Privacy policy
What this site stores, why it stores it, and how to get a link deleted. The short version: no account, no cookies, no advertising, and no profile of you.
Last updated 4 November 2026
In one paragraph
Making a link writes one row to our own database. Opening a link adds one to a counter and passes through Cloudflare, our host, like any other request on the web. There are no cookies, no local storage, no fingerprinting, no advertising network and nothing sold. The video is a YouTube embed, which means Google serves it and sees the request the way it would on any site.
What a link records
This is the complete list. If a field is not in this table, we do not store it.
| Field | What it is | Why it exists |
|---|---|---|
slug | The short code in the /r/ address. | It is the address of the link. A link you make gets a random eight-character code, never derived from what you typed. |
title, description | The headline and description you enter. | Shown in the chat preview and at the top of the page. Public by design. |
image_url | The picture address you paste. | Loaded by the reader's browser from whichever site hosts it. Public by design. |
created_at | The moment you pressed Create link. | Ordering, and the timeline of events when a complaint arrives. |
created_ip | A keyed hash of the address that created the link — a hash, not the address. | Stops bulk creation and lets us answer an abuse complaint. It cannot be read back without a secret we hold. |
hits, previews | Two counters kept by our own server. | The number under the video. Chat preview fetchers are counted separately, so a link nobody opened does not look popular. |
status, removed_at | Set when a link is taken down. | So the address answers with a plain “removed” page instead of the video. |
Your words are public, on purpose
The title, description and image address you submit are stored and shown to anyone who has the link — that is the whole product. Chat apps that build a preview will fetch them, and a screenshot survives deletion. Submit only what you would be comfortable seeing quoted back, and nothing about another person that they would not want published.
Hit counts and page views
The number under the video is our own counter, incremented by our own server. So that a refresh does not inflate it, a short-lived key in Cloudflare KV holds a hash of the reader's address for thirty minutes and expires on its own.
Page views are counted at Cloudflare's edge without a cookie. That count is an aggregate number of visits per page: it sets nothing on the reader's device, it carries no cross-site identifier, and it cannot reconstruct a person's history. It is a counter, not a profile.
To produce that count Cloudflare injects one small script into each page — static.cloudflareinsights.com/beacon.min.js — and it posts a single anonymous event back to this domain at/cdn-cgi/rum. It is the only third-party script on the site, it is served by the same company that hosts us, it writes no cookie and no local storage, and it is the reason this page says "cookieless" rather than "no scripts at all".
What the host sees
Every request passes through Cloudflare before it reaches this site, so Cloudflare processes the usual request data — the address the request came from, the browser's user agent, the requested URL and the time. Cloudflare handles that under its own privacy policy as our hosting provider. We do not build a separate visitor log of it; our own error logs record the failed action and the link's slug, never the title you typed.
The video
The player is the standard youtube-nocookie.com embed. When a link page loads, the reader's browser contacts Google to fetch the player, and Google sees that request and may store things in the player frame under its own policies. We never download, copy or re-host the video, and no video plays anywhere else on the site.
Images you point at
An image address is hotlinked, not copied: we store the URL and the reader's browser fetches the picture from whoever hosts it. That host sees the request, with the same kind of request data any web server sees. We do not cache or re-serve the bytes.
How long it is kept
A link and its counters are kept until the link is removed. The creation hash stays with the record so that a later complaint can still be answered. The short-lived dedupe key expires after thirty minutes. The report log is kept so that we can tell a platform or a regulator what was done and when.
Deleting a link
Email report@rickrollmaker.comwith the full link (it starts with /r/) and say whether you want the link taken down or the record deleted outright. A removal is usually done within hours: the row is marked removed, and the address then answers 410 with no title, no description and no video. You do not need an account, and you do not need to be the person who made the link. Links that are unlawful, impersonate somebody, or carry someone's private information go first.
What we never do
- Sell, rent or share anything with an advertising network.
- Create an account, an email list or a login of any kind.
- Set a cookie, write to local storage, or fingerprint a device.
- Add any analytics script except Cloudflare's cookieless page counter, or load one from a domain we do not already rely on.
- Follow anyone from this site to another site.
Changes and review
The date at the top of this page moves whenever the processing changes, and the table above is checked against the database in the test suite so it cannot drift quietly. No consent banner is needed today because nothing is stored on a visitor's device — the day an account, an email field, an ad or a new third party appears, this page and that conclusion get re-opened before the change ships.
Contact
Privacy questions and deletion requests go to the same address:report@rickrollmaker.com. This page describes our own practice; it is not legal advice.
See how the rickroll link generator works
Read the terms of use. Prefer the short version? The abuse and takedown policy covers what links may not be used for.