Privacy Information

JaykeBird.com is an online service that allows users to store and utilize data. An online account is required to access and use some of the features of JaykeBird.com, and with the creation of an account, some info will be requested and stored. This can include things like your name and email address. This information that is stored on this site is used solely for the purposes of this site, and is not shared with any other services or stored elsewhere.

You have a right to your privacy. JaykeBird.com allows you to be able to download all data associated with your account, and you are also able to delete and completely remove your account and all data associated with it at any time. For more information about your privacy and how we protect it, please view the Privacy section of the Terms of Use.

About Cookies

A "cookie" is a small text file that a website can ask your browser to store, either until you close your browser or until a certain amount of time has passed. Cookies stay on your computer as you navigate through the Internet. Other websites will use cookies to do things like keep track of your identity as you visit different parts of the Internet, provide you with targeted advertising, or offer you the ability to directly share webpages or articles with social media. JaykeBird.com does not use cookies for these purposes.

JaykeBird.com uses cookies to be able to perform certain functions, such as keeping you logged in, actively remembering what data you're currently working on, to keep you and this site secure, and more. This includes the "AspNetCore.Antiforgery" cookie, and the "JaykeBirdLogin" cookie; both of these are essential for the previously-listed reasons. You may also see a cookie for "ItemId" or something while you're using one of my web apps (such as the character sheet editor).

JaykeBird.com does use cookies for anonymous visitor analytics, to keep track of what parts of my site are popular and where visitors are coming from. See the "Google Analytics" section below for more details.

By continuing to visit and use this site, you agree to the usage of these cookies on this site.

You can delete these cookies at any time; the worst that'll happen is you'll lose some unsaved data if you're editing a file or something.

Google Analytics

Some of the cookies and JavaScript packages on this site are used for anonymous data collection, using the service Google Analytics.

(I'm currently also testing Cloudflare Web Analytics to see if I want to instead transition to that.)

This is only for basic things like "are you using a desktop computer or a mobile phone" or "what country/state/province/etc. do you live in", as well as a basic list of what webpages you visit as you go through my site (and what page you were on when you decided to leave my site). It'll also detect if you interact with specific things on my website, such as editing your user profile or starting a session with interactive parts, like the character sheet editor. This information is used solely for the purposes of me figuring out things like what parts of my site are most popular, what do people want to do on my website, how many people are visiting my site, and where in the world my visitors are coming from.

All of this information is anonymized. This isn't connected to your JaykeBird or any other account, and instead the analytics services use their own internal session ID values. Information that you enter into forms, or work that you do within the interactive parts on the website (such as the character sheet editor) is not collected. To this extent, none of the information I collect is personally-identifiable information. (Unless, somehow, you happen to be literally the only guy in an entire country to have a computer.)

Google Analytics offers more advanced services that I could've enabled to get a more detailed insight about my visitors and the things they do, but I don't have that enabled. This sort of in-depth stuff does not interest me. I don't want or need to know more about what it is you're exactly doing or seeing; I just want to know if people, as a whole, like my site. Similarly, Google Analytics offers options to share this anonymous data with other sources or to use in advertisements, but I also don't have that enabled as that is very much not what I want and I doubt would be wanted by my visitors.

The raw anonymous collected data is only kept for a maximum of 14 months, after which point it's gone.

I don't have a built-in option to disable tracking, but this can be done by using cookie-blocking and tracking-blocking tools available via your browser or a browser extension.

Collection of Data from Programs (Telemetry)

If you download and install certain JaykeBird programs, they may include the ability to collect certain data about how you use that program and then send that collected information here to JaykeBird.com.

This is meant to only collect basic information about your computer and your settings, such as:

I am not looking for information about what other things you do or use on your computer, nor am I looking for any personally-identifiable information. That information is not collected.

All of this collection is done completely anonymously by using an anonymous ID that is created and stored on your computer. You can at any time create a new anonymous ID to disconnect your computer from previously collected data. You can also opt out of this data being sent to JaykeBird.com via an option in the installed program itself. You can also see within the program itself what specific data is actually collected.

Data collection / telemetry is very useful for developers, as it helps to figure out where my users are at and what they're actually interested in. Not everyone will report a bug or error, and not everyone would respond to a survey where I ask them for this sort of information, and I'm left with only best-guesses and the little bits of feedback I do get when someone reaches out. There could be major problems or things that are turning away users that I wouldn't know about if I didn't have any of this data, as new users are very likely to just stop using a program and move on, rather than actually reach out and say there's a problem. The feedback I do directly get back from people may also be a vocal minority and not a commonplace issue or problem.

This also helps when it comes time to make decisions about what versions of Windows I want to support, or if I need to focus on translating my programs to another language. I can use the collected data to see if a lot of people are still using an older version of Windows, and as a result, keep continuing to support it. I can see if there's a lot of users who are in a primarily Spanish-speaking country or their computer is set to Spanish, and thus focus on making a Spanish version of the program.

However, for a developer, data collection like this cannot be the only tool in the toolbox. This should also be combined with things like user/UX testing, code testing, and having good coding practices. But prior to the existence of being able to collect data like this, it was otherwise very hard to get information about what people were doing with our software in the real world.