Privacy notice
Last updated November 1, 2026
The short version: we collect as little as we can. No ads, no tracking, no selling or sharing your information. We count visits only in total, with nothing about who visited. We never receive your email address or name.
Who is responsible
Cryptid Junkie is run by one person on servers they operate. Questions, or requests about your information: Contact the site admin. Or use the contact page.
Signing in
You sign in with a provider such as Google. We ask it for one thing: a number that identifies your account with us. We do not get your email address, your name, your picture or your contacts. The board keeps only a scrambled (HMAC) form of that number, so it cannot be turned back into your account, plus the handle you choose. Sign-in runs through our own login service (software called Logto, on our server). It holds the same account number and nothing else about you, and it does not send you email. Your provider (Google, for example) knows you signed in to this site, as it would for any site.
What the board stores
- Your handle, when you joined, and whether you are an admin.
- Your posts, replies and comments, your votes and saves, and any reports or appeals you send.
- Held and removed posts, kept so a moderator can review them and so you can appeal.
- A login session, which expires after 30 days or when you sign out.
- A record of each moderation decision (see below).
The map pages store nothing about visitors. The map loads no outside map tiles or fonts, so no other company learns where you looked or what you searched for.
Visit counts
To see which pages are used, the site keeps daily totals: how many times each kind of page (the map, a case, a source trail, this site's help pages) was opened, and whether the visit came from the map, another page here, a search engine or another site. Each total is a single number. Nothing about the visitor goes with it: no address, cookie, browser details, search words or which case was opened. Visits from search-engine crawlers, other automated programs and site staff are not counted. Cloudflare, which serves the site, also counts page views for us with its Web Analytics script, which uses no cookies (see Cloudflare Web Analytics).
Cookies
Only the ones the site needs to work: a login cookie (ck, up to 30 days), a short sign-in cookie
(ca, a few minutes, while you sign in) and a short form-protection cookie (cx, one hour, on the
contact page). No advertising or tracking cookies.
Your address (IP)
The site is served through Cloudflare, which sees visitors' IP addresses as it passes traffic on and protects the site from abuse (see Cloudflare's notice). Our server uses your address only to slow down automated abuse, in memory, and does not write an access log or store it with your account.
How posts are checked
Before a post appears, its title and text are read by automated reviewers: a hosted AI service (Jev, from Typesafe, which receives the text but not your handle) and, when that is unsure, an AI model running on our own computer (Kevin). A person looks at anything they are not sure about. We record each decision and the text it was about, so we can check the reviewers' accuracy and use the examples to train and improve our own moderation tools. That record contains no handles, account ids or emails. Typesafe handles text it receives under its own terms, which we do not control.
What is on the map
The cases come from public sources (see the credits page) and are not posts by members. We scrub private individuals' names from them (using rules and an AI model), blur exact places, and leave out cases about identifiable people. Names of public figures and people named in very old newspapers stay. If a case still identifies you or someone you know, ask for it to be changed or removed on the corrections page. We act on removal requests first and review them afterwards when a child is involved.
Backups and keeping data
Posts stay until they are deleted. Deleting a post removes it from the site; copies in private backups are replaced over time. Backups are kept on our own systems and in a private cloud drive. Removal and correction requests are kept as a record of what was asked and done. Moderation records are kept for as long as they are useful for checking and improving moderation.
Your choices
- Delete any of your posts or replies yourself.
- Ask us to delete your account and everything you posted, or to give you a copy of what the board holds about you, through the contact page. We will act on it within 30 days.
- You can read the map and the board without an account.
Children
This site is not for children under 13 and we do not knowingly collect their information. If you believe a child has posted, tell us and we will remove it.
Changes
If this notice changes, the date at the top changes with it.