Grinning Cat Studio's policy on privacy is pretty simple: We don't collect people data and we don't share people data. We don't want people data. As far as people go, we track exactly one thing - whether someone is logged in or not. That's it.
We do track some non-people data with regards to products and services. Many things we make have some sort of comments, or ratings, or feedback, or bookmark, or score, or interaction of some variety. These types of things are associated with a Reader Account, that way someone can read from where they left off or keep a useful comment or continue from a saved place. Many of these features are optional. We may from time to time track some metrics with that interaction data: how many of a thing there are with what tags or how often it takes more than a certain time to get a new thing out there. This helps us make better toys for writers to play with.
We also try our best to keep any data we interact with out of the hands of any "AI" training. Both data we generate and data that is shared with us.
Email is used in two cases:
1. For logging into and validation of a Reader Account.
2. System messages from Grinning Cat Studio or our services, such as password resets or purchase confirmations.
Nothing else. We don't do mailing lists or any sort of spam messages. We don't track this information, sell this information, nor make this information public.
Cookies are used in a few small transactional cases. Items such as remembering some details for use with logins while a Reader is logged in or temporarily store some minor information while uploading data to our platforms. Any such cookies are only for those individual asks and are not used if not interacting with those tasks. Due to the nature of these small items, such cookies are required to interact with any of our toys. Engaging in any area while logged in to a Reader Account is consent to these cookies.
We don't touch it. All payments and payment information are handled by third parties. We try our best to only use respectful companies with concern to data, but how they handle financial data is managed by their respective privacy policies.
If any tips, donations, or purchases are made on our sites, a reference may be added to the related Reader Account that a transaction took place. This will never include any sensitive or personal information.
Since anything we sell directly is mostly digital in nature, Grinning Cat Studio has a general no refunds policy. If someone buys something and there is a problem we will instead aim to fix the problem. In rare cases where there is genuine error or product issues, this may be relaxed if a solution can't be found - but rarely.