Privacy

The short version

You paste a report, something reads it, and you get a chart. We keep your report only if you are signed in, and only as the chart you saved. You can sign in with Google, and there is still nothing to buy. Two other companies are involved: OpenAI, whose model reads reports our own parser cannot follow, and Google, who counts the visit — and Google is never told what you typed.

What you give us

Everything this site knows about your dog is something you typed on Add your dog: the text of a DNA report, or a picture of one, or a photograph of the dog, or a sentence about what you think is in there, and a name to put on the chart. That is the whole list. We ask for an account only when you choose to sign in with Google, and there is nowhere on the site to give us a payment. The only place we ask for an email address is the contact page, and it is there so a reply has somewhere to go.

What we do with it

A tidy report is read here, on our own server, by a parser that looks for a breed name with a percentage against it. When that works, nothing you gave us leaves this site at all.

When it does not — a report laid out in a way the parser cannot follow, a screenshot, a photograph, or a sentence like “mostly cocker, and the mum was the beagle” — we send what you gave us to OpenAI in a single request and ask a model to read it. For a report we ask it for the breeds and the percentages it can see, and nothing else. For a description or a photograph we ask for breed names only. The request is marked not to be stored; beyond that, what OpenAI does with it is governed by their own terms rather than by us. What comes back is a list of breeds and numbers, which arrives in front of you as rows you can correct before anything is drawn.

That machine reader can also be switched off, and it has a ceiling on how many reads it does in a day — a reader anyone can use without signing in is otherwise a bill anyone can run up. When it is off, or the day’s reads are spent, nothing is sent anywhere. The page says so plainly and falls back to the lines it can read on its own.

What we keep

If you are not signed in, nothing.The report text, the pictures, the dog’s name and the chart exist for as long as it takes to answer the request, and are not written to a database, a disk, a log file or a cookie. A photograph you put in a circle stays in your own browser — we never receive it. There is no copy here for you to ask us to delete.

If you are signed in, we keep what you made, because you asked us to. A chart you build is saved to your account so you can come back to it: the breeds and percentages you entered, anything you told us in your own words, the dog’s name, and how the eight were arranged. A photograph you choose to keep on your account is stored as the cropped circle you approved — not the original file, and without the place and time your camera wrote into it. Both are yours. You can delete either one from your account page, and deleting your account deletes both.

What we still keep no record of is which paintings were made for whom. The art library counts what has been asked for and has nowhere to put who asked.

There is one exception on the whole site and it is not about your dog: a message you write on the contact page. That is stored — the words and the address to reply to — because it is a letter, and a letter has to survive long enough for somebody to answer it. Ask us there and we will delete it.

We keep two daily safety counts: how many machine reads have come from your network, and, when you are signed in, how many paid painting attempts have run on your account. They are filed under codes derived from the network or account identity. Your IP address itself is never written down, and neither count holds any part of your report, your style words, your chart or a picture. Old daily counts are discarded when that meter is next used after the day changes. They exist only to keep the paid model calls bounded.

Your chart is in the address bar

Worth knowing, because it is the only real way a chart could get away from you: when you build one, everything on it — the breeds, the percentages, the dog’s name — is written into the page’s own web address. That is deliberate. It is what lets you bookmark a chart, reload it, and still have it in a year without an account. It also means that sending somebody the link sends them the report. There is no copy of the chart here, so it exists exactly as long as the link does.

Counting visits

We use Google Analytics to count visits — how many people arrive, which pages they read, and whether they get a chart out of it. Nothing unusual.

But because a chart lives in the web address, reporting page addresses the ordinary way would hand Google somebody’s DNA report on the first page load. So we do not report them. Nothing from the query string is ever copied — not filtered or shortened, not read at all. What leaves this site is the path, such as /add-a-dog, plus a fixed marker for each of a handful of things worth counting: that a chart was built, that somebody went back and edited it. The values behind those markers are never looked at, so ?mix=Cocker+Spaniel~28.1 and ?mix=x reach Google as the identical line. The address you arrived from is put through the same treatment, so clicking away from a finished chart does not carry it out either. The page title goes too; on this site titles are fixed text belonging to the route and never mention your dog.

Google’s own tag then collects what it collects on any site: a rough location from your IP address, your browser and device, and how you found us. It sets a cookie to tell a returning visitor from a new one, and that is the only cookie here — we set none of our own. There is no advertising on this site, no remarketing tag, no ad network, and no other third-party script of any kind.

Accounts, and nothing for sale

You can sign in with Google and sign out again. There is no newsletter and nothing to buy. Pawstrata is not a genetic test and does not sell one: everything here is built from a report you already paid somebody else for.

When this page changes

We expect to add accounts, and this page will get longer when we do — signing in means an email address, a saved chart, and reasons to keep things that are not kept today. It will say so before any of that starts rather than afterwards, and the date at the top is how you can tell.

Getting in touch

Questions about any of this go on the contact page, which reaches the two of us and nobody else. That form is the one place on this site where something you write is kept: your message and your email address are written down and held until we have answered you. A message we have no way of answering would not be much use to either of us, which is the whole of why the address is stored — it is not added to a list and it is not used for anything else.