Privacy

This site is mostly a brochure for some old Windows utilities and a front door to the Discord. There's not much to track and I'm not interested in tracking it.

What's collected

• Cloudflare (the CDN sitting in front of this site) logs requests — IPs, user agents, referrers — for caching and abuse prevention. Standard for anything behind Cloudflare. Logs roll over after a short window. The aggregate side of those logs — how many visitors, which pages, roughly which countries — is the only pageview counting I do, and it happens on Cloudflare's servers without putting anything in your browser.
• The downloads under /bin/ aren't tracked beyond the same Cloudflare logs.
• The one-click poll answer, if you click one. There's a question under most download buttons asking what brought you here. Clicking an answer stores three things in a file on my server: which product, which answer, and the date. No IP address, no identifier, nothing that joins one answer to another or to you. If you pick "something else" and type your own answer, that sentence is stored too, word for word — so it's worth not putting your name or email in it, because I've no way to tell which bit of a sentence was meant to be private.
• Your email address, but only if you type it in. There's a box under the download buttons offering an email when a new version ships. If you use it, your address and the date go into a file on my own server — not a mailing-list company, not a CRM, nowhere else. It's used for release notes and nothing else, it's never sold or shared, and asking me to delete it means it's gone. If you don't fill that box in, nothing about you is stored.

ViDeck, and the apps themselves

The apps — ViStart, ViPad, ViGlance, ViFind — don't phone home at all. They never have. They have no account, no licence check and no analytics in them, and that isn't changing.

ViDeck is the separate little program that keeps them up to date. It asks this site for a list of current versions, which is an ordinary web request and the whole conversation by default.

It can also send me a short report about what the apps are running on — but only if you switch that on, and it's off until you do. If you turn it on, once a day at most it sends:

• Your Windows version, screen size, display scaling and Windows display language.
• Whether you're running under Wine or Proton, rather than Windows proper.
• Which app's installer ViDeck arrived with, if it came bundled with one.
• For each of my apps you have installed: its version, whether it's set to start with Windows, whether it's running at that moment, how many days ago it was installed, and which skin is selected.
• Which of my apps you've uninstalled since the last report — the names only, and nothing about why.
• Your country, as a two-letter code. That one isn't sent by ViDeck: Cloudflare works it out from the connection, the same way it does for every visit to this site. The address it works it out from still isn't stored.

That last group is the part I actually care about, and it's worth saying why rather than leaving you to wonder. I can already count downloads; what I've never been able to see is whether anyone keeps these. Whether an app is set to start with Windows, and how long it's been installed, answers that — and it answers it about a population rather than about you, because there's nothing in the report tying one day's to the next. The skin tells me whether it's worth building a proper skin browser or whether everyone's happy with the default.

The uninstalls are there for the same reason, from the other side. An app that's been removed can't tell me anything — so if I only ever hear from the ones that survive, I get a flattering and completely false picture of how long people stick with these. ViDeck outlives an uninstall, so it's the only thing that can mention it. It's the names of my own apps and nothing else, and knowing that people drop ViFind after a fortnight is the kind of thing that would actually make me fix it.

The country and the bundled-installer name are both about where to put my effort. Nine translations are maintained on a hunch, and search statistics can't settle it because a completely unrelated Iranian product shares a name with one of mine and drowns out the real numbers. Knowing which app introduced you to ViDeck tells me which of them is doing the work of finding people. Neither is narrowed any further than that, and a country is not a location.

It's shown to you word for word, in the app, before you're asked. Nothing in it is a file path, a username, a machine name, or a list of anything else you have installed.

There is no identifier of any kind in that report — no account, no install ID, no machine fingerprint, nothing derived from your hardware, and nothing that joins one day's report to the next or to you. That's why it's capped at one a day: the daily count is roughly how many machines are out there, which is the thing I actually wanted to know, without carrying a number that could follow anyone around. You can turn it off again in ViDeck's settings at any time and it stops immediately.

Why ask at all: I genuinely don't know what these run on. Whether anyone still uses the nine translations, whether high-DPI screens are the common case now, whether the Windows 7 support is still earning its keep — I've been guessing at all of it for years. That's the entire purpose, and it's why the report contains what it contains and nothing else.

Reporting a problem

Separate from all of the above, and nothing to do with the opt-in report: there is a form at Report a problem, and the same thing inside ViDeck. It only ever sends what you typed, when you pressed the button.

That means the description itself, which product it is about, and — only if you choose to fill it in — an email address or Discord handle. Leave that blank and there is nothing in the report that says who you are. A report sent from inside ViDeck also carries your Windows version, screen size, display scaling, language and the versions of my apps you have installed, because the person fixing a bug needs to know what it broke on. The web form sends none of that, for the simple reason that a web page cannot honestly know it.

This is the one place on the site that can hold something personal, so it is treated as a letter rather than as data: it is never published, never counted into anything, and never used for anything but writing back to you. Ask me to delete one and it is deleted — that is the whole process, and I do not need a reason.

What's not collected

No cookies — none, unless you press the tip button described below. No tracking pixels. No ad personalisation. No profile built from what you download. There was briefly a Google Analytics tag here; it's gone, and the site now cleans up any cookies it left behind.

The tip button

The thank-you page you see after installing something has a small "buy me a tea" button in the corner. It opens a payment panel from Ko-fi, who handle the money — I never see your card details.

Nothing loads until you press it. That is deliberate and it is the whole reason this site still has no cookie banner: if you never press the button, no request leaves for anyone but me, and there are no cookies at all. There is also a link in the panel to open Ko-fi in its own tab instead, if you would rather none of it touched this site.

If you do press it, here is what arrives, because "some third-party cookies" is not a useful thing to be told. Ko-fi's panel brings Ko-fi's own cookies, Stripe and PayPal for the payment itself, and Google Analytics — including doubleclick.net, which is Google's advertising network. That is Ko-fi's arrangement rather than mine and it runs under their policies. I would rather tell you it is in there than let you find out from your blocker.

It is on the thank-you pages and nowhere else. Not the homepage, not the product pages, not the download pages, and not this one.

The site itself puts a note in local storage recording that you already signed up, so the email box stops pestering you on every page. Neither is an identifier and neither ever leaves your machine — clearing your browser data removes them.

External links

The Discord, Ko-fi, and GitHub links go to external services with their own privacy policies. If you click through, the same applies as any other site you visit them from.

Contact

Unless you signed up for release emails, or left an address on a problem report, there's no personally identifying data for me to hand back — the counting is aggregate and Cloudflare's logs are Cloudflare's. If you did either and want it gone, say the word and it's deleted; I don't need a reason. For that, or any other privacy concern, or to ask me to take something down, ping the Discord, use the report form, or open an issue on the relevant GitHub repo.

Last updated August 2026 — retired Google Analytics and the cookie notice, added an opt-in email list for release announcements, documented the one-click poll, documented ViDeck's opt-in report, including the country code, the bundled-installer name and the uninstall list added later that month, and added the problem-report form and what it does and does not send.