Privacy, in plain English.

Who this covers

This policy covers shainabushnell.com and all of its subpages — everything from the home page to the games arcade at shainabushnell.com/games to the contact and intake forms. It is written and maintained by Shaina Bushnell in Houston, Texas.

Some things I make live at their own addresses and have their own policies: my coaching at positivelyradiant.vip, my writing at read.shainabushnell.com (which Medium hosts), and my shops at stores.shainabushnell.com. Once you land on one of those, this page stops applying and theirs takes over.

What gets collected, and why

Everything below is the complete list. If it is not here, this site does not collect it.

I do not collect payment details on this site, and I do not ask for your date of birth, address, or phone number anywhere on it.

The arcade, specifically

The games have one shared leaderboard, so a little more needs saying.

Your handle is public

Whatever you type as your handle is shown to everyone who opens that leaderboard. That is the whole idea of it. So pick a nickname, not your full name, and please do not put an email address or anything private in there. You can change it any time from the chip at the top of any game, and you can play every game without ever setting one.

What stays in your browser

Your in-progress games live in your own browser's local storage and never reach me. Clearing your site data removes all of it, including your handle, your saved rounds, your personal bests, and the flag that remembers you have already read a game's instructions.

The scrambled IP

When you submit a score or a form, your IP address is run through a one-way hash (SHA-256) before anything is stored. I keep the scrambled result, never the address itself, and it exists purely to cap how many submissions can come from one place in an hour. It cannot be turned back into your IP, and it is not used to track you between pages.

The AI games

Bright Spark and Blink use OpenAI to write their questions and reading passages. The only thing ever sent to OpenAI is a topic, such as "Movies of the 2020s." No player data goes to OpenAI — not your handle, not your answers, not your score, not your IP. Your answers are checked on my own server against a set written in advance.

Cookies and similar

This site uses Google Analytics, which sets cookies to tell a returning visit from a new one. That is the only cookie-based tracking here. There are no advertising cookies, no retargeting pixels, and nothing that follows you to other sites.

The arcade uses local storage rather than cookies. It never leaves your device and is not sent to any server.

You can opt out of analytics entirely with Google's opt-out add-on, your browser's "do not track" or tracking-protection setting, or any ad blocker. The site works exactly the same either way, and nothing here is gated behind accepting tracking.

Who else touches it

I keep the list short on purpose. Each of these has its own privacy policy.

• Vercel — hosts the site and processes standard server request logs.
• Supabase — the database that holds form submissions and leaderboard scores.
• Google Analytics — traffic statistics.
• Google Fonts — serves the typefaces, which means your browser requests them from Google.
• Resend — delivers form submissions to my inbox.
• OpenAI — writes the trivia and reading passages ahead of time. Receives a topic and nothing about you.

Nobody on this list is paid to advertise to you, and no data is shared with anyone for marketing.

Your say over your data

Wherever you live, you can ask me to show you what I have, correct it, or delete it — and I will, because refusing would be strange behaviour for a site this size. Email info@shainabushnell.com.

• Arcade data: clear your browser's site data to remove everything local. To pull a handle or score off the leaderboard, email me and tell me the handle.
• Form submissions: email me and I will delete the record and the message.
• Analytics: already anonymous, but the opt-out above stops collection at the source.

If you are in the EU or UK, the lawful basis is my legitimate interest in running and improving a small personal site, and your consent where the law requires it. If you are in California, I do not sell or share personal information as those terms are defined by the CCPA, so there is nothing for you to opt out of.

Children

This site is not aimed at children under 13, and I do not knowingly collect anything from them. The arcade is genuinely fun for kids, so worth saying plainly: the handle on the leaderboard is public. If your child plays, have them use a nickname. If you believe a child has submitted something identifying, email me and I will remove it.

Keeping it safe

The site is HTTPS-only. The database refuses direct reads and writes and only accepts a few narrow, purpose-built operations, so a browser can never query it freely. Leaderboard names are rendered as plain text, never as markup, so nobody can smuggle code onto the page through a handle. API keys live on the server and never reach your browser.

That said, no site is perfectly secure, and I would rather say so than pretend otherwise. Please do not send me anything sensitive through a web form.

Changes

If this policy changes in a way that matters, I will update the date at the top of this page. If it changes in a way that really matters, I will say so somewhere you will actually see it.