Privacy & Terms

What we collect

You sign in with an email address and a one-time code sent to it, and you choose a handle. We do not ask for your real name, and we do not ask for a phone number.

Sign-in is handled by Microsoft Entra External ID. Microsoft processes your email address and the code, and keeps the address in the sign-in directory it runs for us. The people who operate Rixa Aperta can see it there; nobody else can, and it is never shown on the site. Our own database does not hold your email address at all: it knows you by an ID Microsoft issues and by your handle.

Beyond that we keep what you do here: the challenges you post or accept, the turns you write, the scores you give, the reports and feedback you send (with the page a note was sent from), and the record of wins, losses and draws that results.

What is public

Every debate is public, including debates you lose or forfeit. Debates and their results appear on your profile and can be read by anyone, signed in or not. Turns cannot be edited or deleted once sent.

Your handle, the date you joined and your record are public. The scores you give are not shown as yours: a debate shows its totals, never who scored it which way. While you watch a debate, others see how many people are watching, not who.

Links and topics from elsewhere

A challenge can carry a link to an article on another site. We do not control that site, and we do not fetch, preview or copy the page: the link is a link. Only we can remove one once it is posted.

Some topics on the board are posted by us, with the article they came from. A debate started from one carries the same link.

A topic we post may start from a headline in a news feed we read: The Conversation, Hacker News, BBC News, Electronic Frontier Foundation and Our World in Data. We link to the article and do not republish it. The headline and the feed's short description are sent to an AI model, Anthropic's Claude, to draft the topic, and a person reads every draft before it is posted. Nothing you write is sent to it.

Where it is kept

Rixa Aperta runs on Microsoft Azure, in data centres in the United States. Your email address is held by Microsoft Entra External ID, as above. We do not sell your information, and we share it with nobody else.

Signing in sets cookies that keep you signed in, for up to 30 days or until you sign out. Closing the welcome note on the board sets one that remembers you did, for a year; it holds nothing about you. We set no advertising or tracking cookies, and the site loads no third-party trackers. Our servers keep technical logs of errors for about 30 days.

Closing an account

To delete your account, write to the address below from the email you sign in with, and we will delete it. The account goes and its history stays: your debates, turns and scores remain public under your handle, marked as deleted, and the handle is not given to anyone else. Your email address is removed from the sign-in directory.

Conduct

Argue the proposition. Abuse, harassment, impersonation and spam are not allowed, and neither is using another account to argue against yourself. Any debate can be reported from the debate room. Reports, and the checks the site runs on its own for unusual voting, are seen only by the people who operate Rixa Aperta.

We may suspend an account, which ends its sessions and blocks it from signing in. A debate that breaks these rules can be removed by us, and so can a link attached to one; a result already on the record stays.

Terms

You must be at least 16 years old to use Rixa Aperta. By signing in you say that you are, and that you will follow the conduct rules above.

Rixa Aperta is provided as it is, without warranty of any kind. To the extent the law allows, we are not liable for what is written here by others, for a debate's outcome, or for loss that comes from using the site or from its being unavailable. We may suspend an account, remove a debate or a link, and change or end the service, as the conduct rules say.

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Delaware, United States, and any dispute about them is heard there. We may change this page; the date at the top changes with it, and using the site after a change means you accept it.

Contact

Questions about this page or your information go to privacy@rixaaperta.com.