RantOut is built around a public pseudonymous identity and private account information.
This page explains what information RantOut handles, what other members can see, how matching and private conversations work, and how information supports safety and platform operations.
Your account
When you create an account, RantOut may store information such as:
- Email address.
- Password hash or external sign-in account information.
- Authentication sessions.
- Account creation time.
- Login and activity timestamps.
- Account status.
Your email is account information. It is not shown as your public RantOut identity.
Your RantOut identity
Other members may see your RantOut username and selected avatar. Depending on your settings, they may also see your country and gender.
Country and gender can be hidden from other members through your Account settings. A pseudonymous username does not guarantee that nobody can identify you from the details you share.
Rants and activity
When you publish a rant, RantOut stores the information you provide, including:
- Title and description.
- Category.
- What kind of response or interaction you are looking for.
- Publication and expiry information.
Public eligible rants may appear on RantOut's homepage, Explore experience, matching results, or other public RantOut surfaces, including to people who are not signed in. Readers may copy or share public content outside RantOut.
You can remove your own rant from public view. Removing or expiring a rant does not automatically remove conversations that were already created through an accepted message request.
Reactions and profile Activity
RantOut stores your current reaction to a rant: I Relate, I Hear You or Been There. You can switch or remove it. A reaction does not send a message request or open a chat.
You choose whether your reaction activity is visible on your public profile. When enabled, people can see eligible public rants you’ve reacted to and which reaction you chose. Private, expired or removed content does not become visible through this setting.
When activity is hidden, your reaction still contributes to aggregate counts, but your identity is not shown in public reaction-member lists. Reaction notifications do not identify who reacted.
Message requests
A member may send one introductory text as a message request. The recipient can Accept or Ignore it, or use Block and Report. Additional chat messages become available only after acceptance. RantOut stores requests and their accepted, ignored or cancelled state.
Matching
RantOut uses technology to help identify rants that may describe similar experiences.
For matching, rant text such as the title and description may be processed by the configured embedding or AI service provider. RantOut stores a numerical representation of rant content used for similarity matching. We do not intentionally include your account email in the text sent for rant similarity matching.
Country may also be used privately to help rank similar rants, even when you hide it from your public profile.
Matching is a suggestion, not a guarantee that two experiences are identical or that another member will want to talk. The conversation is between members.
Private chats and images
After a message request is accepted, members can exchange private text messages and supported images.
Private chats are not part of the public RantOut feed. Chats are stored by RantOut and are not end-to-end encrypted.
Messages and images are stored so that RantOut can provide conversation history, safety tools, and moderation. A recipient may copy material you send.
Images are processed before storage and currently have metadata such as EXIF/GPS removed by the platform's image-processing flow. Visible details in an image can still identify you.
Hiding is not deleting
You can hide a conversation from your own Chats list. Hiding a conversation does not delete:
- The conversation.
- Messages or images.
- The other member's copy or view.
A new message can cause a hidden conversation to return to the normal Chats list. Normal members cannot currently delete individual chat messages or whole conversation histories.
Rant Pulse
Rant Pulse uses aggregated country-level public activity. Participation is optional and off by default.
To qualify, you must make your country publicly visible and separately choose to participate in Rant Pulse.
Rant Pulse does not display your username, individual rant, city, GPS location or exact posting event. Countries only appear when the platform's minimum aggregation threshold is met.
Turning off public country visibility disables your Rant Pulse participation. Making your country public again does not automatically opt you back in.
Safety and platform operations
Members can block another member and report a rant, user, chat message or chat image.
RantOut may access stored platform content when reasonably necessary to investigate reports, enforce platform rules, protect the service, or meet legal obligations. Access to private conversations requires a stated reason and is audited.
When content is removed from member view for moderation reasons, RantOut may retain the original content internally as evidence.
Technical and security data
RantOut processes session information, login and activity timestamps, security and rate-limit information, and administrative audit records to operate and protect the service.
The application uses the connection IP address for temporary, in-memory authentication rate limits. Administrative audit records include the acting administrator, session, action, target and time, with limited action-specific details.
How information is used
RantOut uses information to:
- Create and secure accounts.
- Provide public rant functionality and similarity matching.
- Operate message requests and private chat.
- Display privacy-controlled profile information.
- Provide aggregated activity features.
- Prevent spam and abuse.
- Investigate reports and moderate content.
- Maintain platform security.
- Diagnose and improve service reliability.
Retention
RantOut keeps information for as long as reasonably necessary to operate the platform, maintain safety and integrity, resolve abuse or disputes, and satisfy applicable requirements.
Some important current product behaviors:
- Rant expiry does not automatically delete an accepted chat.
- Hiding a conversation does not delete it.
- Members cannot currently delete individual chat messages or whole chat histories.
- Moderation records and original moderated content may be retained.
Your controls
Current RantOut controls include:
- Choosing whether country and gender are public.
- Separately opting into Rant Pulse.
- Removing your own public rant.
- Cancelling eligible message requests or choosing Ignore.
- Blocking members and reporting content.
- Hiding or restoring chats.
Learn more about these controls in Safety on RantOut.
Service providers
RantOut may rely on service providers for hosting and infrastructure, sign-in, AI/embeddings, storage and other technical services. The application supports Google sign-in and uses OpenAI for embeddings when configured. Rant titles and descriptions are sent for embedding processing when that service is enabled.
Changes
RantOut may update this Privacy page as the service changes. Use the current published version displayed on the site.