A ceremony stores its title, categories, and the display names of whoever joins it. Nominations and ballots are stored against a guest id so we can enforce one vote per guest per category and stop self-voting, but that id is never joined back to a display name anywhere results are shown, including to the host. We do not require a guest email address to join, nominate, or vote.
Joining never asks for an email address and never will. After you’re in a ceremony you can volunteer one to be reminded before the show starts and to be sent the recap afterwards. If you do, we store that address against your seat in that one ceremony and use it for nothing else: no marketing list, no other ceremony, no sharing or selling it, and no passing it to the host or anyone else in the room. Every message we send carries a one-tap unsubscribe that works without signing in, and you can clear the address from the ceremony page itself. Deleting the ceremony deletes it too. Asking the recap page to mail you a copy is separate and keeps nothing: that address is held only long enough to send the one email, then dropped from the record of the send.
Reporting a ceremony does not require an account, and the email address on the form is optional. If you leave one we use it only to answer you about that report. We also store a one-way hash of your IP address, never the address itself, purely so we can tell a stream of bad-faith reports from a room full of people who all noticed the same thing. Reports are kept after the ceremony they are about is deleted, because a record of what happened is the point of having them, and they are never shown to the host or to anyone in the room.
We set a small session cookie so a guest’s browser stays recognized as “joined” for that ceremony, and a separate one for a host’s dashboard session. Neither is used for advertising or cross-site tracking, and neither outlives the ceremony they belong to.
We do not run analytics or advertising scripts on any guest or host page, and we do not load any third-party script or asset in your browser. Payment, when a host purchases a Ceremony Pass or Pro, is handled entirely by our merchant of record; we never see or store card numbers.
A host can ask an outside language model to draft roast one-liners for a category. It is the only feature in Yearlies that sends anything about a real person to another company, so here is exactly what happens. Nothing is sent unless a host presses the button, and the first press asks permission and names the company receiving it. If a host never presses it, nothing about your ceremony ever leaves our servers.
When a host does press it, three things go for that one category: the category’s title, the nominees’ display names, and the evidence the room filed against them. Nothing else. Not ballots, not who nominated whom, not email addresses, not other categories, not the results. A host can also choose to send it without the names, in which case we substitute placeholders for every name the ceremony holds, including inside the evidence text. We are honest about the limit of that: the evidence is free text your friends wrote, so a nickname or spelling we do not hold would still be sent as typed.
The model only ever suggests. Nothing it writes appears in the show or the recap unless the host approves that specific line. The permission is recorded per ceremony, alongside the name of the company it was given about, so it never silently carries over to a different one, and a host can withdraw it at any time from the roast desk.
Deletion is self-service and immediate. A host can delete any single ceremony from its dashboard, which permanently removes that ceremony’s categories, nominations, ballots, guest list, reactions, and recap link from our servers. A signed-in host can also delete their whole account from the settings page, which removes the account’s email address and every ceremony the account owns in the same way. Neither action can be undone. Payment records are the one exception: the record of a purchase is kept for bookkeeping and legal reasons, detached from the deleted ceremony and account. Anything unclear, or a deletion request you can’t make yourself (for example, you were a guest, not the host): write to hello@yearlies.app and we handle it by hand.