Privacy Policy
This policy describes what happens to the information you give us — written against what the site actually does, not a template. Where we say we do not collect something, it means the code has no field for it.
Who we are
FanCaveNation is operated by Fletcher Media, Inc., a California corporation.
Fletcher Media, Inc.1107 Fair Oaks Ave #830, South Pasadena, CA 91030
privacy@fancavenation.com
We are the business responsible for the personal information described here. If you only read one section, read what we publish.
What we collect
When you submit a fan cave
You give us all of this yourself, on the submission form:
| What | Why we ask |
|---|---|
| Your name | To credit you on your cave's page and on the show |
| Email address | To reach you about your entry. Nothing else, unless you opt in below |
| Location — city and state | Context on your page. See what we publish |
| Social handle, if you give one | To tag you when an episode goes out |
| Your team and roughly what you have spent | Caves are compared inside a budget bracket, never against every cave flat |
| Your written answers and the story behind each photo | This is the material an episode is written from |
| Your photographs | Your cave's page, the show, and social |
| Which publisher's call-out sent you | So a publisher can find the entries their campaign brought in |
| Your answers to the age, licence and rules checkboxes, and which version of that text was on screen | So we can show what you actually agreed to, and when |
We strip the hidden data out of your photos. A photo from a phone usually carries EXIF metadata including GPS coordinates. Our image pipeline discards all of it and re-encodes the picture before it is stored. The coordinates of your house never reach our storage, let alone the page.
When you rate a cave
We need to stop one person voting a hundred times, and we do it without knowing who you are. Your IP address and browser user-agent are combined with a secret value and run through a one-way hash; only the first 32 characters of that hash are stored.The IP address itself is never written down. The stored value cannot be reversed into an address, and we cannot use it to look up anything about you.
When you sign up for email
Your address, where on the site you gave it, and whether you ticked the box allowing the publisher who referred you to email you.
Audience measurement
We use Google Analytics 4 to count visits, so we know which pages are worth keeping and how many people who start the submission form finish it. It only runs if you press Accept on the banner.
Until you accept, Google's software is never loaded at all.Not loaded-but-switched-off — not downloaded, not run, and not contacted. No cookie is set and no record of your visit reaches Google, not even an anonymous one. If you decline, or ignore the banner, or never see it, that stays true permanently.
We mention this because the common way to install Google Analytics does load the tag immediately and merely tells it not to store anything — which still sends Google the page you are on, where you came from, your browser and your IP address. We tested ours and found it doing exactly that, and changed it. The site behaves identically whichever way you answer; nothing is withheld from you for saying no.
If you accept, Google Analytics collects:
- Pages viewed, and the page or search that sent you here.
- A randomly generated ID stored in a cookie on your device, which lets Google recognise the same browser across pages and return visits. It is not your name and we cannot turn it into your name.
- Approximate location from your IP address — country, region, city. Google does not expose the IP address itself to us.
- Device, browser and screen size.
- A handful of named events: that a submission was started, that a photo was added, that it was sent, and which page a "Add your fan cave" button was pressed on. These carry no personal information — no name, no email, no photo and no part of what you typed.
We never use this for advertising. Google Signals and ads personalisation are switched off at the property, and the advertising permissions in Google's consent framework are set to denied permanently — not as a default you can change, but as a setting this site never updates. We do not run ads, we do not build audiences, and we do not sell or share what Analytics collects.
Google processes this as our service provider, in the United States and elsewhere, under their ownprivacy policy. You can also block Analytics everywhere with Google'sopt-out browser add-on.
What we do not collect
- No session recorder, and no advertising pixel. Nothing on this site records what you type, where you move your mouse, or replays your visit.
- No advertising cookies, and nothing that follows you to other sites. See cookies.
- No street address, and no field for one.
- No payment information. Entering is free and we never take a payment.
- No precise location.
What we publish, and what we never do
Published on your cave's page: your name, your city and state, your story and answers, your photographs, and the gear you listed.
Never published: your email address, your street address or anything finer than a city, the GPS data from your photos, andthe value or price of anything in your room.
That last one is deliberate and it is enforced in the software, not just in a policy document: our own staff tools refuse to save a valuation on a memorabilia item, and refuse to save anything that reads like a street address in the location field. A page that lists what is in your house and where the house is would be a risk we created for you.
How we use it
- To build and publish your cave's page.
- To choose and produce episodes of the show, and to write the script.
- To compute the gear database and rankings. These are aggregate counts across every published cave — how many rooms contain a given item — not a profile of you.
- To email you about your own entry.
- To email you about future contests, if you asked us to.
- To keep the site working and to investigate abuse.
Who else sees it
We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising. We have never done either.
