Privacy policy
Last updated 24 October 2026
In short: we collect only what's needed to run your account and remember your progress. We don't show ads, use tracking or analytics, send marketing email, or sell or share your information. You can delete your account and everything in it at any time from your Profile page.
Who we are
BirdBrainQuiz is a free bird identification quiz at birdbrainquiz.com, run by an individual rather than a company. Questions about this policy or your information go to jim@computercoach.guru.
What we collect
- Your account: your first and last name, your email address, and your password. The password is stored only in scrambled (hashed) form, so nobody, including us, can read it.
- If you sign in with Google: Google tells us your name, your email address and that the address is yours, plus an account number that lets us recognise you next time. We don't get your Google password or anything else from your Google account.
- Your quiz activity: the quizzes you take and their scores, which birds you got right or missed, your study progress for each bird, your streak, and the settings of your last study session so you can pick up where you left off.
- Things you create: saved bird lists (their names, descriptions and birds) and any photo problem reports, including the reason and the note you write.
- Technical information: like most websites, our server keeps logs of requests, which include your IP address, browser type, the pages requested and when. Our own logs of quiz activity record your account number and browser type. We use these only to fix problems and keep the site secure.
How we use it
We use your information to run your account, save your progress, choose which birds to quiz you on, send password-reset emails you ask for, and find and fix problems. That's all. If you're in the EU or UK, we process your information because it's needed to provide the service you signed up for, and, for logs, because we have a legitimate interest in keeping the site working and secure.
Who else sees it
- Lists you share: if you share one of your lists, anyone with the link can see the list and your name.
- Our hosting provider: the site and its database run on servers rented from DigitalOcean, in the United States. They store the data for us and aren't allowed to use it for anything else.
- Email delivery: password-reset emails, and the photo problem reports you send us (with your name, email address and note, so we can reply), go through an email delivery service, which sees the addresses and the message.
- Google: if you sign in with Google, Google knows you used it to sign in to BirdBrainQuiz. Google's own privacy policy applies to that.
- "How do I tell these apart?": this feature sends the names of the two birds and a description of the photo (such as "female" or "in flight") to Anthropic's Claude AI to write the tips. Nothing about you is sent.
- Donations: donations are handled entirely by Stripe. We never see your card details; Stripe's own privacy policy applies.
- Photos and icons: some quiz photos load directly from iNaturalist, Wikimedia Commons or Flickr, and the site's icons load from jsDelivr. As with any website, those servers see your IP address and browser type when your browser fetches them.
- The law: we'd disclose information only if legally required to.
Cookies
We use just two cookies, both needed for the site to work: one keeps you signed in, and one protects forms against misuse by other websites. We don't use analytics, advertising or tracking cookies.
How long we keep it
Your account information and quiz activity are kept for as long as you have an account. When you delete your account, they're deleted straight away. Copies in server backups are replaced in the normal course of backups. Server logs are kept only as long as they're useful for fixing problems and security.
Your choices
- See and correct your name and email on your Profile page.
- Delete your account from your Profile page. This permanently removes your account, quiz history, progress, saved lists and photo reports.
- Ask for a copy of your information, or ask anything else, by emailing jim@computercoach.guru.
Depending on where you live (for example California, Canada, the EU or the UK), the law may give you specific rights over your information. We honour these requests from everyone, wherever they live.
Children
BirdBrainQuiz isn't aimed at children under 13, and we don't knowingly collect their information. If you think a child under 13 has created an account, email us and we'll delete it.
Security
The site uses encrypted connections (HTTPS), and passwords are stored only in hashed form. No system is perfectly secure, but we take reasonable care to protect your information.
Changes to this policy
If we change this policy, we'll update the date at the top. If a change is significant, we'll also point it out on the site.