Privacy Policy

Browsing this website collects nothing about you. No accounts, no cookies, no analytics, no tracking. There is nothing here to opt out of.

The one form on the site is for game developers to send me a game. If you fill it in, I keep what you typed so I can reply - details below. If you don't, nothing is collected.

The one exception is your choice: pressing play on a video loads YouTube's player, and from then on YouTube's own policies apply to it.

thenerdycowboy.com lists videos from the YouTube channel, with a page for each one. It sets no cookies and runs no analytics or advertising scripts.

Video titles and thumbnails are fetched from YouTube's public API by the server, every few minutes, not by your browser. Game and developer details are fetched the same way from Steam's public store. Simply viewing a page here does not contact YouTube, and your visit is not reported to YouTube by this site.

Video pages show a still image until you press play. Only then does your browser load the player, from YouTube's privacy-enhanced domain (youtube-nocookie.com). What YouTube does after that is covered by Google's policies, not this one.

Following a link to YouTube takes you to Google's service, which has its own policies. This site has no control over and no visibility into what happens once you leave it.

The form at /devs asks for your name, email address, the game's name and Steam page, and optionally its release timing, whether there is a demo, what you'd rather I didn't show, and any other notes.

It is used for one thing: deciding whether to cover your game, and replying to you about it. When you send it, it is emailed to me through Amazon Simple Email Service and saved in a private database on AWS (Amazon RDS), encrypted at rest. The website writes it using a separate database account that can add a request but cannot read any back.

Your IP address is checked briefly, in memory, to stop the same person sending dozens of requests, and is not stored. Nothing you send is sold, shared, used for advertising or added to any mailing list. To have a request deleted, email me at the address below.

A private scheduling tool, not available to the public, signs in to the owner's own YouTube account using Google OAuth. It requests a single read-only permission: youtube.readonly.

It is used for one thing: listing the owner's own videos and their scheduled publishing times, so an upcoming release calendar can be displayed. It reads; it never uploads, edits or deletes anything.

The tool runs on Amazon Web Services (AWS). To stay signed in, it stores the OAuth refresh token Google issues, encrypted with AES-256-GCM, in a private, password-protected database on AWS (Amazon RDS) that is itself encrypted at rest. To draw the calendar, it also stores the owner's own video titles, video IDs and publishing dates in that same database. Nothing else that Google provides is kept.

This public website also reads from that database, to show the episode descriptions written in the calendar, and adds developer form requests to a separate table in it. It connects over encrypted, certificate-verified TLS using its own separate, read-only database account, which can read only four columns of the calendar table: game name, video ID, episode description and Steam link. Form requests go in through a second account that can only add rows to the requests table. Neither account has any access to the OAuth token or to anything else in the database, and the website never sends any Google user data to your browser beyond the public video information already shown on YouTube.

None of it is sold, shared with anyone, used for advertising, used to train any model, or transferred to third parties. No viewer or subscriber data is accessed at any point.

The tool only ever touches the account that signed in to it. Access can be withdrawn at any time from Google Account permissions, which immediately and permanently ends its access. The tool also has a Disconnect button that revokes the token with Google and deletes the stored copy.

This site is not directed at children under 13 and collects no data from anyone, including children.

If what this site or its tools do with data ever changes, this page changes with it and the date at the top is updated.

Questions about any of this go to matt@thenerdycowboy.com.