Privacy policy

When you publish an icon, its pixel data, look settings, name and tags are saved on the Site's servers and published for anyone to see. Please don't put information that identifies a person in a name or tag.

An AI reviews each evolved icon (a haiku, awards, a comment and so on). To write the review, the pixel drawings before and after the evolution, their names and tags, and the names of their ancestors are sent to Anthropic, PBC's generative AI service (the Claude API). Nothing about you — such as the identifier below or your IP address — is sent. The reviews are published with the icons for anyone to see. They're written by an AI, not a person, and say so beneath them.

As people under 18 may use the Site too, it's run in compliance with the laws on children's safety and privacy, including the US Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA).

The Site stores the following in your browser (local storage):

• A randomly generated identifier, used to count favorites and an icon's downloads without double counting; to take each report and vote once per person; to keep you from evolving an icon you just evolved; to show the icons this browser evolved in My record; and to understand how the Site is used — how many people visit, and how many of them evolve icons or vote. It's also saved on the Site's servers alongside the icons you evolve, your votes, the days you visited the Site and so on. It can't be used to identify you.
• Information for My record: when you last opened My record, whether this browser has published an icon, and the edit links of icons you published — used to tell you what's new since last time, and to let you rename or retag an icon from there.

You can delete these from your browser settings at any time.

When you report an icon, the reason you chose and anything you wrote are saved on the Site's servers along with the identifier above. They're used only to deal with the report.

When you vote in a species vote or a naming vote, your choice is saved on the Site's servers along with the identifier above. Names you propose in a naming vote are published for anyone to see — please don't put information that identifies a person in them.

The Site runs on an external cloud service. Access information such as IP addresses and browser types may be recorded for operations such as preventing unauthorized access and dealing with outages.

To understand how the Site is used, it also uses Cloudflare's web analytics service (Cloudflare Web Analytics). It uses no cookies, and counts information such as the pages viewed and browser types in a way that doesn't identify you.

What you send through the contact form (your name, email address and message — the name and email are optional) reaches the operator by email. It's used only to respond to you, and for nothing else.

The Site uses Google AdSense, a third-party advertising service.

• Third-party vendors, including Google, use cookies to serve ads based on your previous visits to the Site or other websites.
• Google's use of advertising cookies enables it and its partners to serve ads based on your visits to the Site and/or other sites.
• You can turn off personalized advertising in Google's My Ad Center, and opt out of third-party vendors' cookies for personalized advertising at www.aboutads.info.

For how Google handles information, see Google's advertising policies.

The Site doesn't share the information it collects with third parties, except as required by law.

We may change this policy without notice as needed. Changes take effect when they're posted on this page.

For questions about this policy, please use the contact form.