Privacy Policy

What is this page?

A "privacy policy", in short, is an explanation of how a website gathers information on its visitors and what is done with that data. Since websites can gather personal information or track your activity, it's a good idea to be very upfront and transparent about what sort of data is collected and why. Thus, this page has been provided to explain, as simply as possible, what information is collected by God Minded Gaming.com and how this information is used.

If you just want the quick version, here you go:

Cookies:

This site uses two cookies: one to remember your preferred color theme (light or dark) and one to remember if you've dismissed the "this website uses cookies" banner.

That's it. Feel free to block both.
Information about you:

Some information about your visit is recorded, such as your IP address, the page you visited, and your user agent.

This information is used to track how this website is used (what's popular, if anything is broken, etc) and is not shared with third parties.

Use of Cookies

Websites like this one are capable of storing a small amount of data on your computer. These invisible files are known as "cookies". Cookies can be used for just about anything, and unfortunately, this occasionally includes things that users aren't very fond of. For example, they can be used to track your online activity, build profiles about your behavior, and other secretive things that remind people of Big Brother from George Orwell's 1984. Fortunately, you can configure how your browser handles cookies, though this is one of the websites where it doesn't make much of a difference.

God Minded Gaming.com stores exactly two cookies, and they are both completely optional.

The first cookie simply records whether or not you've clicked the "OK" button on the little banner that alerts new visitors to the fact that this site uses cookies. If it is set, then the banner is not shown on future visits.

The second cookie stores your preferred color theme. By default, this site uses the Light color theme, but you can change it to the Dark theme by clicking the link in the menu to the right. Rejecting cookies will simply result in the Light theme being used whenever you visit this website.

Information collected from your browser

Your web browser sends a lot of information about itself to every website you visit. This is done so that websites can adjust themselves to provide you with a better experience. For example, many websites switch to a special layout when they detect that you're viewing them on a smartphone or other mobile device.

This data can also be used to help developers monitor and improve their websites. To this end, nearly all websites store some of that information in a server log. These logs can then be used to locate broken links or malfunctioning pages, and they can also show what pages are popular and how people are finding a website. These logs only store a bunch of technical things, but some users are concerned about their IP address being recorded, however temporarily, in these reports.

Also, it's important to emphasize just how many entries there are: each transaction between your browser and the website generates another entry. This means that just by viewing this page once, you've created about seven new entries: one for each resource used by this page and one more for the page itself. The sheer number of entries generally prohibits people from studying the logs directly - various tools are available to turn the raw data into something readable.

God Minded Gaming.com also keeps such a usage log, and it's used to help me improve and monitor the website. I don't usually view the raw logs myself, as I've created my own script to compile the data into a simple and easy to read report. These reports are not shared with anyone, and do not contain any information that could be linked back to a specific person.

Or as I've seen some websites phrase it, "We handle the information provided by our servers in an aggregate format to respect the privacy of our visitors". After all, gotta use fancy technical-sounding words or the normal folks might know what we're talking about!

If you'd like more information about what your browser tells the world, check out my browser mirror page, where I not only break this stuff down, but show you what your browser is telling my website.

Information collected from you

The contact me page uses a short form so that you can send me a message without having to send me an email directly. Knowingly or not, many people have their email software configured to give the recipient some personal information. This might just be your full name, but some people also configure their email software so that it sends along their phone number and street address with every email. You shouldn't be required to give that sort of information out just to send someone a message, and thanks to my form, it's not an issue.

Additionally, everything posted to that form is encrypted, and the decryption code is not stored on this server.

This is probably overkill, but you can never be too careful.

Information that is not collected

At no point is any personally identifying information, such as your name, date of birth, mailing address, credit card number, social security number, the name of your first pet, your mother's maiden name, where you went to school, or anything not mentioned in the above sections asked for or recorded by this website.

That stuff is private for a reason, and I don't need to know about it.

Nor am I interested in finding out.