Privacy Policy

The short version

VG Cruising Ducks is a small community hobby project based in Osceola County, Florida, USA. We collect what you choose to type into our forms, we publish approved submissions on public pages, and we do not sell personal information. Optional tips are processed by PayPal. We do not store your payment card or bank information. Questions or requests: legal@vgcruisingducks.com.

Information you voluntarily submit

When you log a find or a hide you may give us: the duck code, the name you want shown, the cruise line and ship, the date, the place you found or hid the duck, your story, what you did with the duck (kept it or re-hid it), and an optional photo. Apart from the duck code and a display name, these fields are optional. Please use a first name or nickname if you prefer.

Optional support payments. If you choose to leave an optional tip through our “Support the Adventure” feature, payment and billing information is submitted directly to PayPal. VG Cruising Ducks does not collect or store your full credit card, debit card, or bank account information. Leaving a tip is completely optional and is not required to find, register, re-hide, follow, or participate in VG Cruising Ducks.

Approved submissions are public

Every submission is reviewed by an administrator before publication. Once approved, the information submitted for that adventure — finder or hider name, cruise line, ship, date, place or location, story, action taken, approved photo, and approximate map point — may be displayed publicly across VG Cruising Ducks, including Duck Lookup, the Journey Timeline, the Journey Gallery, Recent Adventures, and other applicable public journey pages. These pages are public and may be indexed by search engines, cached, or shared on social media. Please do not submit sensitive personal information in these public fields. Submissions that are not approved remain visible only to site administrators. We may edit, decline, or remove any submission at any time.

Photos and photo metadata

When you submit a photo through “I Found a Duck” or “Hide a Duck,” the photo is initially stored in a private storage area while the submission awaits moderation. Pending photos are not intentionally made publicly accessible; they may be accessed by authorized administrators for the purpose of reviewing the submission. The public website is not designed to display a photo until its submission has been approved.

After an administrator approves a submission, the approved photo is moved from private pending storage into public storage, and it may then appear publicly on VG Cruising Ducks — including Duck Lookup, the Journey Gallery, the Journey Timeline, Recent Adventures, and other applicable public journey pages. For performance, public photos may be delivered as resized, optimized, and cached versions of the uploaded image. Please only upload photos you have the right to share, and avoid photos that identify other people without their permission — especially children.

Photo optimization and metadata. You may select supported photos up to 25 MB. Large or high-resolution photos may be resized and recompressed in your browser before upload, and images may be re-encoded as a web-friendly JPEG or WEBP. This optimization process is designed to remove embedded EXIF metadata — including embedded GPS or location metadata — from the resulting uploaded image. We describe this as our current processing design rather than a guarantee about every possible file or metadata format, so if metadata matters to you, you may still wish to remove it before uploading. The site does not intentionally use EXIF GPS metadata to determine where a duck was found or hidden; journey map locations come from the approximate place information provided through the site's location feature.

Approximate location on the journey map

When you log a find or a hide you may optionally type a place name — a cruise port, city, or island. If you do, we look that place up and store an approximate map point (latitude and longitude rounded to roughly a kilometre). Once approved, that point is shown publicly as a numbered marker on the duck's journey map.

This is optional; submissions work fine without it. The website does not request or intentionally collect your device's precise GPS location for journey-map submissions, it does not read your browser location automatically, and it does not derive map points from photo metadata. Please choose a general place such as a port or city rather than anything that pinpoints where you live or stay.

Technical information processed automatically

Like most websites, our hosting infrastructure and backend provider may automatically process technical information when you visit or submit a form — for example IP address, browser and device information, referring page, and request, error, or security logs. This processing supports delivering the site, preventing abuse, and diagnosing problems. We do not use this information to build profiles about you.

Service providers we rely on

Supabase provides our database services, file storage, administrator authentication, and administrator password recovery/reset functionality. Submissions and uploaded images are stored there, and access to unpublished submissions and pending photos is restricted to authenticated administrators. Administrator authentication information, including the administrator account and email information needed for sign-in and password recovery, is processed through Supabase Auth.

Lovable provides infrastructure used to operate and host this website and to support its application infrastructure. Certain service requests — including geocoding-related requests, where applicable — may pass through Lovable-provided infrastructure or gateway services before reaching the relevant third-party service.

Google services are used for map display and for place lookup (geocoding). Some geocoding requests may be routed through our application infrastructure rather than being sent directly from your browser. When a journey map is displayed, your browser may load Google Maps resources directly, and Google Fonts may be loaded to provide the website's typography. These third-party services may receive technical information such as IP address, browser and device information, and request details as necessary to provide their services.

