Rebuttal is a debate practice app published by Rebuttal Studios LLC (New Jersey, USA). This policy explains what happens to the information you put into it. It is written to be read, not to be skimmed past.
The short version. Rebuttal has two halves, and they collect very different amounts of information.
- Practising on your own — against the AI, or passing one phone between two people — needs no account and no personal details at all. Your history stays on your device. The only thing that leaves it is the text of the debate, sent to an AI service so the app can argue back and score you.
- Versus, the online mode, needs an account: a username you choose, a password, and optionally an email address. Your debates with other players are stored on our server, because both players have to be able to read them.
There is no advertising, no analytics SDK, no crash reporting service, and no tracking of you across other apps or websites. Nothing is sold or shared for marketing, ever.
Part 1 — Practising on your own
What is collected
Nothing that identifies you. No sign-up, no email, no name, no phone number, no advertising identifier. You can use this half of the app forever without telling us anything about yourself.
Debate content
To generate an opponent's arguments and to score a finished debate, Rebuttal sends the text of your debate to an AI language model over the internet.
What is sent: the debate motion, the arguments you write or dictate, and the opponent's previous replies. Nothing else — no device identifier, no location, no contact details, no name.
How it is sent: requests go to a small server we operate (a Cloudflare Worker), which forwards them to an AI provider. That server exists so API credentials never have to be stored inside the app. It does not keep a copy of your solo debates.
Who processes it: the AI providers are Groq and, when Groq's capacity is exhausted, OpenRouter. The forwarding server is hosted by Cloudflare. Your debate text is handled by these companies under their own privacy policies, linked here and worth reading if this matters to you. We do not control their retention.
Practical advice: please do not type personal, sensitive, or confidential information into a debate. Argue about ideas, not about your private life.
What stays on your device
Your solo debate history — motions, scores, verdicts, feedback, dates, and your practice rating — is saved only on your device, in the app's own storage. It is never uploaded. It is what powers your win rate, best score and daily streak, all calculated on your device.
You can erase it at any time from within the app. Deleting Rebuttal deletes it permanently.
Part 2 — Versus (online play)
This half needs an account, and it is where information about you is stored on our server. If you never open the Versus tab, none of it applies to you.
What an account holds
| What | Why | Required? |
|---|---|---|
| Username | It is how other players see and find you. It is public to anyone you play. | Yes |
| Password | Stored only as a salted PBKDF2 hash. We never store or see the password itself. | Yes |
| Email address | Its only purpose is resetting a forgotten password. | No — optional |
| Rating and record | Your Versus rating, games played and won. | Automatic |
| Your debates | Motions, every turn both players wrote, and the verdict. | As you play |
| Last-active time | Powers the "online now" dot. See below. | Automatic |
Email is optional and we mean it. You can create an account without one. The trade-off is that there is then no way to recover a forgotten password, and the app says so plainly at sign-up. We ask for it for exactly one reason and use it for exactly that reason.
Being found by email is off by default. There is a switch in Account settings to let someone add you as a friend by typing your email address. It is opt-in and starts switched off, because if any address were a lookup key, "add a friend" would become a way to test which addresses have accounts.
What other players can see
- Your username and your Versus rating. Both are visible to anyone you play or send a friend request to, to anyone who sees a challenge you post to the open lobby, and on the leaderboards described below.
- Everything you write in a debate with them. Obviously — it is a debate.
- Whether you are online right now, but only to people you have accepted as friends. See the next section.
Other players never see your email address, and there is no way for them to search for it unless you have switched the option above on.
Leaderboards
The app shows two ranked lists: one of your friends, and a global one of the highest-rated players. Both show a username, a rating, and a number of games played — nothing else. You appear on the global list only once you have finished at least one rated online debate, and players you have blocked, or who have blocked you, never appear to you.
Leaderboards never show whether anyone is online, and never show anyone's email address.
"Online now"
Our server records the time you last used the app, so friends can see a green dot next to your name and know whether you can answer a live, timed challenge before it expires in a few minutes.
Two limits on this, both deliberate:
- It is only ever published as yes-or-no. Other players are told "online" or "not online". They are never shown a time, and never told when you were last in the app.
- It is only shown to people you have accepted as friends. Strangers in the open lobby are never shown it — not even indirectly. Our server checks it to decide whether a timed game can start fairly, and answers only that question.
Friends, blocking and reporting
- Adding a friend requires the other person to accept. Nobody can send you a challenge until you have accepted them.
- Blocking someone hides them from you and you from them, ends any debate in progress between you, and cancels anything pending.
