What CUSP knows, and why
CUSP keeps your email, the profile you write, what you do in the game, and which pages you open. It also shows public information about public creators. We do not sell any of it and we do not show ads.
What we collect from you
- Your email
- You sign in with a link or a code that we email to you. There is no password. Your email is how we know it is you.
- Your profile
- Your display name, scout handle, bio, up to three links, and a profile picture if you add one. We shrink the picture and remove its hidden data, such as location, before we store it.
- Your game
- Your roster, drafts and captain, your HOT and COLD calls, the screenshots you attach to calls, your Scout Takes and votes, and your points and rank in each week.
- Presence
- When you were last active and which page you were on. Your browser checks in about once a minute while CUSP is open.
- Page views and taps
- Which pages and which creator profiles you open, when, for how long, and from which page, plus key taps such as changing a sort or opening a card, and whether you are on a phone or a computer. This is tied to your account.
- Device basics
- Like every website, our host receives your IP address, browser type and the time of each request. We also keep your time zone, so CUSP can match its light or dark look to your local time.
How we use it
- To sign you in and keep you signed in.
- To run the game: score your roster, rank each week, and show your calls and takes.
- To show other scouts who is around, as described below.
- To read the numbers in a screenshot you attach to a call. Your browser tries first. If it is unsure, we send the screenshot to Anthropic’s Claude model to read it.
- To learn what works. Page views and taps show us which screens people use, where they get stuck, and which creators draw attention. Only the CUSP team can see them.
- To keep CUSP safe, find bugs, and stop abuse.
We do not sell your information, share it with advertisers, or use it to build ad profiles. If you are in the EU or UK, our legal bases are: running the service you asked for (sign-in and the game), and our legitimate interest in improving and protecting CUSP (presence, page views, device basics).
What other scouts see
CUSP is a social game. Anyone signed in to CUSP can see your display name, handle, profile picture, bio and links; your calls, with their screenshots; your Scout Takes and votes; and your points and rank. They see your roster once the week’s picks are locked.
They can also see whether you are online now, when you were last here (for example “seen 12 min ago”), and the last place you were in the app, such as “the board” or a creator’s page.
CUSP does not show other scouts your email, your page-view history, or your taps. People who are not signed in to CUSP cannot see any of this. Your profile picture is stored at a hard-to-guess web address, so it is visible to anyone who has that address.
For creators
CUSP shows public information about public creator accounts, so that scouts can follow and predict their growth. A creator is on CUSP because a scout added them. We never collect from private accounts, and we never log in to Instagram or any other platform to collect data.
What we collect about a creator
- From a public Instagram profile: name, handle, bio, profile picture, the link in the bio, the account type and category, and follower, following and post counts.
- From the latest public posts: the cover image, caption, hashtags, mentions, tagged accounts, location tag, music, and like, comment and view counts.
- A daily history of those counts, including older history copied from Social Blade.
- From YouTube’s official API: channel name, description, country, picture, and subscriber, view and video counts, plus recent video titles and their counts.
- What scouts say about the creator: calls, screenshots and Scout Takes.
Instagram data comes through a service called Apify, which reads public profile pages without logging in. We keep copies of profile pictures and post covers so that pages load quickly. We do not collect follower lists, messages, or anything that needs a login to see, and we do not sell creator data.
To correct or remove your profile
Email [contact email] and tell us which profile is yours and whether you want it corrected or removed. We may ask you to confirm that the account is yours, for example with a message from it. If you ask for removal, we delete your creator profile, its count history, its posts, and our copies of your images, and we stop collecting your data. We will tell you when it is done.
Services we use
These companies run parts of CUSP for us. Each one gets only what it needs for its job.
- Vercel
- Hosts the website and runs its servers. Receives every request, including your IP address.
- Supabase
- Our database, sign-in system and file storage. Holds your email, profile, game data, page views and screenshots, and all creator data.
- Resend
- Delivers the sign-in emails. Receives your email address and the sign-in code.
- Plausible
- Counts page visits across all visitors. It sets no cookies and does not identify you, but it sees page addresses, which can include a creator’s handle.
- Anthropic
- Reads call screenshots, only when your browser could not read them on its own.
- jsDelivr
- Serves the text-reading tool your browser uses for screenshots. Sees your IP address.
- Apify
- Collects public Instagram creator data. It receives no information about you.
- The YouTube Data API supplies public channel counts. Google Workspace runs our email.
Our database and servers are in the United States, so your data is stored there. We may also share information when the law requires it, or to protect people from harm.
How long we keep it
- Your profile and game history: for as long as you have an account.
- Page views and taps: 12 months, then deleted.
- Server request logs at our host: up to 30 days.
- Creator data: while the creator is on CUSP, or until the creator asks us to remove it.
- When you delete your account, we delete your data within 30 days. Copies in database backups are gone within 30 days after that.
Deletion and your rights
You can edit your profile at any time in Settings. For anything else, email [contact email] from the address you sign in with. You can ask us to:
- send you a copy of the data we hold about you;
- correct something that is wrong;
- delete your account and everything tied to it;
- stop using your page views and taps to study how CUSP is used.
We aim to reply within 30 days. Depending on where you live, laws such as the GDPR or California’s privacy law may give you more rights, and you can complain to your local data protection authority. We will not treat you differently for using any of these rights.
Children
CUSP is not for children. You must be at least 13 to use it, or at least 16 in the EU or UK. We do not knowingly collect data from anyone younger. If you think a child has an account, email [contact email] and we will delete it.
Changes and contact
When we change this policy, we update the date at the top. If a change matters, such as collecting a new kind of data, we will tell you in the app before it takes effect.
CUSP is run by [legal entity name]. Questions go to [contact email]. The terms of use cover the rules of the game.