Privacy Policy
What Cold XVI collects, why, which companies see it, and how to make us delete it. Where we send your work somewhere else, we name where.
Last updated: 15 September 2026
This policy explains what Cold XVI collects, why, who else sees it, and how to make us delete it. It covers the Cold XVI application and cold16.com (together, the “Service”), operated by Toggle Media, LLC, a Florida limited liability company (“Toggle Media,” “we,” “us”).
We have tried to write this the way we write everything else here: specifically, and without the vagueness that lets a policy cover anything. Where we send your work to another company, we name the company and say what they are allowed to do with it.
1. What we collect
Your account. Cold XVI signs you in anonymously the first time you open it — an identifier with no name attached, so you can record and score before deciding whether to have an account at all. If you claim a handle, we store the handle, your role (rapper or fan), and an avatar if you upload one. If you protect your account so it survives a lost phone, Apple or Google holds the credential and passes us only a stable identifier.
What you record and write. Audio of your takes, video where you record with the camera on, the lyrics you type, the beat you chose, the resulting scores and their breakdowns, and anything you post — comments, submissions, battle entries.
Your device, if you let it. A push notification token, only if you grant notification permission. You can revoke it in iOS Settings and we stop.
What you bought. If you subscribe to Cold XVI Unlimited, Apple takes the payment and RevenueCat tells our server one thing: whether your subscription is currently active, and when it runs out. That is the whole of what we store about a purchase. We never see your card.
How the app is used. Product analytics — which screens are opened, which features are reached, where people drop out of a flow. These are events about behaviour, not about content: we log that a take was scored, never the bars in it.
Website. If you join the waitlist we store your email address, your social handle if you give one, and a country inferred from your browser’s time zone. We do not use advertising cookies or third-party trackers on cold16.com.
Diagnostics. A debug archive of submitted takes exists so a wrong score can be reproduced and fixed instead of argued about. It is controlled by a server setting, is not on by default, and holds audio plus the scoring parameters — never analytics or account data.
2. Where your content goes
This is the section most policies keep vague, so here it is plainly. Some of what you submit leaves our own infrastructure to be processed. Everyone it reaches is named below.
| What | Who | Why | What they may do with it |
|---|---|---|---|
| The lyrics you type | Our language-model provider — currently OpenAI, previously Google (Gemini) | The wordplay read that produces part of your score, and the safety screen described in §4 | Process it and return a result. Nothing else. We only send this to providers whose API terms forbid training on what we send them and limit retention to abuse monitoring. The provider can change; that rule cannot, and we name the current one here |
| Avatar images, and sampled frames of submitted video | Google (Cloud Vision) | Detecting sexual or illegal imagery before it is shown to other people | Return a classification. Nothing else |
| Audio, video, avatars | Google Cloud Storage | Storage | Store it |
| Account records, scores, comments | Google Cloud SQL | The database | Store it |
| Sign-in, push notifications, analytics | Google (Firebase) | Accounts and delivery | Provide the service |
| Your account identifier, and what you bought | RevenueCat | Running the subscription, and telling our server what you are entitled to | Process it and return entitlement state. Nothing else |
| Your payment | Apple | Billing, renewal and refunds for anything bought in the app | Handle the transaction. We never see your payment details |
| Email, where we send it | Mailgun | Delivering mail you asked for | Deliver it |
Your audio is not sent to any third party for analysis. Scoring runs on our own service, on our own infrastructure. Only typed text and images leave for processing, and only for the two purposes above.
We do not sell your content or your personal information, and we do not license either to anyone for their own model training. Under California law: we have not sold or shared personal information in the preceding twelve months.
3. Training our own scoring engine
We analyze what you submit, and we use it — and data derived from it — to develop, evaluate and improve the Cold XVI scoring engine. That is how the engine gets better at reading a verse, and it is the same right described in §5.4 of the Terms.
This is our own system, on our own infrastructure. It is not the same thing as handing your work to a third party to train theirs, which we do not do.
If you delete your content or your account, we stop using it for this. Measurements already folded into a released version of the engine cannot be unpicked from it — that is a limit of what a trained system is, and we would rather say so than imply a reversal we cannot perform.
