Privacy

The Bipolar Seller is run by OriginalToyStore. Here is exactly what it keeps, and how AI is used.

• Your account: display name, email address and a one-way hash of your password. Your email is never shown to anyone. Anything else on your profile — what you sell, what you can help with, your area, links — is optional and public.
• What you post: threads and replies, shown publicly under your display name — except in the members’ lounge, which only signed-in members can see and which search engines and FRANK never read. Removed posts are hidden from everyone but kept for moderators.
• Reactions and reputation: who reacted to what, and the reputation that earns, so levels and leaderboards work. You can keep yourself off leaderboards in your profile.
• Security records: hashed (not readable) connection and email fingerprints for up to two days, to stop spam and password guessing; a record of sign-ins, sign-outs, password resets, exports and deletions for six months, with connection details hashed.
• One cookie, to keep you signed in. No advertising cookies, no third-party trackers, and nothing is sent to an analytics company.
• Which parts you use: if you are signed in, the board counts how many times each day you opened an area — the board, the Arena, the classroom, chat — and roughly how long you were in it, worked out from the gap between two page loads. It records the area and nothing else: not the page, not the order you went in, not what you read. It is used to tell whether people come back and what makes them stay. Visitors who are not signed in get no row here at all, and the wellbeing space is counted as one total that is never broken down or shown. Kept for about a year, then deleted.
• Where visits come from: the board keeps a daily tally of how many visits arrived from each place — TikTok, a search engine, a link somebody shared, or typed straight in — and how many of those went on to join. That tally is the only thing recorded: a date, a name from a fixed list, and a number. The address you came from is read to work out which of those names applies and is then thrown away; it is never stored. Nothing in it is attached to a person or an account, so it cannot say where any individual came from, and no page you visited is recorded. This one does include visitors who are not signed in, because it is a count of visits and not a record of anybody.

Chat

• Private, but not end-to-end encrypted. Messages travel encrypted and are stored encrypted in the database. Because FRANK checks them for scams and rule-breaking before they’re delivered, the server can read them — we’d rather tell you that plainly than promise something we don’t do.
• Safety checks: each message (and the words in a voice note, which are transcribed) is checked by OpenAI’s safety model and the house-rules check. Photos go through the image safety model. If something looks like a scam aimed at you — pay outside eBay, send a code, a lookalike link — you see a warning; the message still arrives.
• Who can see a chat: only the people in it. A moderator sees a message only if it’s held by the check, or if someone in the chat reports it — then they see that message and the few around it, which the reporter shares.
• FRANK in chat only reads a chat when you message FRANK or @mention it there, and only the recent messages in that chat. Member names are replaced with Member A, B… before anything is sent. Nothing from Chat is ever used to train or teach FRANK, and chats are never searched by Ask FRANK.
• You control it: read receipts and “last seen” can be switched off; disappearing messages, unsend (for a day) and delete-for-me are built in; new people can only send a request until you accept.

How AI is used

• A safety check on every post. New and edited posts are checked by OpenAI’s moderation service. If a post might mention self-harm, you’ll privately see support numbers and a moderator is alerted. The post is not hidden.
• A house-rules check. Posts, replies, edits, messages, bios and FRANK requests are checked for help to break the law or eBay’s rules. The result is recorded (the scores, the rule and the model version — not a copy of your text) so moderators can see why. Anything it’s unsure of goes to a person — nothing is deleted automatically, the AI never bans anyone, and you can always ask for a review.
• Usefulness scores. Posts outside “Selling with bipolar” and the members’ lounge are rated by an AI for how helpful they are, with names, emails, links and phone numbers removed first.
• FRANK learning — only if you opt in. If you tick “Let FRANK learn from my public posts”, your public posts can be read by FRANK when it answers questions, drafts knowledge articles and courses, and are added to FRANK’s knowledge store — always with names and contact details removed. Posts from members who haven’t opted in are never sent to the AI as text; Ask FRANK only shows them as links. Private messages, check-ins, the members’ lounge and “Selling with bipolar” are never used. Untick and your posts are withdrawn within about a day.
• Ask FRANK sends your question, plus the opted-in posts it found, to write an answer that cites its sources. Every source links back to the original discussion.
• Knowledge library. FRANK drafts articles from solved discussions (opted-in text only). A moderator approves every article before it’s shown, and it lists the threads and members it came from.
• “Knows about” on profiles comes from what you did — helpful and accepted answers — never from an AI guess, and never about health.
• Which AI: OpenAI by default. If OpenAI is down, a text job may be answered by Anthropic’s Claude instead; moderators can also route a job to a self-hosted model. The same privacy rules apply to all of them.

Seller meetups

If you come to one of our seller meets, there is a register for that meet, and it is worth being specific about because it holds more about you than the rest of the board does.

• What is on it: your name, email address, company and eBay username as they came from the ticket, whether you are registered or a walk-in, and — on the day — whether you arrived, when, and which host checked you in.
• Who can see it: the people running that meet, and nobody else. A host in Glasgow cannot see Portsmouth’s register. Permission comes from being signed in and being on that meet’s crew; there is no link that lets anyone else in. There are three jobs and they are deliberately not the same: a host can see and do everything for their meet; a volunteer on the door can check people in and add walk-ins, and gets no exports and no dietary needs; a catering contact gets the dietary needs and the headcount and nothing else — no addresses, no register.
• Allergies and dietary needs are health information, and are treated as such. They are visible only to that meet’s own hosts and to a catering contact the host names for it — not to moderators, who can see everything else. That last part is on purpose: whoever books the food needs the allergies, and the alternative was making them a full host, which would have handed them every attendee’s email address as a side effect. Every single time these notes are looked at, by anyone, it is written to the moderation log; they are left out of the ordinary register export; and they delete themselves 30 days after the meet whether anyone remembers or not. The list we hand a venue has the dietary needs on it and no email addresses, because a caterer needs to know about the nuts and not who to email.
• Filming: we record yes, no, or that you were never asked — three answers, not two, so “nobody put the question to them” can never be read as “they said no”.
• Your eBay account type: because these meets are for business sellers, a host may ask eBay whether the username on your ticket is a business or a private account. That is eBay’s own answer, not a guess about you. “We could not tell” and “no such username” are kept separate from “private”, and it flags for a human to look at — nothing about your ticket happens automatically.
• The email asking if you are coming: sent from this site, with the address of whoever runs meets in that area as the reply-to, so a reply reaches a person. It carries two links — coming, and can’t make it — and either one stops us asking. If you do not answer, you may get up to 3 emails in total, never less than 2 days apart, and then it stops on its own. The link in it is a one-off address for you only; it stops working after the meet and is deleted 30 days later.
• None of it reaches an AI. No attendee name, email, eBay username or dietary note is ever sent to a model, for any purpose.
• Taking yourself off a register: reply to the email, or write to the address on the meet’s listing, and the host will remove you. You do not need a board account to ask, and you do not have to give a reason.

Your data

Download everything you’ve written and set here as one file, any time. You can delete your account yourself: your profile, check-ins, FRANK memory, follows and chat messages are deleted, and you choose whether your public posts stay up as “deleted member” or come down.

Posting about your health is your choice — please share only what you are comfortable being public.