Privacy Policy.

A plain-English account of what IsMyCatFat collects, what we don't, who we share it with, and how to make us stop.

Who we are.

IsMyCatFat (the "site", "we", "us") is a free, ad-supported website that judges photographs of cats for comedic and informational purposes. The site is operated by an individual, not a corporation, and runs entirely on free or near-free infrastructure. There is no team, no investors, and no shareholders to hide behind. If something on this page seems unclear, it's our fault, and we'd like to know.

This policy describes what data we collect, why, and what we do with it. It applies to all pages on the IsMyCatFat domain, including the cat-judging tool, the SEO guides, and any future pages we add. If we make material changes, we'll update the "last updated" date at the top of this page.

What we collect.

We try to collect as little as possible. Here's the full list, with explanations.

1. Cat photos you upload

When you upload a photograph for judgement, the image is sent to our server (a Cloudflare Worker), which forwards it to Anthropic — the company behind Claude, the AI doing the actual judging. Once the verdict is rendered, the image is not stored on our servers. We do not keep a copy. We do not train models on it. We do not look at it later.

However, Anthropic does receive the image to process the request. They have their own privacy policy that governs what happens on their side. As of this writing, Anthropic states that API requests through their commercial API are not used to train their models, but you should read their policy yourself if this matters to you.

2. Email addresses (if you sign up for the digest)

If you submit your email through the "Cat of the Week" signup form, we store your email address with our email service provider for the sole purpose of sending you the weekly digest. We do not sell, trade, or share email addresses. Every email we send includes a one-click unsubscribe link, which removes you immediately.

3. Standard server logs

Like every website on the internet, our hosting provider (Cloudflare) keeps short-term logs of requests, including IP addresses, browser type, and the page accessed. We use this for security and basic operational purposes — for instance, to rate-limit abusive traffic and prevent someone from running up our API bill. These logs are retained according to Cloudflare's policies and are not used to build profiles of individual visitors.

4. Anonymous traffic statistics

We use Cloudflare Web Analytics to understand how the site is being used — how many visitors per day, which pages are popular, what kinds of devices people use. This service does not use cookies, does not track users across sites, and does not collect personal information. It tells us what's working without telling us who you are.

5. Advertising data (via Google AdSense)

This is the bigger one, and we want to be honest about it.

To keep the site free, we display ads through Google AdSense. Google and its advertising partners may collect information about your visit using cookies, web beacons, and similar technologies. They use this information to show ads that they believe are relevant to you, which is how the ad-supported internet has worked for two decades.

Specifically, Google and its partners may collect:

• Your IP address and approximate location
• The device and browser you're using
• Pages you visit on this site
• Your interactions with ads (whether you saw, hovered, or clicked them)
• Information from cookies they previously set across the web (this is how "personalized advertising" works)

You can read Google's full advertising privacy policy at policies.google.com/technologies/ads. You can opt out of personalized advertising at google.com/settings/ads. You can also use the global opt-out at aboutads.info (US) or youronlinechoices.eu (EU).

Cookies, in specific.

The site itself sets no cookies of its own. We don't have a login system, and we don't track you. The cookies you may encounter come from:

• Google AdSense — for ad personalization, frequency capping, and click measurement. These are set when you load a page that contains ads.
• Cloudflare — a single security cookie may be set if our security systems flag your traffic as potentially abusive (this is rare and intended to protect the site from attacks).

You can clear or block cookies in your browser settings. Some sites break when you do this; ours mostly doesn't, though ads may stop displaying — which means we earn less, but you can still use everything.

How we use what we collect.

We use the data described above to:

• Render verdicts on cat photographs (the AI processing)
• Send the weekly email digest, if you've signed up
• Display ads (Google's responsibility, not ours, but we facilitate it)
• Understand which pages are popular so we can write more like them
• Detect and stop abuse (rate-limiting, blocking obvious bots)
• Comply with applicable laws (e.g. responding to legal requests if we ever receive them — we haven't)

We do not, and will not, sell personal data to third parties. We do not build profiles on individual users. We do not have the resources or interest to do either.

Who we share data with.

We share data only with the service providers necessary to run the site:

• Cloudflare — hosts our pages, provides DNS and security, runs the API proxy worker
• Anthropic — processes uploaded images and text for AI verdicts
• Google AdSense — displays advertising
• Our email provider (Buttondown or similar) — sends the weekly digest, if you've subscribed

Each of these companies has their own privacy policy governing what they do with the data they receive. We are not responsible for their practices, but we have chosen them in part because their practices are documented and reasonable. We do not share data with anyone else.

Your rights.

Depending on where you live, you may have specific legal rights regarding your data — including in the EU/EEA (under GDPR), the UK, California (under CCPA/CPRA), and other jurisdictions. These rights typically include:

• The right to access — to ask what data we have about you
• The right to deletion — to ask us to delete it
• The right to correction — to ask us to fix incorrect data
• The right to opt out — of personalized advertising and other processing
• The right to data portability — to receive your data in a portable format
• The right to lodge a complaint — with your local data protection authority

Practically: because we keep almost no data, most of these rights are easy to exercise. If you want to be removed from the email list, click the unsubscribe link in any email or contact us. If you want a deeper request — for example, asking what (if anything) we have about you — email us and we'll respond within 30 days.

Kids and the site.

This site is not directed at children under 13 (in the US) or under 16 (in some other jurisdictions). We do not knowingly collect data from children. If you are a parent or guardian and believe a child has submitted information, contact us and we'll delete it.

International visitors.

The site is operated from outside any single country and is hosted on Cloudflare's global network. If you visit the site from somewhere with stronger data protections than where our service providers are located (e.g. you're in the EU and our provider is in the US), data may be transferred internationally. Our service providers (Cloudflare, Anthropic, Google) all maintain Standard Contractual Clauses or equivalent mechanisms for these transfers.

Changes to this policy.

We may update this policy from time to time — most often when we add a new feature or change a service provider. We'll update the "last updated" date at the top, and for material changes (anything that meaningfully expands data collection), we'll add a note to the homepage for a few weeks. We won't make stealth changes that affect your existing data.