Your data is yours.
Plain English: we don’t collect more than we need, we don’t sell it, and we don’t train AI on it.
We don't sell your data. Not to advertisers, not to data brokers, not to anyone.
We don't train AI models on your posts, photos, comments, or pet profiles.
We don't share your email or membership info with other clubs unless you choose to publish it.
We don't see what you give Stripe — we only get a verified yes/no back.
We do use Stripe to verify that paid members are real, identifiable people — but Stripe holds the ID, not us.
We pay Stripe ~$1.50 per verification — that cost is why verification is a paid step, not a free one.
You can delete your account at any time and your data is removed.
Why we care who's a real person
A community is only as good as the people in it. Bots, AI agents pretending to be users, troll accounts, and people running multiple fake identities all corrode the trust that makes a club worth joining.
Free members can join AADC anonymously — you only need an email. But for paid members (who get governance votes, club-creation rights, marketplace access, and more) we want a stronger signal that you’re a real, unique person. That’s where Stripe comes in.
How we use Stripe Identity
When a paid member opts into identity verification, Stripe (a regulated payment company) checks that:
- You’re a real, unique person (not an AI or duplicate account)
- Your name and date of birth match a government-issued ID
- The selfie photo matches the photo on the ID
Stripe then sends us back a single answer: verified or not verified. That’s it. We don’t see your ID, your selfie, your address, your ID number, or any biometric data — ever.
Why verification costs money
Stripe charges us a fee for every identity verification (about $1.50 per check). That cost is passed through to the verification step — we’re not making money on verification, we’re paying Stripe.
What you get in return: more of the Club’s activities and website features unlock for verified members. Governance voting, club creation, marketplace, member directories opt-in, premium content, partner-program participation. The verification fee is the price of trust in a community that aims to keep bots, AI agents, and duplicate accounts out.
The data flow is one-way
When you go through Stripe’s verification form, you give Stripe a lot of information — ID document, selfie, sometimes an address. We don’t see any of that. We don’t see the form, we don’t see what you typed, we don’t see what you uploaded.
What Stripe sends back to AADC: a verification result (verified / not verified), and the name and date of birth that match your ID. That’s the entire data exchange.
We don’t hand any of your data to advertisers, data brokers, or analytics resellers. We may, at some point in the future, publish aggregate, anonymous group statistics — for example, “AADC has X members in Y states with Z average breeds per household.” That kind of summary data is fine; what we will never do is pass along anything personal or identifying.
When you leave AADC, we lose control
If you click a link to another website (a partner organization’s site, a news article, a YouTube video, a rescue’s donation page), the site you land on can collect anything its operator chooses to collect — cookies, IP address, location, browsing history. We have no influence over that.
Embedded videos and social posts are also third-party beacons. When you play an embedded YouTube, TikTok, or Vimeo clip on an AADC page, the embedded service can set cookies and log your viewing session — even if you never leave AADC.
We’ve adopted a “click-to-load”approach for video embeds (the same idea behind DuckDuckGo’s Duck Player). Instead of loading YouTube’s iframe immediately, we show a thumbnail placeholder. No request is sent to YouTube until you click play. When you do, we load the iframe at the privacy-enhanced youtube-nocookie.com domain, with no-referrer set so YouTube can’t see which AADC page you came from, and a sandboxed iframe so the video can’t do anything beyond playing the video.
Once you click play, YouTube does still receive your IP, user-agent, and viewing session — we cannot prevent that without proxying every video stream through our own servers, which would be costly and break frequently. What we can do is make sure the choice to load the embed is yours, not automatic, and we have.
Live example — an AADC video embed:
Inspect this page in your browser’s network tab: you’ll see no requests to youtube.com until you click the play button above.
- · Your government-issued ID image
- · Your selfie / biometric data
- · Your card & billing details
- · Verification audit logs
Held under PCI DSS Level 1, EU-US Data Privacy Framework, and Stripe’s privacy policy. Biometric data is deleted within 1 year.
- · Your email address
- · Your username and display name
- · A “verified: yes/no” flag from Stripe
- · Your verified first name and date of birth (only if you completed verification)
- · The content you chose to publish (posts, photos, pets)
No biometric data, no ID document, no card numbers, no CVV. Ever.
- Sell, rent, or trade your personal data to anyone.
- Train AI / large-language models on your private content.
- Share your email or contact info with other members or clubs without your explicit action.
- Track you across the rest of the web with third-party advertising pixels.
- Use dark patterns to keep you from deleting your account.
- Lock your data in. You can export it and walk away whenever you like.
So how does AADC make money?
Membership dues. That’s it. Free members are free forever. Paid members fund the platform, and a portion of every paid membership goes to dog welfare organizations chosen by the membership. See “Where Your Dues Go” for the breakdown.
For the legal version with all the formal details: Privacy Policy · Disclaimer
Stripe’s own privacy policy: stripe.com/privacy