Publishers
Publishers run their own call-outs and send fans here. A publisher can see the entries their campaign brought in. A publisher only receives your email address if you ticked the box naming them on the form. If you did not, your address stays with us and is used only for messages about your own entry.
Service providers
- Cloudflare
- Stores and serves the photographs, and provides DNS.
- Replit
- Hosts the application.
- beehiiv
- Sends email to people who asked for it.
- Google Analytics
- Counts visits, only for people who accepted the banner. Seeaudience measurement for exactly what it receives andcookies for what it stores.
- Google Fonts
- Serves the two typefaces. Loading a font means Google's servers see your IP address, as they would for any site using their fonts.
- YouTube
- Episode videos are embedded through youtube-nocookie.com, which does not set a cookie unless you actually press play. If you play a video, YouTube's own privacy policy applies to that.
Legal
We will disclose information if we are legally required to, or where we believe in good faith it is necessary to protect somebody's safety.
Cookies
Everything this site can put on your device, and why:
- _ga, _ga_* — analytics, needs consent
- Set by Google Analytics, only after you press Accept. They hold a random ID so Google can recognise the same browser. Google sets these to last up to two years. Decline and they are never created —and if you accept and later change your mind, we delete them for you the moment you decline rather than merely stopping reading them.
- fcn_consent_v1 — your choice, no consent needed
- Not a cookie at all. Your answer to the banner is kept in your browser's local storage, on your device, and is never sent to us or to anyone else. It records only whether you said yes or no, when, and whether the answer came from the banner or from a browser privacy signal. It is what stops us asking again on every page. It expires after twelve months, and then we ask once more.
- fcn_session — sign-in, no consent needed
- Only staff and publisher accounts ever receive it. It keeps you signed in to the admin, is HttpOnly andSameSite=Lax, expires after fourteen days, and holds a signed reference to your account and nothing else. A fan browsing the public site never gets one.
That is the complete list. You can change your answer whenever you like with Cookie settings, which is in the footer of every page on this site.
Your privacy choices
We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising — not to Google, not to a publisher, not to anybody. We have never done either, and the advertising features of Google Analytics are switched off precisely so that this stays true.
Three ways to control what is collected, any of which is enough on its own:
- Cookie settings — in the footer of every page. Decline and analytics stops immediately and permanently.
- Global Privacy Control. If your browser or an extension sends a GPC signal we treat it as a decline automatically. You will not see the banner at all, no cookie is set, and you do not have to tell us twice. We honour Do Not Track the same way, even though it carries no legal weight.
- Email privacy@fancavenation.comand ask. We will do it by hand and confirm when it is done.
Your rights in California
Under the California Consumer Privacy Act as amended by the CPRA, you have the right to:
- Know what personal information we hold about you and where it came from.
- Delete it, subject to the exceptions the law allows.
- Correct anything inaccurate.
- Opt out of sale or sharing. We do neither, so there is nothing to opt out of — but the right exists, the controls are underyour privacy choices above, and we honour a Global Privacy Control signal automatically.
- Limit the use of sensitive personal information. We do not collect any, so there is nothing to limit.
- Not be discriminated against for exercising any of these. We will not refuse an entry or treat it differently because you asked.
Email privacy@fancavenation.com from the address you submitted with, or write to us at the address above. We will respond within 45 days. We may need to confirm you are who you say you are before acting on a request about a specific entry.
An authorised agent may make a request on your behalf with written permission.
Taking your cave down
You can ask us to unpublish your cave at any time and we will, without asking why. Email privacy@fancavenation.com. Episodes already published to YouTube and posts already made to social are outside what we can recall — we will stop using the material going forward and take down what we control.
How long we keep it
- Published caves stay up until you or we take them down.
- Entries that are never published are kept while the season they were entered in is running, and reviewed after.
- Consent records — what you agreed to and when — are kept for as long as we are using your material, because they are the proof that we may.
- Rating hashes carry no identity and are kept indefinitely.
Children
This site is for adults. You must confirm you are 18 or older to enter, and we do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 13. If you believe a child has submitted something, emailprivacy@fancavenation.com and we will delete it.
If there are children in a photograph you send us, you are telling us you are their parent or guardian, or that you have permission from whoever is.
Security
Passwords are stored as scrypt hashes and are never recoverable, by us or by anyone else — an admin who forgets one can only be sent a fresh invite link. Sessions are signed. Photographs are re-encoded on the way in, which removes both metadata and a class of malicious file. No system is perfect, and we will tell you if something happens that affects you.
Changes
If we change this policy we will change the effective date at the top. If a change materially affects how we use something you already gave us, we will email the address on your entry rather than rely on you noticing.
Contact
Privacy questions and requests:privacy@fancavenation.com. Everything else: hello@fancavenation.com.
Fletcher Media, Inc., 1107 Fair Oaks Ave #830, South Pasadena, CA 91030