This site collects very little, and what it does collect exists to make the ratings work rather than to learn anything about you. This page says plainly what is stored and why.
Who we are
Potentially Offensive is a publicly contributed dictionary of terms and how offensive people find them. The site is at https://potentiallyoffensive.com.
When you rate a term
Rating is anonymous. No account is needed and no name or email address is asked for.
What is stored is your rating, and a one-way hash of your IP address recorded against that term. The hash exists for one reason: so the same person cannot rate the same term repeatedly and skew its score. It cannot be reversed to recover your address, it is not linked across terms to build a profile, and it is not shared.
The same hash is held briefly, for up to an hour, to limit how many ratings or submissions can be sent from one address in quick succession. That is a defence against automated abuse, and it expires on its own.
When you submit a term
The word or phrase you submit is stored so it can be reviewed, and published if accepted. Nothing else about you is recorded with it — submissions carry no name, no email address and no author.
When you contact us
The contact form sends your name, your message, and your email address if you chose to give one, to the site’s own inbox. An email address is optional and is used only to reply to you. Messages are not added to a mailing list.
Cookies
Browsing and rating set no cookies. Cookies are set only if you sign in to administer the site, which applies to staff rather than visitors.
Comments and accounts
There are none. Comments are switched off across the site and registration is closed, so nothing described in a typical privacy policy about commenters, profiles or avatars applies here. Discussion happens on X instead, under X’s own terms and privacy policy rather than ours.
Other sites we link to
Entries link out to Urban Dictionary, Google and X so you can look a term up. Following one of those links takes you to a site with its own policies, over which we have no control. We are not told that you followed it.
Analytics
The site uses standard web analytics to understand which pages are visited and which searches bring people here. This is used in aggregate to decide what to work on, not to identify individuals.
How long any of this is kept
Ratings and the hashes attached to them are kept for as long as the term exists, because removing them would corrupt its score. Rate-limiting records expire within the hour. Submitted terms are kept whether or not they are published, so the same word is not proposed and reviewed repeatedly. Contact messages are kept in the inbox they were sent to.
Your rights
Because ratings are anonymous and identified only by an irreversible hash, we generally cannot find “your” data on request — there is nothing tying it to you to search by. If you have contacted us, you can ask for that message to be deleted. Write to us through the contact page and say what you would like removed.
Changes
If what the site collects changes, this page changes with it.