How Study of Us handles your data
The short version: your photo is shown to other people, your survey answers are not. We use everything in aggregate for research, we don't sell any of it, and you can delete it all from your account page.
Who runs this
Study of Us (studyofus.com) is run by Aella, an independent researcher. This policy covers what Study of Us collects and does.
What we collect
- Account details. An email address, or a Google sign-in, or a username and password. If you sign in through Glosso, we get your Glosso username. We never see your password in the clear.
- Photos you submit. The face photo itself, when you submitted it, and the checks you ticked when submitting it.
- Your votes and guesses. Which face you preferred in each matchup, and what you guessed in the guessing games.
- Your survey answers. These can be sensitive: dating and relationship history, sexuality, mental health, politics, income, and similar. You choose what to answer; skipping is always allowed.
- Purchases. Payments run through Stripe. We receive the amount, the outcome, and a Stripe reference. Your card number never touches our servers.
- Usage. Which pages you open (the path only, never what you typed), how you first arrived (campaign tags in the link and the site that sent you, not the full page), and, for some survey submissions, a hashed form of your IP address and your browser's identifying string. Your IP address is also used, unhashed and briefly, to rate-limit abuse.
- Things you send us. Bug reports and feedback typed into the feedback button, and referral links you share.
What other people can see
If you submit a photo, other people using the site, signed in or trying the games as a visitor, will see it in the matchup and guessing games, and may see how it ranks. The photo is shown on its own, with no name, handle, or link to your account. It is served only to this site's own pages: opening a photo's address by itself, or embedding it on another site, does not work, and search engines are told not to index it.
Your survey answers are never shown to anyone individually. They are used in two ways: pooled with everyone else's to build the reports and findings, and as hidden ground truth in the guessing games, where other people guess about your photo without ever being told the answer.
Your report pages, your credits, your matches and everything else behind your login are visible only to you. If the site offers a public profile page and you choose to create one, only what you put on that page is public.
What we do with it
- Run the games, build your reports, and keep score.
- Research. Aella publishes findings built from pooled, anonymised data from this site. Published work never identifies an individual and never includes a submitted photo without separate permission.
- Screen submitted photos. Every photo is checked against the site's rules before it goes live, first by an automated model and then by a person. The model sees the photo only; it is not given your account.
- Send you the emails you ask for: sign-in links, and receipts through Stripe.
- Keep the site working and fair: rate limiting, bot detection, and fixing bugs.
We do not sell your data, and we do not show ads based on it. There are no social-media pixels on this site. We use Google Analytics to count visits and see which pages and links bring people here. It runs with ad personalisation switched off, and it is only told the page path, never the part of the address after the question mark, so it does not learn which photo report you opened or which link you came in on.
Cookies
- A session cookie that keeps you signed in.
- A referral cookie (30 days, or 90 for a partner's link) if you arrived through someone's referral link, so they get credit when you join. Partners see how many people joined and spent through their link, never who.
- A source cookie (90 days) recording how you first found the site, so we can tell which links bring people here.
- Google Analytics cookies (up to two years), which tell one visitor's visits apart so we can count them. They carry a random id, not your name or email.
- Small settings saved in your own browser, such as which reminder you dismissed.
Who else handles the data
We use a handful of services to run the site. Each one sees only what it needs to do its job:
- Cloudflare and Fly.io, which serve and host the site.
- Neon, which hosts the database.
- Stripe, for payments.
- Google, for Google sign-in, for Google Analytics (visit counts, as described above), and for the site's typeface.
- Resend, which delivers sign-in emails.
- Anthropic, whose model screens submitted photos against the site's rules.
How long we keep it, and how to delete it
We keep your data while your account exists. On your account page there is a "Delete my Study of Us data" button. It removes your photos from the games and deletes everything Study of Us holds about you: credits, game progress, and your survey answers. Aggregate statistics that were already computed before you deleted (for example, how often a photo was chosen) contain no way to identify you and are not rebuilt. Backups roll off on their own within a few weeks.
You can also ask us to show you what we hold, or to delete it for you, using the contact below.
Age
Study of Us is for adults. You must be 18 or older to use the site or submit a photo.
Changes
If this policy changes in a way that matters, we will note the new date at the top of this page and mention it on the home page.
Contact
Use the feedback button in the corner of any page, or message @Aella_Girl on X.