouTube in your account — visit Account Settings and use the Disconnect YouTube control. This immediately deletes your access token, refresh token, and expiry from our database and revokes the token with Google.
• Revoke access directly with Google — visit Google Security Settings → Third-party apps with account access and remove “The Second Messenger.” Google will invalidate our tokens. If you don’t also disconnect on our side, our next refresh attempt will fail and the connection will be cleared automatically.
• Delete your entire account (see Section 8) — this also revokes and purges all Google tokens.

You can review the governing policies for this integration here:

• Google Privacy Policy
• YouTube Terms of Service
• Google API Services User Data Policy
• Revoke our app’s access to your Google account

We retain your account data for as long as your Crew account is active. Aggregate, de-identified analytics may be retained indefinitely. Stripe invoice and tax records are retained per Stripe’s own retention rules and applicable financial-records law (typically 7 years).

You can view and edit most of your profile information directly from Account Settings. For a machine-readable export or to request correction of data you cannot self-edit, contact us at privacy@thesecondmessenger.com. We will respond within 30 days.

Use the Disconnect YouTube button in Account Settings to clear and revoke your Google tokens immediately. You can also revoke access directly through the Google Security Settings.

Deleting your account is permanent and, where possible, instant.

• In-app: open Account Settings and use the Delete Account control at the bottom of the page. When confirmed, we revoke any connected Google tokens, cancel active Stripe subscriptions at period end (or immediately, your choice in the confirmation dialog), delete your user record, and log you out.
• By email: send a deletion request from the email address on file to privacy@thesecondmessenger.com. We will action the request within 30 days and reply with confirmation once complete.

Some information must be retained after deletion for legal, accounting, or fraud-prevention reasons (for example, Stripe invoice records and minimal audit logs). We keep these records only for the period required and access them only as necessary.

Every marketing email we send includes an unsubscribe link. You can also email privacy@thesecondmessenger.com with the subject “unsubscribe.” Transactional messages (receipts, security notices) cannot be opted out of without closing your account.