PRIVACY POLICY

At coding.kitty, we take your privacy seriously. This Privacy Policy explains how we collect, use, disclose, and safeguard your information when you visit our website and use our services. Please read this privacy policy carefully.

1. Information We Collect

We collect information that you provide directly to us when using our services:

• Video Topic Suggestions: When you submit a video topic suggestion, we collect the title, description, and optional Instagram handle you provide
• Voting Data: We track upvotes and downvotes on video topics to prioritize content creation
• Cat Pinboard Uploads: When you upload a cat photo, we collect the image file, cat name, and position data
• Usage Data:We collect information about how you interact with our website through PostHog, including pages visited, features used, and interaction patterns. Until you accept cookies this is collected without storing anything on your device and without any identifier that lasts beyond the day — enough to count visits, not to recognise you. Accepting cookies adds a randomly generated visitor ID, which is what links your visits together over time
• Product Analytics Events:We record the actions you take on the site — such as uploading to the cat pinboard, voting on topics, submitting a suggestion or comment, filtering videos, searching the pinboard, and submitting the contact form. These records hold the action and non-identifying details about it (for example a cat name, a video title, or the length of a message) — not your name, email address, or the content of your messages. Only with your consent do they also carry a visitor ID. Our backend records the same actions when it confirms them, so that a successful upload or vote is counted once it has actually been saved; that backend record is made only if you have accepted cookies, since it exists to be joined to the visitor ID and there is nothing to join it to otherwise
• Contact Information: When you submit the contact form, we collect your name, email address, subject, and message

2. How We Use Your Information

We use the information we collect to:

• Provide, maintain, and improve our services and educational content
• Process and prioritize video topic suggestions based on community voting
• Display cat photos on the public pinboard feature
• Validate uploaded images using AI to ensure they contain cats
• Communicate with you about suggestions and content updates
• Monitor and analyze usage patterns to improve user experience (via PostHog — anonymously by default, and linked to a visitor ID only with your consent)
• Understand which features and content are most valuable to our community
• Integrate with project management tools (Jira) to track content creation
• Prevent spam and abuse through bot protection (Cloudflare Turnstile)

3. Third-Party Services

We use the following third-party services to operate our platform:

• PostHog:For product analytics — understanding which features are used and where people get stuck. Anonymous and cookieless unless you accept cookies. Used on both this website and our backend API. We do not enable session recording or heatmaps
• Cloudflare R2: For storing uploaded cat images securely in the cloud
• Azure Computer Vision: For AI-powered validation of uploaded images to ensure they contain cats
• Cloudflare Turnstile: For bot protection and spam prevention on forms and interactive features
• Discord: For community notifications and displaying server member counts
• Instagram: For displaying follower statistics on our website
• TikTok: For displaying follower statistics on our website
• Jira: For internal project management and tracking video topic suggestions

These services have their own privacy policies, and we encourage you to review them.

4. Data Storage and Security

We implement appropriate technical and organizational measures to protect your information:

• All data is stored in secure databases with access controls
• Uploaded images are stored on Cloudflare R2 with appropriate security configurations
• We use HTTPS encryption to protect data transmitted between your browser and our servers
• Access to user data is restricted to authorized personnel only

However, no method of transmission over the internet is 100% secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security.

5. Public Information

Please be aware that certain information you provide is publicly visible:

• Video topic suggestions and their vote counts are publicly displayed
• Cat photos uploaded to the pinboard are publicly visible to all website visitors
• Cat names associated with pinboard photos are publicly displayed

6. Cookies and Tracking Technologies

We use cookies and similar tracking technologies to enhance your experience on our website. Cookies are small data files stored on your device that help us remember your preferences and understand how you use our site.

