End User Data And Privacy

Your data and privacy

What ProductLift stores about you as an end user on a portal, and what you can do about it.

What's stored

When you create an account on a ProductLift portal:

  • Your email address (used to log in and receive notifications).
  • Your name if you provided one.
  • A unique account identifier.
  • Your votes, posts, and comments on this portal.
  • Timestamps for your activity.

That's it. No tracking profile, no advertising IDs, no behavioral analytics tied to your identity beyond your portal activity.

Who can see what

  • Other customers see your name next to your posts, comments, and votes (depending on the portal owner's settings).
  • The portal owner / team can see your email, votes, posts, and comments.
  • ProductLift, as the platform provider, stores this on EU-based infrastructure.

Your rights

You can:

  • Access your data, download an export yourself from the profile page (see the next section) or ask the portal owner.
  • Correct your name or email, edit your profile.
  • Delete your account yourself, see the next section.
  • Withdraw votes / delete your posts and comments anytime.

Download your data

How to get there: Click your avatar in the top-right → Edit profile → scroll to the Your data card near the bottom → click Download my data.

You get a plain markdown (.md) file containing:

  • Your profile (name, email, account key, member-since date).
  • Every post you authored on this portal (title, body as plain text, URL, vote count, current status).
  • Every comment you posted (body as plain text, timestamp, link to the post).
  • Every vote you cast (target post URL, timestamp).
  • The list of posts you follow.
  • Your identity-change history (email/password changes with source, actor, and old→new values).

Portal admins see the same button when they open your profile in the admin userlist. That way, if you email the portal owner with a GDPR access request instead of doing it yourself, they can hand you the same file. Other members cannot download your export.

The file is generated on request from the live database, so what you see is what the portal currently holds. Nothing is stored server-side.

Delete your account

How to get there: Click your avatar in the top-right → Edit profile → scroll to the Delete account section at the bottom.

Clicking Delete my account and confirming will:

  • Remove your name, email, password, profile photo, notifications, votes, following list, invite record, and social login link.
  • Null the email fields in the identity-change audit log so historical addresses are not preserved in plaintext.
  • Log you out immediately.

Your posts and comments are handled by the same rules described in the next section, Deleting individual posts and comments. In short: your identity is removed from them, but the content itself is kept as [User Deleted] if other people have engaged with it (voted, commented, or the post has moved through the roadmap).

Portal admins can also delete your account for you, and only they have the option to wipe your posts, comments, and votes at the same time. That option exists for spam or junk accounts and is not part of the self-delete flow.

If you are the only admin on a portal, you cannot delete your account, otherwise no one could manage the portal. Instead you either invite another admin first (then delete your account), or delete the whole portal from Settings → Delete.

Deleting individual posts and comments

You can delete your own posts and comments at any time from the post or comment itself. What happens depends on whether other users have engaged with the content:

Posts

  • If nobody else has engaged (no votes from others, no comments, and no admin has moved the post through a status), the post is fully deleted. Row gone.
  • If other people have engaged (someone voted, commented, or an admin changed its status), the post is anonymized:
    • The author link is removed. The post shows as [User Deleted].
    • The title and body are kept so the roadmap still makes sense to the portal owner and the other people who voted for it.
    • Any occurrence of your own name or email address inside the title or body is replaced with [removed] at the moment of deletion.
    • Votes, comments and status history stay.

Comments

  • If the comment has no replies, it is fully deleted.
  • If the comment has replies from other users, the body is replaced with [Content removed by author] and the author link is removed, so the surrounding conversation still makes sense.

The same rules run when your whole account is deleted: each of your posts and comments goes through this individually.

Why we don't fully wipe engaged content (GDPR reasoning)

The right to erasure under Article 17 GDPR covers personal data, meaning data that identifies a natural person. Once we have:

  1. Removed the link between the content and your user account (created_by_user_id set to null, user_id on the comment set to null).
  2. Removed your own name and email from the body of the post.
  3. Displayed the author as [User Deleted] everywhere in the UI.

...the remaining content (the feature request text, a comment reply) no longer identifies you. It is anonymized, not merely pseudonymized. This aligns with the EDPB guidance on anonymization and mirrors how established platforms handle deletion of content that others have relied on (Reddit shows removed content as [deleted], GitHub keeps issue comments after account deletion, Discourse anonymizes rather than removes engaged posts).

The alternative, wiping engaged content entirely, would erase other users' contributions (their votes, their replies, the record of an admin's status decision). That is not required by GDPR and it would break the portal owner's roadmap, which is the whole reason the portal exists.

If you want a specific post or comment gone including the title and body, edit it first (blank out the content or replace it), then delete it. The edit is yours to make and is honored by the platform.

What we scrub, exactly (audit reference)

For reviewers doing a GDPR audit, here is precisely what leaves your database record when you delete your account or a piece of content. This is the source of truth; if the code and this list disagree, the code is wrong.

On account delete (safeDelete):

  • Deleted rows: your record's name, email, password, remember token, hash-login token, profile photo files (S3), notifications, votes, following list, invite record, social login link, password reset tokens, login attempts, email history, AI logs, app events, knowledge base feedback, product feedback, Nova feedback and conversations, poll votes, mention unsubscribes, changelog reactions, search history.
  • Nulled fields: user_id on poll_options (poll option stays because it belongs to the poll), user_id on status_histories (transition stays because it belongs to the post), cast_by_user_id on votes where you were a proxy voter on behalf of someone else, old_value / new_value / ip / user_agent on user_identity_changes.
  • Posts and comments: each one goes through the per-record rules above (delete if orphan, anonymize with body-scrub if engaged).
  • The users row itself is soft-deleted with all identifying columns nulled. The row is kept only so that historical foreign keys (comments, votes, transitions attributed to a now-anonymous user) do not orphan.

On individual post delete (author-initiated): see the Posts subsection above.

On individual comment delete (author-initiated): see the Comments subsection above.

What is deliberately NOT scrubbed:

  • Content written by other users that quotes or mentions you — that is their speech, not your personal data on our side. Contact the portal owner if you need it removed.
  • Content in AI outputs generated from your data that already left our systems (e.g. a summary emailed to an admin) — we can only control what we hold.
  • The fact that a row was anonymized (created_by_user_id IS NULL in an engaged post). This is metadata about the anonymization event, not about you.

What happens when the portal owner exports / migrates data

If the portal owner migrates to a different platform, your data may move with the portal as part of that export. The portal owner is the controller of your data, your relationship is with them, not with ProductLift directly. Their privacy policy applies.

What happens when the portal owner deletes the portal

Your account on that portal is deleted with the rest of the data. If you had an account on multiple portals, each is independent.

Cookies

A ProductLift portal uses functional cookies only, session, security, and language preferences. No tracking or advertising cookies.

Questions

For questions about your data on a specific portal, contact the portal owner. For platform-level questions about ProductLift itself, email support@productlift.dev.