Privacy policy

Journeys is a small, independent service for writing and walking branching journeys of text and images. This page says what it stores, why, and what it never does. It is written to be read, not skimmed past.

Two kinds of users

Authors sign in and write journeys. Participants walk a published journey from a link and never have an account. What we store is different for each.

What we store about Authors

• Your name, email address, and profile picture, as Google or Discord shares them when you sign in; you can change the name and the picture link on your Settings page. We use them to show you who you are signed in as and to let the other members of a project recognise you. If you turn on your Author page, your name, profile picture, bio, and links are public at that page, together with the projects you belong to that have a published journey, until you turn it off. We never see or store your password.
• A sign-in session record, holding the browser and IP address the session was created from, and the tokens Google or Discord issue so that we can keep you signed in.
• The projects and journeys you create: their titles, descriptions, every step and choice, each published version, and which projects you are a member of.
• The runs of your published journeys, so you can see how they are walked. A run is never tied to a person; see below.

What we store about Participants

Nothing that identifies you. When you walk a published journey we record a run: which steps you visited, which choices you made, and, when a step asks you a question, the answer you type. A run holds no name, no email address, no account, and no IP address. Authors of the journey can read their runs, including the free-text answers, so do not type anything into a journey that you would not want its authors to read.

Cookies

Journeys sets cookies only to make the service work. None of them is used for advertising or for tracking you across other sites.

• Session cookie (Authors). Set when you sign in so that you stay signed in. It lasts seven days, extended while you keep using Journeys, and is removed when you sign out.
• Participant cookie (Participants, journeys.participant). A random id, set on the first choice you make in any journey and kept as the same id across every journey you walk in this browser, so that your walks can be counted together and told apart from somebody else’s on the same device. It is scoped to journey pages, lasts up to 400 days, and is never linked to an account or to any way of reaching you.
• Run cookie (Participants, journeys.run. followed by the journey’s id). One per journey you are walking, holding the id of that run so the journey can pick up where you left off. It lasts 30 days and is only ever sent to that journey’s pages.

Your choice of light or dark theme is kept in your browser’s local storage, not in a cookie, and never leaves your device.

What we never do

• We do not sell your data, and we do not show advertising.
• We do not share your data with anyone except the services that host Journeys, listed below, and then only as much as running the service requires.
• We do not use your journeys or runs to train models or for anything other than running Journeys.

Where it lives

The application runs on Vercel and the database is hosted by Neon. Sign-in is handled through Google and Discord; each provider’s own privacy policy covers what they do with your sign-in.

Deleting things

Deleting a journey removes its draft, every published version, and every run. Deleting a project removes everything in it. You can delete your account from your Settings page: projects where you are the only member are deleted with everything in them, projects you share with other members stay with them, and your account details, sessions, and sign-in links go with it. It cannot be undone.

Changes

If this policy changes, the date at the top changes with it. A change that affects what we store will be noted on this page.

Contact

Questions, requests, or concerns: pauljosephmacfarlane@gmail.com.