4. Automated screening, and where a human sits
Submitted content is screened automatically for the harms described in the Content Standard. We want to be exact about what that system can and cannot do to you.
- It does not decide anything. Where it believes it has found something, it quotes the words and names the person it believes is being harmed, and puts that in front of a person. A human makes every removal and every account decision.
- The one exception is the absolute floor — child sexual abuse material, and flatly unlawful content — where detection hides the content immediately, before review. We would rather tell you this than have you find it.
- Because a person is in the path, no decision affecting your account is made solely by automated means, and where the law gives you a right to human review of an automated decision, that review is the process we already run.
You will be told when your content is removed or your account restricted, what was found, and how to contest it.
5. Why we are allowed to hold it
For users in the UK, EU and other regions with a similar framework, our legal bases are: contract (running the Service you asked for — accounts, scoring, leaderboards); legitimate interests (keeping the platform safe, preventing abuse and cheating, and improving the engine, balanced against your interests); legal obligation (responding to lawful requests and copyright notices); and consent where you gave it — push notifications, and the Label Discovery Program, both of which you can withdraw.
6. Who can see what
Public: your handle, avatar, role, scores on submitted entries, submissions you chose to make public, and your comments. A leaderboard is a public thing.
Private: takes you never submit, drafts in the lyrics pad, verses saved only on your phone, and 1v1 battles, which are visible only to the two people in them.
Never public: your email address, your sign-in credential, your push token, your reports (the person you report is not told who reported them), and who you have blocked.
7. Keeping and deleting
You can delete your account from inside the app — Settings → Delete my account. It removes your account row and, by cascade, your entries, comments, likes, blocks, credits, moderation records and Discovery consent, and it deletes your audio, video and avatar from storage.
Three things deliberately survive, and you should know all three:
- Battles you answered rather than started. Deleting your account does not reach into another person’s history and erase a fight they took part in. Your side of it is de-identified.
- Moderation and copyright records, where we need them to enforce the repeat-infringer policy the law requires us to have, or to answer a legal claim.
- Your subscription, at RevenueCat and at Apple. Deleting your account removes our copy of what you were entitled to. It cannot remove RevenueCat’s customer record or Apple’s record of the transaction — those are theirs, Apple keeps purchase history for its own accounting, and we have no way to reach either. Deleting your account does not cancel a subscription. Cancel it in the App Store first, or it keeps renewing.
Encrypted backups roll off on their own schedule, so deleted material can persist in a backup for a short period before it is overwritten. It is not restored to the Service.
Where a decision has been made about your account, we keep the record of that decision. That is what makes an appeal answerable.
8. Your rights
Wherever you are, you can ask us to give you a copy of what we hold, correct it, or delete it — write to privacy@cold16.com. If you are in the EU/UK you also have the right to object to processing, to restrict it, to portability, and to complain to your local supervisory authority. If you are in California you have the rights to know, delete, correct, and opt out of sale or sharing — and as above, there is nothing to opt out of, because we do neither.
We will not treat you differently for exercising any of this.
9. Children
The Service requires you to be 16 or older, and the Label Discovery Program requires 18 or older. It is not directed at children, and we do not knowingly collect information from anyone under 16. If we learn we have, we delete it and remove the account. If you believe a child is using the Service, write to safety@cold16.com.
10. Where it is processed
We operate on Google Cloud in the United States. If you use the Service from outside the US, your information is transferred to and processed there, under the transfer mechanisms our providers maintain.
11. Security
Content is transmitted over encrypted connections and stored in access-controlled Google Cloud services. The database is not reachable from the public internet. No system is perfect and we will not claim ours is; if we discover a breach affecting you, we will tell you and any regulator that requires it.
12. Changes
We will post any change here with a new date, and tell you in-app or by email if it is material. Continued use after the stated date is acceptance. If you would rather not, delete your account.
13. Contact
Toggle Media, LLC
- privacy@cold16.com — access, correction, deletion, anything in this document
- safety@cold16.com — reports, takedowns, appeals
- legal@cold16.com — legal notices and copyright
- support@cold16.com — everything else
This policy is not legal advice. It describes how the Service actually behaves; where behaviour and this document ever disagree, the document is the bug and we want to hear about it at privacy@cold16.com.