Fifth Circle is a short panel show. People send in questions; the questions become tickets; the tickets become episodes; the record of every episode is published here. This page says what we collect along the way, why, how long we keep it, and how to have it removed. The mail policy covers what happens to a letter once it is in the bag.
YouTube API Services
This show publishes to YouTube, and our publishing software uses YouTube API Services to do it. By interacting with the show on YouTube you are also bound by the YouTube Terms of Service, and Google's handling of your data is described in the Google Privacy Policy.
Our software touches our own channel and our own videos, and nothing else. It uploads each finished episode with its captions, posts one comment of our own under it, and reads the comments left on our own videos. It does not read your subscriptions, your watch history, your other activity, or anybody else's channel. Nobody outside our production can sign in to it; there is no account to create here.
Revoking our access
Our software signs in as the show, not as you, so there is nothing for you to revoke to stop it. If you have ever granted any application access to your own Google account, you can review and remove it at myaccount.google.com/permissions.
What we collect, and why
If you comment on one of our videos
A comment on one of our videos may become a ticket in the bag. When that happens we store the comment's text, the comment's own id, the id of the video it was left on, the time it was published, a one-way hash of your channel id, and your display name as YouTube supplies it.
The display name is held as a private field. It is never read on air, never printed on this site, never written into the published record, and never logged by the software that reads it. It exists so that a person can be recognised as the same person across tickets — that is how one ticket per commenter per day is enforced — and so that a request to remove it can be honoured. The hash of your channel id does the same work without storing the id itself.
The comment text may be read on air and published in the record as the question the committee argues about. Your name is not, unless you separately opt in by writing to us — names on air are opt-in only.
If you write to us
See the mail policy. In short: we keep the ticket, the cleaned body, the timestamp, a hashed sender for deduplication and opt-out, and an opt-in display name. We do not keep IP addresses or raw mail headers. Raw mail is purged from the mailbox after 90 days.
If you use the form on this site
The form collects what you type into it and nothing else. It is protected against automated abuse by Google reCAPTCHA Enterprise, whose use is covered by the Google Privacy Policy. We do not set advertising cookies and we do not run analytics that profile you.
What we never do
- We do not sell, rent, or trade your data, to anyone, for anything.
- We do not share it with third parties, except the services named under "Who reads what you send", which read it on our behalf, and the infrastructure providers that run the show's own systems.
- We do not use YouTube data to target advertising, and we show no advertising on this site.
- We do not build profiles of people, and we do not combine what you write here with data from anywhere else.
- We do not knowingly collect anything from children, and nothing that identifies a submitter as a minor is read on air.
Who reads what you send
Whatever you send — a letter, a form entry, or a comment that becomes a ticket — is first checked by our own code, with no model involved: it removes links, hidden text and formatting, and looks for tricks aimed at the show's software. Two outside services then read the cleaned words on our behalf:
- Jev, from TypeSafe AI, sorts it — a question for the committee, a question for us, feedback, business, or spam — and flags a submission that tries to give instructions to the show's software, asks for help causing harm, or suggests the writer may be at risk. It answers with those labels and nothing else. Feedback, business and spam it is sure about are filed away from the bag; anything it flags is held for a person to look at. TypeSafe's handling is covered by its privacy policy.
- Claude, from Anthropic, checks everything that could be drawn against the mail policy before it goes in the bag. Jev can set a submission aside, but only this check puts one in the bag. Anthropic's handling is covered by its privacy policy.
They receive the words you wrote, not your email address, your sender details, or anything about your YouTube account. Under their terms, neither uses what we send to train its models. A submission that is drawn is then argued by the committee's seats, which are language models from several providers; each episode's record names them.
How long we keep it, and deletion
Raw mail is purged after 90 days. Comment data taken from YouTube is refreshed against YouTube and removed when it is no longer needed for the episode it belongs to; if you delete your comment on YouTube, the copy we hold stops being republished and is removed from the working record. Stored YouTube data is in any case re-fetched or deleted within 30 days, as YouTube's developer policies require.
The published record of an episode — the ruling, the ticket number, the minutes — is permanent, because the record is the point of the show. An opt-out removes your display name and the body of your submission from that archive; the ledger keeps the ruling against the ticket number only.
Asking us to remove something
Write to write@EnterTheFifthCircle.com and say what you want removed. If you have a ticket number, quote it and we can find it immediately; if you commented on a video, say which video and roughly when. We will remove what we hold, and tell you what the permanent record still shows.
Changes
If this policy changes, the changed page appears here. We do not notify by mail, because we do not keep a mailing list.