Privacy Policy

Last Updated: December 18th, 2021

We've kept this policy short to encourage you to read it. Please email us at support@vgc.io if you have any questions.

What personal information do we collect?

Account and profile

Obviously, we collect any information that you explicitly give us when signing up for an account, activating your account, and filling out your profile. This includes your email address and username, and optionally your regional settings (country, time zone, and preferred language), real name, birthdate, contact information, biographical details, profile picture, and links to your personal website and social media pages.

Patreon and Kickstarter

When you participate in one of our crowdfunding campaigns on Patreon or Kickstarter, we receive and collect the name, email address, and billing address that you enter on these platforms. We need this for legal reasons, and to be able to send you your rewards, if any.

IP address

We automatically collect your IP address when you browse our websites. This is stricly necessary for security reasons and protect us against spam. We also use this to know in which country/city you live: it helps us know in which languages we should translate our tools.

Web behavior

When you browse our websites or read our emails, we use cookies and web beacons to automatically collect which pages you visit, which emails you open, and how you find us (Google, invite links, etc.). This helps us grow our community by measuring which marketing techniques work best. We also collect which browsers and devices you use: it allows us to know which platforms we should support in priority.

Tools statistics

When you use our software tools, we automatically collect usage statistics after obtaining your explicit consent. This helps us be aware of all the interesting ways you are using our tools, so we can improve these tools to support your unique workflow, provide customer support, and perform academic research.

Forum posts

In general, forum posts are not considered to be "personal information" as per the GDPR definition. In particular, they do not contain identifying information. If we see such identifying information, we will delete it so that when a user asks to delete their account, we don't have to delete all their posts: we can just remove who posted them. This makes it possible to preserve important learning material for the whole community.

How do we store and secure this information?

All our websites are hosted by OVH in a secured data center located in France. This is where all your personal information is stored. We also perform periodic backups which we store encrypted at our office, also located in France.

We follow generally accepted standards to protect your personal information: all communications between you and us are encrypted, and your password is never stored in plain text in our databases, but hashed with a unique salt. We restrict access to your personal information when we do not need it, and keep it stored only for as long as we need it.

To whom we share this information?

Mailgun

We use Mailgun to deliver our emails. This means that we share your email address and the content of our emails with them.

Google Analytics

We share your IP address and your web behavior with Google Analytics. They do a much better job than we could ever do at presenting the data in a useful way.

Youtube

We embed Youtube videos in our websites. While we ourselves never send any of your personal information to Youtube, be aware that by watching these videos, you are yourself automatically sending some information to Youtube, such as your IP address and cookies.

Cookies

We store a few cookies in your computer: those are tiny little files that help us remember information when you go from one page to another. You can disable any of those in your browser settings, but our website won't work correctly without technical cookies.

Technical cookies

SERVERID* are load balancing cookies used by our host OVH for performance and security reasons. phpbb3_* and vgc_sid are session cookies necessary for our account system to work.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics uses cookies, more details here.

Youtube

Embedded Youtube videos use cookies, more details here.

No ads :-)

You may have noticed that we don't run any ads on our websites. We hate them as much as you do, and we'll never share your personal information for the purpose of targeted advertising. Enjoy the ad-free experience!