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.
What we do not collect
- No analytics. There is no Google Analytics, no pixel, no session recorder and no third-party tag on this site.
- No advertising or tracking cookies. 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, and the 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 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
There is one cookie on this site, and only staff and publisher accounts ever receive it: fcn_session, which keeps you signed in to the admin. It is HttpOnly, SameSite=Lax, expires after fourteen days, and contains a signed reference to your account and nothing else.
Browsing the public site as a fan sets no cookie at all. There is no cookie banner because there is nothing to consent to.
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. There is nothing to opt out of — we do neither — but the right exists and we will honour any request.
- 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, email privacy@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