Odd Question — Privacy Policy

Effective date: September 8, 2026 Last updated: September 8, 2026

Who we are

Odd Question is operated by Odd Question LLC, a Virginia limited liability company ("we," "us," "The Institute"). This policy explains what information Odd Question collects, why, and what choices you have. It applies to our iOS and Android apps, our website, and the public pages you can reach without an account (for example, a shared question link).

If you have questions about this policy or want to exercise any of the rights described below, contact us at hello@oddquestion.app.

Who can use Odd Question

Odd Question is intended for people 13 years of age or older. We do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 13. If we learn that we've collected information from a child under 13, we will delete it.

What we collect

We keep this deliberately minimal. Here is everything the app collects, and nothing more:

• Your answers. When you rank, vote, or forecast on a question, we record your choice so it can be counted toward the aggregate result. Individual answers are never published or shown to other users — only aggregate findings (percentages, rankings, splits) are ever displayed.
• Your birthday. We ask for your date of birth when you create an account, to confirm you are 13 or older, to place you in one of six age ranges (13–17, 18–29, 30–39, 40–49, 50–64, 65+) so questions and results can be shown in a way that's relevant to you, and for birthday features inside the app. It is stored with your account and deleted with it.
• Self-reported demographics, each entirely optional. Over your first weeks we ask, one at a time and about once a week, which broad bucket you fall into for: gender; race/ethnicity; household income; state; political party and lean; whether you're registered to vote and how you voted in 2024; community type (urban, suburban, rural); education; parental and marital status; housing; employment; union household; language at home; LGBTQ identity; and disability status. Every one of these can be skipped with "Prefer not to say," and every one can be answered, changed, or cleared later under Settings › Demographics. Declining any or all of them never affects the core daily experience. Only age, gender, and race are used to show you a question written for that group; everything else is used solely to weight findings so they read like the country and to break aggregate findings out by group. When you answer a question, we keep a snapshot of the demographics you'd given at that time, so a past finding can be re-weighted the same way later. We never infer any of these from anything else you do.
• Your school, optional. At sign-up, and later under Settings › Demographics, you can pick the college you attend or attended. It tags your account so you receive that school's campus poll — one question a day for the people who picked the same school — and so that poll's finding counts only answers from your school. It is never shown to other members, never used to locate you, and you can change or clear it at any time.
• A coarse time zone, detected automatically. Your device tells us which of six US time zones you're in (e.g. "Eastern"). We use this only to make sure a finding isn't accidentally skewed toward whichever coast happened to be awake — never to locate you, and never shown to anyone. This is never GPS or precise location.
• An account. The app creates an anonymous account the first time it opens, so your first answers are never lost. Signing up attaches a name, a username, a password, and a phone number or email to that same account. Your name and username are shown to your friends and your groups, never to the country; the username is unique and appears on group leaderboards.
• Your email address — only if you give it to us, in any of a few different ways: subscribing to receive findings by email, saving your progress so it survives a cleared browser or a new device, verifying a work or school email to join that domain's group, or commissioning a poll through our studies portal (in which case we also keep the email you asked results to be sent to, so you don't have to re-enter it next time). You can unsubscribe from marketing email at any time via the one-click link in every email we send.
• A phone number, or an email. Sign-up asks for a mobile number and verifies it with a six-digit text code; email is the alternative. Our sign-in provider (Supabase) holds the number or address to sign you in. Our own records keep only a salted one-way hash of the number, which lets friends who already have your number in their phone find you. That is controlled by a switch, "Let friends find me by my number," which you can turn off at any time. We never show your number to anyone.
• Your contacts — only if you choose to check them, and only as hashes. After sign-up the phone app offers to find your friends from your contacts; you can skip it, and you can run it later from Settings › Friends. When you do, your phone reads the names and numbers, turns each number into a salted one-way hash, and sends only the hashes — never a name, never a number. We compare them to members who chose to be findable. If you allow it, we keep those hashes so we can tell you when someone from your contacts joins later; you can erase them at any time with "Forget my synced contacts" under Settings › Friends, and deleting your account erases them too. We never message your contacts: an invitation is a text you send yourself, from your own messaging app.
• Friends, Circles, and the questions you send. Who you've added as a friend, which Circles you belong to, and two kinds of questions you can send a friend or a Circle: an anonymous poll (the recipient sees the poll and your answer, never who asked) and an unmasked question (free-form text, with your name attached from the start). We keep the record so it can be answered, moderated, and so daily limits work.
• A push notification token, only if you turn on reminders. If you enable "remind me" notifications, your device gives us a token that lets us send that one reminder — nothing else is inferred from it, and turning reminders off removes it.
• Device-local preferences. Things like your streak, which topics you've picked, and your thumbs-up/thumbs-down taste signals are stored on your device (not sent to us) unless syncing them is required for the app to function (e.g. your answers themselves, which are stored on our servers so the aggregate findings can be computed) or you've chosen to save your progress (see above), in which case a copy is kept server-side too so it can be restored on another device.
• Payment information — never seen by us. If you commission a poll or subscribe to Plus+, payment is handled entirely by Stripe (web) or by Apple or Google (in-app purchases). We never see or store your card number or other payment details.

