Privacy Policy

Last updated: August 24, 2026

Underdogs Battles is a music discovery platform where independent tracks compete in head-to-head battles and community rankings. This Privacy Policy explains the information processed when you use the website, create an account, vote, or connect a YouTube channel.

When you create an Underdogs Battles account, we store the information needed to provide and secure it. This may include your username, email address, password hash and other authentication information, account creation date, session information, and security-related timestamps. We do not store your plain-text password.

Underdogs Battles uses a transactional email provider to deliver account verification and security messages. The provider may process the destination email address and technical delivery information only as needed to send and protect those messages.

Artists may optionally connect a YouTube account through Google OAuth. Underdogs Battles requests YouTube read-only access using the scope https://www.googleapis.com/auth/youtube.readonly.

This access is used to identify the YouTube channel controlled by the user, retrieve its channel ID and public metadata, retrieve uploads from that verified channel, let the artist select their own music for import, and prevent someone from claiming an artist profile they do not control. The YouTube channel ID is used as a stable identity. A matching channel or artist name alone never grants ownership.

The requested permission is read-only. It does not allow Underdogs Battles to:

• upload or delete videos;
• edit videos or change channel settings;
• publish comments; or
• otherwise modify your YouTube account.

Access and refresh tokens may be stored when necessary to maintain the YouTube connection. Stored YouTube tokens are encrypted and are used only to provide the connected YouTube features described in this policy. Authentication keys and other private implementation secrets are not exposed to users or placed in public song records.

When an artist imports music from YouTube, Underdogs Battles may store the YouTube video ID and URL, video title, channel ID, channel name, thumbnail and other public video metadata, the association with an artist profile, and user-edited information such as genre, language, or a cleaned song title. Public YouTube information and edited music metadata may appear publicly on Underdogs Battles as part of artist profiles, battles, search, and rankings.

Administrators may add publicly available YouTube music to populate the discovery platform even when the artist has not created an account. These artist profiles may initially be unclaimed. If the real artist later verifies the correct YouTube channel, they may receive management access to the existing profile.

We process limited technical, session, and network information needed to operate voting, enforce rate limits, prevent vote manipulation and abuse, protect forms from bots, and maintain site integrity. The application uses a signed anonymous visitor cookie and may store short-lived, one-way pseudonymous hashes for security controls. Raw IP addresses are not written to the application database.

The website uses Cloudflare infrastructure for hosting, database services, network delivery, and security. Cloudflare Turnstile is used on protected actions to help identify automated abuse. Cloudflare is an independent service provider and processes information according to its own applicable terms and privacy practices.

Information is used to operate the service, authenticate accounts, verify artist ownership, allow artists to import their music, display artist and song profiles, run battles and rankings, investigate reports, prevent fraud and abuse, maintain security, and improve the reliability and usefulness of Underdogs Battles.

Underdogs Battles does not sell users' Google account data. Information may be processed by infrastructure and service providers only where necessary to operate, secure, and support the service, or when disclosure is required for security or legal reasons. Public song and channel metadata is displayed as part of the platform as described above.

Underdogs Battles' use and transfer of information received from Google APIs will adhere to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements.

Users may request disconnection or use account controls made available by Underdogs Battles to disconnect their YouTube connection. Disconnecting prevents future use of the stored connection, but does not automatically remove public song metadata or legitimate historical battle records already present on the platform.

You can independently review or revoke Underdogs Battles' access at any time from your Google Account connections. Revoking permission stops future authorized access through the revoked connection. You may still need to request deletion of information already stored by Underdogs Battles.

Information is retained for as long as reasonably needed to operate and secure the service, provide account and artist features, preserve legitimate platform records, resolve abuse or rights concerns, and meet applicable requirements. Users may request deletion of personal account information. Public song metadata and aggregate or historical battle statistics may be retained separately where needed to preserve platform and ranking integrity.

Underdogs Battles is not intended for children under 13, and we do not knowingly design the service to collect personal information from children under 13.

This Privacy Policy may be updated as Underdogs Battles evolves. The date shown near the top indicates when the policy was last updated. Material changes to how connected Google data is used will be disclosed before that data is used for a new purpose.

For privacy-related requests, contact us through the contact information provided on the website. Please do not send passwords, OAuth tokens, or other account secrets in a request.