PostHog

We use PostHog for product analytics: working out which parts of the site are actually useful and where people run into trouble. It records:

• Pages you visit and how you move between them
• How you arrived at our website (referral source)
• Your general location, derived from your IP address (country/city level) — only once you have answered the cookie banner; see below
• Device, browser, and screen size information
• Specific actions you take, such as pinboard uploads, votes, topic suggestions, comments, video filters, searches, and contact form submissions

Before you answer the cookie banner

PostHog runs in a cookieless mode. Nothing is stored on your device — no cookie, no analytics data in browser storage, no visitor ID. To count visits without a visitor ID, PostHog works out a temporary code on its servers from your IP address and browser type, combined with a secret value that changes every day and is then deleted. The code cannot be turned back into your IP address, and because the secret is thrown away daily, tomorrow's code for the same browser is different. This lets us see how many people visited and which pages they read; it cannot follow you between days or recognise you as a returning visitor. Your IP address is discarded on arrival rather than stored, which also means we get no location data in this mode.

We measure this way because a large share of visitors never see the cookie banner at all — the same browser extensions and blocklists that block analytics also hide consent banners — and we would rather know how many people we are reaching than guess.

Answering the cookie banner

The banner offers two buttons: Accept all cookies and Accept essential cookies only. We want to be straightforward about what each one does, because the second button could otherwise be mistaken for an opt-out. It is not one. Essential cookies are the ones that keep the site working — for example Cloudflare Turnstile's bot-protection cookie and any session state a form needs while you fill it in — and they are set regardless of which button you press, because the site cannot function without them. “Accept essential cookies only” means you are consenting to that essential set and to nothing beyond it being implied by your visit; it does not turn analytics off. Both buttons move PostHog out of the cookieless mode described above and into full tracking: a randomly generated visitor ID is stored in your browser, which is what joins your visits into sessions and lets us tell a returning visitor from a new one. There is no third, reduced-analytics mode for PostHog to run in between the two, so we do not offer a button that implies one.

Answering also connects the two halves of our analytics. PostHog runs on the website and on our backend API, and when you complete an action our server records that it succeeded, tagged with the same visitor ID your browser is using so the two line up. Our server never sends your name, email address, or message contents to PostHog. Your browser only passes that visitor ID to our API once you have answered the banner, and our server records nothing without it — so before you answer, there is no server-side analytics at all.

Important: PostHog is only active on the live thecodingkitty.com site. Our development and testing environments send nothing. We have configured PostHog with:

• No session recording, no heatmaps, and no keystroke capture
• No personally identifiable information (PII) collection
• No analytics storage on your device, and no lasting identifier, until you answer the banner — before that, only a record of your eventual choice is ever written
• Respect for your browser's “Do Not Track” setting, which keeps you in the cookieless mode regardless of the banner

Enabling “Do Not Track” in your browser keeps PostHog cookieless no matter which button you would otherwise press: we do not honour an opt-in from a DNT browser, so no visitor ID is created. To change a previous choice, clear this site's data in your browser settings and the banner will appear again.

If you would rather not be counted at all, an ad or tracker blocker will do that. We do not attempt to work around a blocker that stops the requests outright.

7. Children's Privacy

Our website is not directed to children under the age of 13. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13. If you are a parent or guardian and believe your child has provided us with personal information, please contact us so we can delete it.

8. Your Rights

Depending on your location, you may have certain rights regarding your personal information:

• The right to access the personal information we hold about you
• The right to request correction of inaccurate information
• The right to request deletion of your information (subject to legal obligations)
• The right to object to or restrict certain processing of your data

To exercise these rights, please contact us using the information provided below.

9. Data Retention

We retain your information for as long as necessary to provide our services and fulfill the purposes outlined in this privacy policy. Video suggestions, votes, and cat pinboard photos are retained indefinitely unless you request deletion. We may also retain certain information as required by law or for legitimate business purposes.

10. Changes to This Privacy Policy

We may update this privacy policy from time to time. We will notify you of any changes by posting the new privacy policy on this page and updating the "Last Updated" date. We encourage you to review this privacy policy periodically for any changes.

11. Contact Us

If you have any questions about this Privacy Policy or our data practices, please contact us at contact@thecodingkitty.com