Privacy

Before you tell us anything. You can look around and start a project without signing up. The moment you start, we make you a save slot so your work has somewhere to live. It gets a random id. Your name and your email are not attached to it, because at that point we do not have either.

When you save your work.You give us an email address and we send a sign in link to it. There are no passwords. We store that address, plus a username we make up for you (something like quiet-heron-0421, never your real name). In settings you can also add your name, your age, and a parent’s email address if you want them to get updates.

What you make. The projects you open, the choices you make inside them, the messages you type to the people in the chat, and anything you hand in at the end: a link, a file, a video, or written work.

How you use the site. Which pages you open, what you press, and what kind of device you are on. We also record the visit itself, so we can play back where people got stuck.

Cookies. Small files the site leaves in your browser. One keeps you signed in. The rest belong to our analytics tool and to Meta, and they are covered below.

BuildMe is built on other companies’ tools. Each one gets the part it needs to do its job:

• Supabase holds your account, your work, and any file you upload.
• Vercel runs the site, so it sees the requests your browser makes to it.
• PostHog gets the usage data and the visit recordings.
• Anthropic gets what you type in a project chat and the work you show the people in it, so Claude can write back to you.
• Resend sends our email, so it gets the address we are sending to.
• Meta gets a record of some of what you do here, because we buy ads on Instagram and Facebook. The next section is all of it.

That list is everyone we hand your information to.

One thing sits outside it. When somebody publishes work that is a YouTube video, a Vimeo video, or a site they built and put online, the page showing it off loads the real thing rather than a picture of it. Whoever runs that thing sees your visit, the same as if you had opened it yourself.

Every page here loads Meta’s tracking code, the one advertisers call the Meta pixel. Our own server sends Meta a second copy of the same events, so the count survives a browser that blocks the first one. What goes across:

• that you opened a page, that you started a project, and that you saved your work with an email address
• your email address, scrambled first. We run it through a one way code, so what Meta receives is a long string of letters and numbers it cannot turn back into your address. Meta scrambles the addresses it already has the same way and looks for a match, which is how it works out which of its users you are.
• the random id your BuildMe account uses, your IP address, which browser you are on, the page you were on at the time, and the country and state your IP points to
• Meta’s own two cookies, which say whether you arrived here from one of our ads and which ad it was

We never send Meta your name, your age, or a parent’s email address, and we never send your email in a form Meta could read.

You can cut most of this off from Meta’s side. In your Facebook or Instagram account settings, the ads section has a switch for activity that other websites send Meta about you. A tracker blocker in your browser stops the half that runs on the page.

• Your email address is never shown anywhere on the site.
• A parent’s email address is only ever used to email that parent. No other user is ever shown it.
• Everything you hand in starts private. It is yours alone until you press publish, and unpublishing puts it back.
• One catch worth knowing: a file you upload sits at its own web address on our storage, and that address works for anyone who has it, published or not. Nothing links to it while your work is private, but it is not sealed. Do not upload something you would mind a stranger opening.
• The username we generate never uses your real name, so publishing your work does not publish who you are.

• Email. Every email we send has an unsubscribe link at the bottom, and settings has a switch for each kind. Sign in links are the exception. Those only ever arrive because you just asked for one.
• Publishing. Unpublish anything you published and it goes back to being private.
• All of it. Email hello@build-me.org and ask us to delete your account. We delete the account, the work, and the files. There is no button for this yet, so the email is the way.

BuildMe is for people aged 13 and over. If you are under 13, this is not built for you yet.

If what we collect changes, this page changes and the date at the top moves. Questions about any of it go to hello@build-me.org.