PayPal — optional support payments

If you choose to leave an optional tip, payment processing is handled by PayPal. PayPal may collect and process payment, billing, contact, fraud-prevention, identity-verification, and transaction information according to its own Privacy Statement. PayPal acts independently with respect to the personal information it processes in connection with its payment services. PayPal Privacy Statement.

Instagram is an external social and contact platform we link to. If you message or follow us there, that interaction happens on Instagram's platform under its own terms and privacy policy.

These providers handle information under their own privacy policies. Links to other websites are provided for convenience, and we are not responsible for their content or practices.

Cookies, storage, and tracking

VG Cruising Ducks uses minimal first-party anonymous analytics for one purpose only: to understand whether visitors are able to complete the duck-finding flow (for example, how many people scan a duck tag, reach the find page, have a duck code recognized, and finish a submission). These counts are stored on our own backend and are never sold or shared for advertising.

These analytics do not collect your IP address, advertising or device identifiers, precise location, browser fingerprint, user agent, cookies, or any personal profile data. We record only the step reached, an optional duck code, whether the visit came from a QR tag, and a random token stored in your browser's session storage so a single visit isn't counted twice. That token is not a cookie, contains nothing about you, and disappears when you close the tab — it cannot follow you across sessions, days, or sites.

We do not use advertising technology, behavioral profiling, or cross-site tracking. We use essential browser storage only for necessary functionality — such as administrator authentication and password recovery and ordinary application operation. Third-party services used by the site may use their own technically necessary storage or cookies when their content loads in your browser, subject to their own practices and policies.

Please don't send sensitive information

Do not submit anything sensitive: home addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, cabin numbers, booking or loyalty numbers, payment details, government ID details, health information, or anything else you would not want published. Anything you type into a public story field may end up on a public page.

Data retention

Approved submissions are intended to be retained as part of a duck's historical journey, so they may remain published unless removed. Pending, declined, deleted, or replaced content may be removed according to our moderation and operational needs.

When an administrator deletes a find or hide submission, the associated stored photo is also deleted through the site's storage cleanup process. When an administrator successfully replaces a photo, the previous stored photo is removed after the replacement has been saved. We cannot promise instantaneous erasure from every cache, backup, or infrastructure layer: temporary cached copies may persist for a limited period as part of normal hosting and CDN operation, and copies may persist for a period in routine provider backups and logs, search-engine caches, or wherever content has already been shared outside this website. We may also retain limited information where needed to resolve disputes, prevent abuse, or comply with legal obligations.

Access, correction, and deletion requests

You may request access to, correction of, or deletion of information you submitted by emailing legal@vgcruisingducks.com. So we can match the request to the right submission, we may ask for reasonable verifying details such as the duck code, the approximate submission date, the display name used, or other information associated with the submission.

We offer these mechanisms voluntarily as a matter of good practice. Nothing here is a representation that any particular privacy statute applies to VG Cruising Ducks. We aim to respond to reasonable requests within a reasonable time, but we cannot guarantee immediate or complete erasure everywhere — see Data retention above. You can also reach us through our contact page or on Instagram at @vgcruisingducks, though email is the best route for privacy and legal requests.

Security

We use reasonable safeguards, including administrator authentication, restricted administrative access, private storage for pending photos, access controls on unpublished submissions, and encrypted connections provided by our hosting and backend providers. However, no website, server, or Internet transmission can be guaranteed to be completely secure, so please treat anything you submit as potentially public.

Children's privacy

This site is meant for a general audience and is not directed to children under 13. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children. If a child wants to share a find, a parent or guardian should make the submission on their behalf and use a first name only. If you believe a child has submitted personal information, email legal@vgcruisingducks.com and we will remove it.

No sale of personal information

We do not sell, rent, or trade personal information, and we do not currently use submitted personal information for targeted advertising or profiling.

Where information is processed

VG Cruising Ducks operates from the United States, and our providers may store or process information in the United States and other countries where they operate. If you submit information from outside the United States, you understand it may be processed in the United States, where data protection laws may differ from those in your country.

Changes to this policy

This site is growing, so this policy may change. When it does, we will update the revision date at the top of this page. Continued use of the site after an update means you accept the revised policy.

Contact

VG Cruising Ducks, Osceola County, Florida, USA — legal@vgcruisingducks.com