PRIVACY POLICY · WHAT THE RECORD CONTAINS
EFFECTIVE AUGUST 8, 2026
THE SHORT VERSION: we record only people who explicitly swear in, only while the game is on. Audio is transcribed and thrown away — never kept. The papers of a Hearing — transcripts, scores, votes — expire from our systems within days. Two things last: the messages the bot posts to your Discord server, which your server controls and can delete like any message; and The Annals, a career ledger of wins and averages kept per server, holding no words you said, which lapses after 400 days away and is struck on request. No ads, no analytics, no tracking, no selling anything to anyone, ever.
VERDICT is an entertainment service — a voice party game for Discord with an AI judge — reachable as a Discord Activity, a Discord bot, and the companion site at playverdict.gg (which also hosts the browser Web Annex, when in service). This policy describes what data the Service handles.
VERDICT is published by Forge Nine Labs LLC ("we," "us"), a limited liability company organized in the State of Illinois, USA, which is the controller of the data described here. We are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or operated by Discord Inc. Write to us at hail@forgeninelabs.com — that address reaches a human, and it is the right address for any privacy request in this policy.
| DATA | DETAILS |
|---|---|
| Discord identity | When you sign in, Discord gives us your user ID and username/display name via OAuth (identify scope; inside the Activity, also rpc.voice.read for voice-channel context). We do not request, use, or store your avatar, and we never see your email, password, or messages. We use identity to seat you in the courtroom and to put your name on scorecards. Your user ID is also the key to your career record in The Annals below, and is kept for as long as that record stands; the name displayed there is fetched fresh from Discord each time, never stored by us. |
| Voice audio | Captured only from participants who swear in as Advocates, only during their testimony, cross-examination (voir dire) answers, or an open-floor session. Note that convening a Hearing is itself a swear-in — the convener is seated as the first Advocate, and the convene button says so. Audio is streamed for transcription and then discarded — it is never stored durably, never leaves the game machinery except for transcription, and is gone when the Hearing ends. Spectators (the Gallery) are never captured. |
| Game records | Transcripts, scores, rulings, votes, objections, the court's own sealed directives (pre-written lines the game deals out, not anything you said), and session state — kept in our database only long enough to run the game and enter its outcome into The Annals, then deleted automatically within days by expiry. The outcome alone — that you argued, that you won or lost, the numbers you scored — is copied into your career record before the papers expire. |
| Career records (The Annals) | When a Hearing concludes, its outcome is entered into The Annals — a ledger kept per Discord server, keyed to your user ID: Hearings argued, Hearings taken as champion, rounds judged, rulings won, running score totals (including Magnificent Wrongness), contempts, Gallery favour, sustained objections drawn against you, appeals won, and head-to-head tallies against advocates you have repeatedly faced. It holds no audio, no transcript, no quotation, no remark, and no record of which Matters you argued — only counters. Dates are kept coarse (the month you first appeared, the day you last did). The Annals are visible to others in that server. Unlike everything else here they do not expire on a timer of days: they lapse automatically after 400 days without an appearance, and are struck on request — see YOUR CHOICES. |
| Voice-channel presence | We check with Discord whether you are in the Hearing's voice channel when you convene or swear in — an anti-impersonation measure. The check is momentary; nothing about your presence is retained. During testimony the court also reads the room's commotion — counts of brief speaking bursts and how many voices joined them, taken from the speaking indicators Discord already broadcasts. No audio is captured for this, no content is heard, and only the counts (never who) are kept, expiring with the Hearing's other papers. The same counts feed a live coarse gauge shown to the courtroom during testimony and the meter cited in rulings. Separately, while a Hearing is being configured, the configurator's selections (format, mode, clocks, options — never the text of custom Matters, only how many were prepared) are mirrored live to others on the convening screen; the mirror is transient and clears when the gavel is released or lapses. |
| Browser storage | The Web Annex (when in service) keeps a signed session token (which encodes your Discord user ID and display name) and your docket code in your browser's sessionStorage so refreshes don't evict you from the courtroom. We set no cookies and run no analytics or trackers of any kind. |
| Operational logs | Short-lived debugging and abuse-prevention logs (deleted automatically within about two weeks) may include request metadata and identifiers such as your Discord user ID and display name. They never contain your audio. |
The court has clerks. Data is processed by these providers, each only for the purpose stated:
We do not sell, rent, or trade any data. We do not use your data for advertising or to train models. We share data with no one beyond the processors above, unless the law compels it.
The rulings, scorecard images, and recaps the bot posts to your Discord channel are ordinary Discord messages. If your server has a text channel named #verdict, #verdict-records, or #the-record, the bot also mirrors these posts there — a browsable archive your server opted into by creating the channel. All of it persists in your server, governed by Discord's terms and your server's moderators — deleting it is done in Discord, like any message.
Our own copies of a Hearing's papers expire from our systems within days regardless — with one exception, The Annals described above, which stand until they lapse or are struck. The Annals, unlike the mirrored records channel, open themselves the first time a Hearing is held in a server. A server that would rather the court kept no memory may have its Annals dissolved on request — the ledger is emptied, though holding another Hearing there would begin a new one, and standing strikes survive the dissolution. An advocate may have their own record expunged; that also removes the shared head-to-head rows in which they appear, which necessarily changes what their opponents see. Head-to-head tallies are never posted to your channel — they live only in the ledger, where they can still be erased.
The Service is available only to those who may use Discord under its terms: 13 or older, or older still where local law requires. We do not knowingly collect data from children below that age.
The current policy is always posted at playverdict.gg/privacy.html with its effective date above. Material changes will be noted in the Court Circular.