Privacy Policy

Who We Are

Vented (ventedapp.com) is operated by us. In this policy, “we”, “us”, and “Vented” mean the operator of the Vented app and ventedapp.com. If you have questions about your data, contact us through the Contact page.

What We Collect

• Account data: your real name, email address, and optional phone number.
• Location: your city or region, entered manually at signup and used for internal record-keeping.
• Date of birth: collected for age verification and stored securely.
• Username: optional public identifier. If left blank, you appear as anonymous.
• Content: vents, comments, likes, and any photos, videos, or Live stories you upload.
• Technical data: IP address and browser info for security and abuse prevention.
• Device identifier for notifications: if you turn on push notifications in the mobile app, a push token (a device identifier issued by Firebase, tied to the Firebase installation of the app on your device) is stored with your account. Its only purpose is app functionality, delivering notifications to you. It is not used for advertising, analytics, or tracking, and it is deleted when you sign out, when your account is deleted, or when it stops working.
• Tags, replies and notifications: if you tag someone (@username), reply to a comment, or someone does that to you, we store the tag or reply with the vent or comment, and a notification (what happened, which vent or comment it points to, and who caused it) so we can show it in your VentAlerts and send a push. Notification text on your lock screen is generic and never includes your name or any vent text.
• Login attempts: to stop password guessing, we keep failed login attempts for 24 hours as one-way scrambled (hashed) values of the email address you typed and your IP address, never in readable form.
• Cookies: session tokens and, if you accept, advertising cookies. See our Cookie Policy for details.

How We Use Your Data

• To provide and operate the Vented service.
• To verify your age for age-restricted content.
• To send account-related emails, such as verification and security alerts.
• To prevent abuse, spam, and policy violations, including automatically checking posts, comments, and captions against our Community Guidelines.
• To display advertising, if you have accepted cookies.

Optional Face ID, fingerprint or passcode lock

You can lock Silent Screams (your private space) on a phone with Face ID, Touch ID, fingerprint, or your device passcode. Your phone performs that check itself. Vented never reads, receives, or stores any biometric data (no face or fingerprint data, no templates, no images). Vented only learns whether your phone said “yes” or “no”, and the setting is stored only on your device. You can turn the lock off at any time.

Tagging, replies and notifications

You choose who can tag you (Profile Settings → Who can tag me): people you follow who also follow you (the default), anyone you follow, or no one. You cannot be tagged by someone you have blocked, or who you are blocked by. A tag shows your username as a link in the vent or comment, and sends you a notification. Replies are comments under another comment and follow the same rules as any comment, including blocking, reporting, and moderation. Deleting a comment deletes its replies, tags and notifications; deleting a vent deletes its tags and notifications.

Notifications are shown in the app, and as push notifications if you allow them. The push text is deliberately generic (for example “Someone replied to your comment”) and never includes names or what was written. You can turn push notifications off in your phone's settings at any time.

Anonymity

Only your chosen username (or “anonymous”) appears on vents and comments. Your real name, email address, phone number, and date of birth are never shown publicly.

Data Storage

Your data is stored in a PostgreSQL database hosted on Neon, a US-based cloud provider. The platform is hosted on Vercel. Both providers maintain industry-standard security practices.

Passwords are hashed using bcrypt and are never stored in plain text.

Advertising

Ads appear only on the Vented website, never in the Vented iOS or Android app, and the apps do not track you across other apps or websites. If you accept cookies on the website, Vented may display ads via Google AdSense. Google may use cookies to show you personalised ads based on your activity on Vented and other sites. You can opt out of personalised ads at Google Ad Settings.

If you decline cookies, no advertising cookies are set and no ads are displayed.

Third-Party Sharing

We do not sell your personal data. We share limited data only with the following:

