Privacy policy
Last updated:
This page says what we collect, why, where it goes, and what you can do about it. It is short because there is not much.
Who runs this site
JapowDB is run by Po Chun Chiu, in Taiwan. Not a company, one person.
For anything about your personal data, or to see it, correct it, or have it deleted, email privacy@japowdb.com. That address only receives mail.
What we collect
If you are just reading: what you do on the site, roughly where you are based on your IP address (country, region, city), and your device and browser. That goes to PostHog in the United States, and we use it to see which pages people actually read.
If you have an account, also: the account details Google or Discord give us when you sign in, the handle, description and link you write yourself, the three questions you answer when you start, the trips you save, and the ride tracks you upload.
You can keep using the site without any of that. You just cannot save trips or upload tracks.
Your ride tracks
An uploaded GPX keeps its full coordinates and the time of each run. That is more sensitive than it sounds: a track that starts at your home, drives to the resort and comes back tells anyone reading it where you live and where you parked.
So they are private by default. Publishing one is something you choose to do.
When you do, one control covers both places it appears: your own page, and the community map for the resort you rode. Turn it off and it comes back from both. The map is cached, so it can take up to an hour to disappear.
A published track is clipped to the resort boundary. Anything outside it is never sent. That is a commitment, not a setting.
You keep ownership of your tracks. Uploading one lets us show it in the places you turn on.
Who else sees it
These services see your IP address simply because your browser makes a request to them: PostHog (United States, analytics), Supabase (accounts and database), Vercel (hosting), Google Fonts, Google (the preferred-sources button on snow report pages), OpenStreetMap and CARTO (map tiles), and the source of our terrain tiles.
The files you upload sit in storage that needs a key to read and is not open to the public. Avatars are served through our own address rather than directly.
YouTube deserves its own line. A video only loads if you click it, and it loads from the no tracking address. But the thumbnails load as soon as the page does, so YouTube knows you visited either way.
We do not sell your data, we run no advertising, and we do not hand anything to data brokers.
Cookies and browser storage
Your sign-in session, the language you picked (one year), the analytics cookie, whether you dismissed the Discord note, a marker that you have saved a trip before, and your progress through article checklists.
And one more: if you tell us not to measure your visits, that instruction has to be stored too, or we would forget it on your next page.
How long we keep it
Analytics data is kept twelve months. Account data is kept until you delete your account.
Deleting an account really deletes it: the database rows go with it, and your uploaded files are cleared too.
Two exceptions, stated plainly. A handle you have used is held for 180 days so nobody can take it immediately. And clearing the files happens after the account is already gone, so if the storage service is having a bad moment the files can survive; we record whatever was not cleared and deal with it.
Your rights
You can ask to see your data, to correct it, or to have it deleted, and you can tell us to stop measuring your visits. Under Taiwan’s personal data law these rights cannot be waived in advance. Email privacy@japowdb.com.
Your account settings also control which parts of your own page are visible. Accounts are not open yet, so that link has nothing behind it until they are.
Changes to this policy
The date this page last changed is at the top. When something changes materially, we note it in the site changelog.