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Privacy

Draft, pending legal review.

What we collect

We do not obtain lists of followers or identify individual followers. MarsVale reads the follower count of its Instagram account (one aggregate number) through the official Instagram API and the public profile page. If you comment under one of our posts, we read that comment, including your username, to give a colonist your @handle (or remove it when you comment LEAVE), to build what you asked for and to reply to it.

This website

The site has no accounts, no forms, no cookies and no third-party trackers. Your browser may remember your 2D/3D preference, and a few colony totals from your last visit (to show what changed), in local storage on your own device. Nothing from local storage is ever sent to us, except one yes/no flag described below.

Visit counts

To know whether MarsVale is worth building on, each page view sends one small request that says only: which page, whether this browser has visited before (yes or no), whether you arrived from Instagram, and whether the screen is phone-sized. There is no cookie, no identifier and no third-party script, and we never send the address of the page you came from.

Our hosting provider (Amazon CloudFront) keeps standard access logs of requests, which include IP addresses, browser type and the address requested (including any tracking tags a link carried, such as Instagram's). We keep these logs for 14 days, use them only to count visits and to keep the site secure and affordable, never combine them with other data, and then they are deleted automatically.

If your browser sends Global Privacy Control or Do Not Track, the visit request is not sent at all.

Named characters

Characters in the colony are fictional. The Founder Archive names only people who asked to be named, by commenting on an open-call post. We keep the name you chose, whether you allowed your username to be shown, when you asked, and how (comment, message or email). Only the name, the username if you allowed it, a fictional role and the month you joined are published. Ask the MarsVale Instagram account to be removed at any time: your entry leaves the page at the next update, and its record is deleted from our storage, including backup copies, within 90 days.

Contact

Questions: message the MarsVale Instagram account.