Cookie Policy

We use secure cookies to verify who you are and keep you logged in as you navigate between your Home Feed, the Global Map, the AI Studio and other pages.

• Session Management: We use AWS Cognito to issue encrypted authentication tokens. These cookies ensure that another user cannot impersonate your account or access your private settings.
• Spam & Bot Prevention: We deploy technologies to detect automated bots and malicious scraping. This helps us ensure that post views, likes, and map location votes are generated by real humans.
• Age Verification & Safety: If you do not meet our minimum age requirement (13 years old) during registration, we place a temporary 24-hour essential cookie (age_gate_failed) on your device. This lock prevents repeated registration attempts, ensuring we comply with international child safety laws (such as the GDPR and COPPA) by strictly blocking the collection of data from minors.

We use your browser's Local Storage to remember the choices you make on the platform, saving you from having to re-enter them every time you visit.

• User Interface Settings: Remembering your preference for Light, Dark, or System theme displays, as well as your selected platform language.
• Map View States: Remembering if you have acknowledged the "Interactive Map" usage warnings, so we do not interrupt your browsing experience repeatedly.
• View Tracking (Session Storage): To provide highly accurate metrics for creators, we temporarily note which posts you have viewed in your current tab's Session Storage. This prevents duplicate views from being counted if you scroll up and down the feed.
• Cookie Consent: We must use a small local storage item to remember whether you have accepted or rejected non-essential cookies.

If you upgrade to a Premium tier, our payment processor (Stripe) sets strictly necessary cookies to facilitate the transaction. These cookies are critical for rendering the payment portal, detecting fraudulent credit card attempts, and complying with international banking security standards. You can learn more in Stripe's Cookie Policy.

We utilize Google Analytics to measure traffic and engagement. Google Analytics places cookies on your device to report on user interactions, such as:

• Which pages you visit (e.g., your Home Feed vs. the Global Map).
• How long you spend on the platform.
• General demographic and geographic data (derived from anonymized IP addresses).

These cookies collect information in an aggregated, anonymous form. You have the right to opt out of analytics cookies through our Cookie Consent Manager. If you disable these cookies, we will not know when you have visited our site, which limits our ability to monitor its performance.

We partner with Google AdSense to deliver advertisements within your content feeds. Google AdSense and its certified advertising partners use advertising cookies to serve ads based on your prior visits to Demotect and other websites on the internet.

• Personalization: If you grant consent for marketing cookies, Google and its partners will use cookies to show you personalized ads that are relevant to your interests.
• Non-Personalized Ads: If you reject marketing cookies, you will still see advertisements on Demotect to support the platform, but they will be contextual (based on the content of the page you are viewing) rather than targeted to your specific user profile.

Advertising networks often use tracking pixels and cookies to build a profile of your interests across multiple, unaffiliated websites. Under certain privacy laws (such as the CCPA/CPRA in California), allowing these third-party trackers to operate on our website may constitute "sharing" your personal information. You can opt out of this cross-site tracking at any time using our Cookie Consent Manager, your browser's tracking protection, or via a Global Privacy Control (GPC) signal.

Our Global Map is powered by Mapbox, and our location search relies on Komoot Photon (OpenStreetMap).

Rendering 3D architectural data and map tiles globally is highly data-intensive. To make zooming and panning extremely fast, and to save your cellular bandwidth on mobile devices, Mapbox utilizes your browser's local cache to store map tiles you have already downloaded. This caching is strictly for functional performance and is not used to track your identity across the web.

When a user provides a source URL for an image's copyright attribution, or when you click on external links in user biographies, you will be directed away from Demotect. Please note that we do not control the cookies or tracking technologies used by these external, third-party websites. We encourage you to read the privacy and cookie policies of any external site you visit.

You have the right to decide whether to accept or reject non-essential cookies. You can exercise your cookie rights at any time by opening our Cookie Consent Manager.

This tool allows you to select which categories of cookies you accept or reject. Please note that Essential & Functional Technologies cannot be rejected, as they are strictly necessary to provide you with secure authentication, payment processing, and core platform services.

Most modern web browsers allow you to control cookies through their settings preferences. You can configure your browser to accept all cookies, reject all cookies, or notify you when a cookie is set.

If you choose to configure your browser to reject all cookies, you may still visit our website, but your access to critical functionality—such as logging into your account, using the AI Studio, or saving posts—will be severely restricted or entirely broken. To learn how to manage cookies on your specific browser, please visit the browser developer's official help documentation.

Global Privacy Control (GPC): We fully support and honor Global Privacy Control signals. GPC is a browser-level signal that allows you to universally opt out of having your data "sold" or "shared" for targeted advertising. If our systems detect a GPC signal from your browser or extension, we will automatically respect it and disable all non-essential marketing, analytics, and cross-site tracking cookies without requiring you to manually use our Cookie Consent Manager.

Do Not Track (DNT): Some older web browsers include a "Do Not Track" feature. Because there currently is no uniform industry standard for recognizing and implementing DNT signals, we currently rely on GPC and our explicit Cookie Consent Manager to manage your opt-out preferences.

In addition to our internal controls, you can opt out of interest-based and targeted advertising from third-party networks globally. To do so, you can utilize the following industry-standard tools:

• Google Ad Settings: You can opt out of Google's personalized advertising directly via the Google My Ad Center.
• Digital Advertising Alliance (DAA): Users in the US can use the DAA WebChoices Tool.
• Network Advertising Initiative (NAI): You can use the NAI Opt-Out Tool.
• European Interactive Digital Advertising Alliance (EDAA): Users in the EU can use Your Online Choices.