What we don't collect

• We do not collect your home address or government ID.
• We do not sell your personal information to anyone.
• We do not place third-party advertising trackers, analytics pixels, or cross-app tracking SDKs in the app. The website uses Cloudflare Web Analytics, which counts page views without cookies, without fingerprinting, and without identifying you. We may advertise Odd Question on platforms such as Meta or Google; data those platforms collect on their own sites and apps is governed by their privacy practices, not by anything inside Odd Question.
• We do not use non-essential cookies. The only browser storage the web app uses is the minimum required to run at all: a session token (so your answers are yours) and a local cache of your own progress. Nothing here is used to track you across other websites.

How we use what we collect

• To compute and display aggregate findings ("72% of the country says X").
• To weight findings so they read like the country. Weights are computed from the demographics of everyone who answered; no individual is ever shown.
• To personalize which questions you see (based on your age band, region, and any demographics or interests you've opted into) — never to change what a "national" finding shows.
• To track your personal progress: rank, streak, forecasting accuracy, and similar in-app stats, and to restore that progress if you log in on another device.
• To find the friends you've asked us to find, and to suggest people you may know (someone from your contacts who joined, a friend of a friend, a member of one of your groups, or someone on your verified school or work domain).
• To send you the emails and notifications you've opted into, and nothing else.
• To keep the platform safe (e.g. detecting and down-weighting suspicious voting patterns, like an unusual number of votes from one source in a short time).
• Question and marketing-copy text itself (not your personal data) is sometimes drafted with the help of AI language-model providers — see the table below. They never receive your answers, your account identifier, or any of your personal information; they only ever see the finished, aggregate, already-anonymous subject matter of a poll.

Who we share it with

We use a small number of service providers to run Odd Question, each only for the purpose described:

We do not sell, rent, or otherwise share your personal information with third parties for their own marketing purposes.

Your choices and rights

• Delete your account and data, anytime, in-app. Odd Question has a built-in "delete my data" option that removes your on-device data and, if you have an account, your server-side records and login — immediately, no support ticket required. See Delete your account for the steps.
• Change or clear any demographic under Settings › Demographics.
• Stop being findable by phone with the "Let friends find me by my number" switch, and erase synced contacts with "Forget my synced contacts," both under Settings › Friends.
• Unsubscribe from email at any time using the link in any email we send.
• Request a copy or deletion of your data by emailing us at hello@oddquestion.app.

If you're in the European Economic Area, the UK, or Switzerland

The rights below are guaranteed to you under GDPR (or the equivalent UK/Swiss data protection law) specifically, in addition to everything above:

• Legal basis for processing. We process your answers, progress, and any demographics you opt into on the basis of your consent (you can withdraw it anytime by deleting your data or declining an opt-in) and, for the small amount of data needed to run the core service (your pseudonymous account id, your answers), on the basis that it's necessary to provide the service you've asked for. We never rely on "legitimate interest" to justify data you haven't actively opted into.
• Right of access — ask us for a copy of everything we hold about you.
• Right to rectification — ask us to correct anything that's wrong.
• Right to erasure ("right to be forgotten") — delete your account and data anytime, in-app, with no need to even contact us.
• Right to restrict or object to processing — tell us to stop processing your data for a specific purpose (e.g. you can decline any single demographic opt-in without affecting anything else).
• Right to data portability — request your data in a machine-readable format.
• Right to withdraw consent at any time, as easily as you gave it.
• Right to lodge a complaint with your local data protection authority if you believe we've mishandled your data.

To exercise any of these, email hello@oddquestion.app — we'll respond within the timeframe GDPR requires (generally one month).

Data retention

We keep your answers for as long as your account exists, since they contribute to ongoing aggregate findings even after you personally stop using the app (in de-identified, aggregate-only form — never shown as "your" answer to anyone). Synced contact hashes are kept until you forget them or delete your account. If you delete your account, your personal identifiers, phone hash, contact hashes, and any directly-linked data are removed; anonymized aggregate contributions to past findings may remain, since they can no longer be traced back to you.

Changes to this policy

If we make material changes to this policy, we'll update the "Last updated" date above and, where required, notify you in the app or by email.

Contact us

Odd Question LLC
8401 Mayland Dr, Ste S
Richmond, VA 23294, United States
hello@oddquestion.app

Text messages. If you verify a phone number, we send one-time verification codes by SMS and nothing else — no marketing texts. One message per request; message and data rates may apply; reply STOP to opt out or HELP for help. Details at oddquestion.app/sms.