Privacy Policy

Cardinal (cardinaldebate.org, the “Service”) is a set of debate preparation tools for competitive debaters: cutting cards, searching evidence, and building blockfiles. When this policy says “we” or “Cardinal,” it means the operator of cardinaldebate.org. You can reach us any time at aanvithreddy@gmail.com.

Account information. Your email address, an optional display name, and your password. Passwords are stored only as a cryptographic hash; we cannot see them. If you sign in with Google, Google shares your name, email address, and profile picture with us, and we never see your Google password.

Content you create. The cards you cut, cases and blockfiles you build, searches you run, and text or links you submit to the tools. This content is private to your account unless you choose to share or export it.

Reviews. If you post a review, the review text, rating, and the name you provide are displayed publicly on the site.

Payment information.Payments are processed by Stripe on Stripe’s own pages. Cardinal never receives or stores your card number. We keep a record of your subscription status and Stripe’s reference for your purchase.

Usage information. Counts and timestamps of tool use (for example, how many cards you have cut), which we use for rate limits, free-tier quotas, and improving the product. We also use Vercel Analytics for aggregate page-view statistics.

Referral and source information. If you arrive through a referral or campaign link, we record the referral code or source tag so we can credit the referrer and understand which channels bring debaters to Cardinal.

We do not collect your date of birth, physical address, or government identifiers.

We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share it with advertisers.

We do not run third-party advertising or cross-site tracking on the Service.

We use the information above to:

• provide and operate the tools you use;
• verify your email and secure your account;
• process subscriptions and prevent abuse of free limits;
• respond when you email us;
• send Service email such as verification links and receipts, and occasional product updates you can opt out of;
• understand aggregate usage so we can improve Cardinal.

When you use tools that read articles or generate output (for example, the card cutter), the text or links you submit are sent to our AI provider, Google’s Gemini API, to produce the result, and the result is returned to you. We do not use your content to train our own models. Your account password and payment details are never sent to the AI provider.

We use a small number of cookies and browser storage entries, all first-party:

• a session cookie that keeps you signed in;
• a preference entry that remembers your light or dark theme;
• a source cookie (90 days) that remembers which link brought you here, so referrals are credited correctly.

We do not use advertising or cross-site tracking cookies.

Cardinal runs on a small set of providers that process data on our behalf, under their own security and privacy commitments:

• Stripe for payments;
• Google for optional sign-in and for AI processing (Gemini API);
• Resend for sending Service email;
• Vercel for hosting and aggregate analytics;
• cloud database infrastructure for storing your account and content.

We share only what each provider needs to do its job, and we never sell data to anyone.

We keep your information while your account is active. If you want your account and its content deleted, email us at aanvithreddy@gmail.com from your account email and we will delete it within 30 days. We may retain limited records where the law requires it (for example, payment records).

Cardinal is for debaters aged 13 and older. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13. If you believe a child under 13 has created an account, contact us and we will delete the account and its information promptly. If you are between 13 and 18, you should use Cardinal with a parent’s or guardian’s permission.

All traffic to Cardinal is encrypted with HTTPS, passwords are stored as hashes, and access to production data is restricted. No online service can promise perfect security, but we take reasonable measures to protect your information, and we will notify affected users if a breach involving personal information occurs.

You can access and update your account details on the account page, unsubscribe from product-update email using the link in any such email, and request a copy or deletion of your data by emailing us. Depending on where you live, you may have additional rights under laws such as the GDPR or the CCPA; we honor reasonable requests from anyone regardless of location.

If we change this policy in a meaningful way, we will update the effective date at the top and, for significant changes, notify you by email or an in-app notice. Continued use of the Service after a change means you accept the updated policy.

Questions about privacy or this policy: email aanvithreddy@gmail.com. A real person reads and answers every message.

See also the Terms of Service.