The Debate Club
Privacy Policy
Last updated: 15 August 2026
The Debate Club (“we”, “us”) runs free, live online voice debates and publishes recordings and short clips of them. This policy explains what information we collect, why, and what you can do about it. We are a small volunteer-run community, and we collect as little as we can get away with.
The application we use to publish our recordings is described on its own page: The Debate Club application.
Information we collect
- What you send us. If you fill in our topic-suggestion form or volunteer form, or email us, we receive what you type — which may include your name and email address.
- Session recordings. Our Saturday debates are recorded on Zoom. The recording captures your voice, your Zoom display name, and anything you type in the session chat. Cameras are off; we do not record video of participants.
- Voice matching, on our own machine. So that a returning speaker keeps the same animated character across weeks, we compute a numeric voice signature from session audio. This runs entirely on a local computer. It is not sent to any third-party service, and it is not used to identify you anywhere outside The Debate Club.
- Website analytics. This site does not run advertising trackers.
How we use it
- To run the weekly debate and tell you when it is happening.
- To choose the topics the community votes for.
- To publish recordings and short clips, with the speaker’s name shown, to our YouTube channel and social accounts. This is the point of the club: speakers are credited for what they said.
Our use of YouTube API Services
The Debate Club uses software of its own to upload our own recordings and clips to our own YouTube channel. That software uses YouTube API Services. It is used by us, for our own channel, and is not offered to anyone else.
- By using our uploading tool you also agree to be bound by the YouTube Terms of Service.
- Google’s handling of any data it receives is described in the Google Privacy Policy.
- What we access. Only our own channel. The tool is authorised by a Debate Club channel administrator and uses that authorisation solely to upload videos, upload caption tracks, and set the title, description and publication time of videos we ourselves produced. It does not read viewer data, does not access anyone else’s channel, and is not offered to the public.
- What we store. An OAuth refresh token for our own channel, kept on a local machine so the tool can upload without a person re-authorising every time. No end-user Google data is collected, stored or shared.
- Revoking access. The authorising administrator can revoke our tool’s access to their Google account at any time via the Google security settings page. Revoking it immediately and permanently stops the tool from using the API.
Being featured, and opting out
We publish short clips of contributions, with the speaker’s name on them, and the moderator says so at the start of every session. If you would rather not be featured, say so in the session chat or email us — we will honour it permanently, and you can still take part in the debate. If a clip of you is already published and you want it taken down, email us and we will remove it.
Deleting your data
Email thedebateclub.info@gmail.com and ask. We will delete your voice signature, your stored contact details, and any published clip featuring you. Recordings already uploaded to YouTube can be removed from our channel on request. We do not require you to explain why.
Who we share it with
Nobody, other than the platforms we publish on (YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn) and the tools we run the community with (Zoom, Meetup, WhatsApp, Google Forms). We do not sell data and we do not run advertising.
Children
The Debate Club is intended for adults. We do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 16.
Changes
If this policy changes materially we will update the date at the top and note it in the community.