• Infrastructure providers, which are necessary to operate the service: Neon (database), Vercel (hosting), and Vercel Blob (storage for the photos, videos, and profile pictures you upload).
• Google Firebase Cloud Messaging, which delivers push notifications to your device. It receives your push token and the notification text.
• Brevo, our email provider, which receives your email address when we send verification, password-reset, and support emails.
• Google reCAPTCHA, which may check sign-up requests to block bots and receives technical data such as your IP address.
• Google Fonts, which serves the typeface used on our website and receives your IP address when the font loads.
• Anthropic, which provides the AI service (Claude) we use in two places, moderation and translation:
  • Content moderation: the text of posts, comments, story captions, and story comments is sent to Anthropic's API when you submit it, so it can be checked against our Community Guidelines.
  • Translate: when you tap Translate on a vent or comment, the text being translated is sent to Anthropic to produce the translation.
  • We do not send your name, email address, phone number, or other account details, and images are not sent.
• Google AdSense, a third-party advertising network, but only on the website and only if you have accepted cookies. Ads are never shown in the Vented iOS or Android app. Google may use cookies to show you ads.
• Your signup information (name, email address, phone number, and city/state) is kept for account-safety record-keeping, so we can identify who is behind an account if it is reported. It is stored in a separate, access-restricted database (hosted on Neon) that only authorised reviewers can read. During our transition to that database, a copy also remains in a restricted Google Sheets spreadsheet. Once the transition is finished that spreadsheet is deleted and the database becomes the only copy.
• The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) and law enforcement. Federal law requires us to report apparent child sexual abuse material to NCMEC's CyberTipline. A report can include the content, the account's identifying details, and IP addresses. We also respond to other valid legal process (see Data Retention).

Your Rights

• Access: you can view your vents and account data at any time.
• Deletion: delete your account from the account menu to permanently remove your data (steps, and what is and isn't deleted, are on our Delete Your Account page). A small amount of data is kept only where the law requires (see Data Retention).
• Correction: update your username and password from the account menu.
• Portability: contact us to request a copy of your data.
• Cookies: withdraw cookie consent at any time by clearing localStorage in your browser settings.

Data Retention

Account data is retained until you delete your account. When you do, your account and its content are removed immediately and permanently. We do not retain backups of deleted user data beyond 30 days, and those exist only for disaster recovery.

Exception — legally required retention. If content on Vented is identified as apparent child sexual abuse material, federal law (18 U.S.C. § 2258A) requires us to report it to NCMEC and preserve the related evidence. In that case we keep that content together with identifying information about the account (such as name, email address, phone number, city/state, IP addresses, and device identifiers) for up to 400 days, in a separate, access-restricted store, even if the account is deleted. It is used only for the report, for law enforcement, and as the law requires, and is then permanently deleted. This is the only case in which data survives account deletion.

How Long We Keep Each Kind of Data

• Account details (name, email, optional phone, city, date of birth, username): until you delete your account.
• Sign-up registry (the restricted record of name, email, phone, city and state): until you delete your account.
• Vents, comments, likes, reposts, polls, photos, videos and Live stories: until you delete them or delete your account. Live stories also disappear from the live feed after 24 hours.
• Push token: until you sign out, delete your account, or the token stops working.
• Tags, replies and notifications: until the vent or comment they belong to is deleted, or you delete your account.
• Failed login attempts (hashed): 24 hours, then automatically deleted.
• Login sessions: up to 30 days, or until you sign out.
• Email verification and password-reset links: expire after 24 hours and 1 hour; used or expired links are not usable again.
• Moderation and security records (including IP addresses attached to them): kept while your account exists and deleted with it.
• Messages you send us through the Contact form: kept in our support inbox for as long as needed to respond.
• Backups: up to 30 days, for disaster recovery only.
• Evidence of child sexual abuse material: up to 400 days, as described under Data Retention below, then permanently deleted.

Children's Privacy

Vented is not directed at anyone under the age of 18. We do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone below the minimum age in effect when their account was created.

Accounts created before September 19, 2026 were opened under our previous minimum age of 17 and remain active under the terms they were created under. The minimum age is 18 for every account created on or after September 19, 2026.

All users must provide their date of birth at signup, and users who indicate they are under 18 are blocked from creating an account. Because we cannot independently verify age, users are responsible for providing accurate information.

If we become aware, through a report, parental contact, or any other means, that an account was created by someone below the minimum age in effect on the date it was created, we will immediately delete the account and all associated data without notice.

If you are a parent or guardian and believe your child under 18 has created an account on Vented, please contact us through the platform immediately and we will take action within 48 hours.

Copyright

Vented does not permit users to post content they don't have the rights to, including copyrighted images or memes. See our Terms of Service for our full copyright and DMCA policy. If you believe your copyrighted work has been posted without permission, contact reports@ventedapp.com

Changes to This Policy

We may update this policy at any time. Continued use of the platform after updates constitutes acceptance. The last-updated date below reflects the most recent revision.

Last updated: October 6, 2026.