---
title: Privacy
description: What you can see of your tippers, what they can see of you, and how TipPage keeps both directions safe.
---

Taking money from internet strangers is a privacy problem in both
directions: you don't want a tip to be a way to find out where you live,
and a tipper shouldn't have to hand a streamer their card identity or
inbox. TipPage is built so each side sees only what they actually need.
This page is the plain-English explainer of who sees what.

## What you see of a tipper

When someone tips you, your dashboard shows:

- The **name they typed** (or their Twitch name, if you force it), the
  **amount**, the **message**, and any **media request** - the things that
  go on stream anyway.
- Their **Twitch account**, if they signed in to tip (or you require it).

What you never see:

- **Card details.** They go from the tipper's browser to Stripe; TipPage
  servers never touch them, and neither do you.
- **Their receipt email.** It's used once, to send the receipt, and is
  deliberately kept out of every screen you can open - including refund
  requests, which show you the tip and the reason but not the address.
- **Their IP or location.**
- **Their payment identity.** Anti-abuse matching (bans, evasion
  detection) runs on one-way hashed signals, so a [ban](/moderation/bans-and-refunds)
  shows you labels like "card identity" or "device" - never the underlying
  data.

## What a tipper sees of you

- Your **tip page** - streamer name, branding, Twitch link. All public by
  choice.
- On their **card statement: TipPage**, not your name.
- Most importantly, what they *can't* do: card tips are processed on
  TipPage's own Stripe account and then transferred to yours. Card
  processors expose "merchant support details" - a support address and
  phone number - to cardholders on request, and for a streamer working
  from home that would be your home address. Because the charge belongs to
  TipPage's account, those tools point at TipPage, not at you.

## The PayPal caveat

Everything above describes **card tips through Stripe**. PayPal is a
different animal: PayPal payments are direct between two PayPal accounts,
and **PayPal itself shows each side the other's details** - TipPage can't
sit in the middle.

- **You see the tipper's** name and email address in your PayPal activity.
- **The tipper sees your** PayPal account name on their receipt - on a
  personal account, that's your legal name.

If privacy matters to you or your viewers, **Stripe is the safe choice**.
If you do run PayPal, use a [Business account](/payments/link-paypal) so
tippers at least see your streamer name instead of your legal one.

## How it works

For the curious, the mechanics behind the promises:

- **Destination charges** - card tips are charged on the platform's Stripe
  account and transferred to yours, which is what keeps your support
  details out of cardholder-facing tools.
- **Authorize, screen, capture** - a card tip is
  [only captured after checks pass](/payments/getting-paid#how-a-card-tip-is-charged),
  so a banned donor is never charged in the first place.
- **Per-streamer one-way hashing** - identity signals used for bans are
  hashed with a different key for every streamer. Raw identifiers never
  leave the platform, and one streamer's ban data is meaningless to
  another's.
- **Receipt emails stay in the receipt pipeline** - stored only where
  sending receipts and honouring refund codes requires, never on
  streamer-facing screens, never used for marketing.
- **The [Developer API](/developer-api) carries stream-visible data only** -
  API responses and webhook payloads contain what's already shown on
  stream; payment identities and emails are never in them.

## Why we do this

Streamers get harassed, doxxed, and swatted; a £2 tip must never be the
thread someone pulls to find your address. And tippers support people they
don't personally know - they deserve to do that without surrendering their
identity to a stranger. Designing the platform so neither side has to
trust the other with more than a display name is what makes tipping safe
enough to be worth doing at all.

:::note
This page is the plain-English explainer, not a legal document.
:::