- Reporting someone stores your report — who reported whom, the debate or lobby motion in question, and what you wrote — so a person can read it and act. Reports are kept indefinitely and are read by a human. Blocking is the instant remedy and is separate.
The open lobby
You can post a debate motion to a public lobby for any player to accept, and you can accept motions posted by other people.
Anything you post there is public to every player in the app, along with your username and rating. Do not put anything in a motion that you would not put on a noticeboard — and never a link, a handle, or contact details of any kind.
- Every motion is checked automatically before it is published. If the check cannot be performed, the motion is not posted at all.
- Motions that several different players report are hidden from the lobby while a human reviews them.
- Playing a stranger from the lobby does not make you friends and does not let them contact you afterwards.
- You are never shown to strangers as online, and nothing anyone posts can appear in your inbox or notify you. You only ever meet someone here by choosing to post or choosing to accept.
Safety checks on what players write
Every turn written in an online debate, and every motion posted to the lobby, is sent to an AI safety filter before the other player can see it. It looks for abuse aimed at a person, slurs, threats, sexual content, and contact details. Forceful argument about the motion is allowed — that is the whole point of the app.
This is an automated filter and it is not perfect. Block and report are there for what it misses.
Deleting your account
You can delete your account from Account settings in the app. When you do:
- Your username, email address and password are erased.
- Your account is marked deleted and stops appearing anywhere in the app, including on leaderboards.
- Debates you played with other people are kept, because they belong to your opponents as much as to you, and deleting them would tear holes in other people's history. Your name is no longer attached to them in the app.
- Reports filed about conduct are kept, so a record of abuse cannot be erased by deleting the account that caused it.
Voice dictation
If you use the microphone button, Rebuttal uses Apple's built-in speech recognition to turn what you say into text.
Your speech audio may be sent to Apple's servers to be transcribed. That is Apple's service, not ours, and it is governed by Apple's Privacy Policy. Rebuttal receives only the resulting text; it does not record, store or transmit audio itself, and no recording is kept on your device.
The microphone is active only while dictation is switched on, and stops when you tap the button again, send your argument, leave the debate, or switch away from the app.
You can refuse or later revoke microphone and speech permission in Settings › Privacy & Security. Rebuttal remains fully usable by typing.
Notifications
Rebuttal can notify you about a friend request, a challenge, your turn in a debate, and a finished debate, as well as remind you to keep a daily streak going.
These are local notifications, scheduled on your device when the app checks for news. The app may register a device token for future remote notifications; that token identifies a device, not a person, and no remote notifications are currently sent.
You can turn notifications off at any time in Settings › Notifications.
Technical information
Our server sees the IP address of requests, as every internet server does. It is used to limit abuse — capping sign-ups and failed logins — and is not used to build a profile, is not combined with your debates, and is not sold or shared. Cloudflare, our host, also processes it under its own policy.
What Rebuttal never does
- It does not sell, rent, or share your information with anyone for marketing.
- It does not show advertisements.
- It does not track you across other apps or websites.
- It does not build an advertising profile of you.
- It does not collect location, contacts, photos, health, or financial data.
- It does not require an account for the practice half of the app.
Children
Rebuttal is intended for students and a general audience. It is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from them. If you believe a child under 13 has created an account, contact us at the address below and we will delete it.
Parents and teachers should know four things, all described above:
- Debate text is sent to a third-party AI service to be answered and scored.
- Dictation sends speech audio to Apple for transcription.
- The online mode lets students write to each other. Contact requires mutual acceptance, except in the open lobby, where a motion is public to all players and either person chooses to start the game. Every message and motion is filtered automatically, and block and report are always available.
- Friends are shown whether a student is in the app right now, as a yes/no only, never a history of when they were online.
Students should be told not to type personal details into a debate or a motion.
AI-generated content
The opponent's arguments and the judge's scores are produced by an AI language model. They may be wrong. The AI opponent may state facts, statistics, or studies that are inaccurate or that do not exist, and its scoring is an automated estimate rather than an authoritative assessment of your ability. Rebuttal is a practice tool, and nothing it produces should be relied on as factual information.
Your rights
You can see the information held about you from within the app, correct your username and email in Account settings, and delete your account and its personal details at any time. If you are in a place with additional rights over your data — for example the EEA or California — write to the address below and we will honour them.
Changes to this policy
If this policy changes, the "last updated" date above changes with it. If a change materially affects what happens to your information, it will be noted in the app's release notes.
Contact
Questions about this policy, requests about your data, or reports of a child's account can be sent to: