How I handle your data

Only what you typed into it yourself:

• what you need: the options you picked;
• your task in your own words;
• where to reply: Telegram, WhatsApp, or email;
• your name, if you gave it (the field is optional);
• when you need it, if you filled that in (also an optional field).

The address of the page you sent it from goes along with your request. I need it for one thing only: to understand which piece of work you mean if you sent the request from a case study page. It is not linked to anything else.

Your request is first saved as a file on my server, and from there it goes to me on Telegram. It is set up this way so that the request doesn’t get lost: if Telegram doesn’t respond, the server tries again by itself.

I’m the only one who reads it. No copy is sent to email, and it doesn’t end up in third-party services (newsletter and bulk-messaging services, a CRM, analytics). The server is mine and is located in Singapore. Telegram handles the delivery, which means the message passes through its servers, like any message in a messenger.

To reply to you and, if you and I come to an agreement, to do the work. Nothing else: I don’t send newsletters or bulk messages, and I don’t sell this data or pass it on to anyone.

As long as it may be needed for the work or for correspondence. Nothing is deleted automatically: the request stays as a file on the server and as a message in Telegram until I delete it myself.

Ask me to delete it, and I’ll delete it in both places and write back to say it’s done.

On your first visit, a consent banner appears at the bottom of the screen and asks whether to turn on the Google Analytics visit counter or not. Until you click the “I agree” button, the counter doesn’t load at all and sets no cookies, and the website works exactly the same.

If you agree, Google Analytics remembers your browser using cookies (_ga and _ga_…, which last up to two years) and sends me a summary: how many people visited, where they came from (from search, from Telegram, or by a direct link), which pages they viewed, whether they used a phone or a computer, and which country they were in. In that summary I can’t see who exactly you are, and what you wrote in the contact form doesn’t go into the counter.

The data is stored and processed by Google, including on servers in the United States; how exactly it does this is described in Google’s rules for data from websites. Google Analytics does not store your IP address. The counter’s advertising features are turned off, and the data is kept for 14 months.

If you change your mind, come back to this page: there is a link to it at the bottom of every page of the website, and here, in this section, is the “Turn off the counter” button. The counter’s cookies will be deleted, and it won’t load again. Your choice is remembered by your browser, not by my server.

Turn off the counter

The counter is off: it does not load, and its cookies have been deleted.

If you switch the site language, your choice is stored for a year in a cookie named lang, so the home page opens in the same language next time. The cookie holds nothing but the language, it is not shared with anyone, and you are not asked to consent to it: without it you would have to pick the language on every visit.

To see how people search for the website, I use the search engines’ own dashboards: Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools, and Yandex Webmaster, the Yandex tool for site owners. They show which searches lead people to the website and which pages the search engine has taken into its results. These are the search engines’ summaries of their own search results: they receive nothing about the website’s visitors, and there are no scripts or cookies from them on the pages.

After every update, the website tells Bing and Yandex, a search engine used in Russia, which pages have changed. It does this by itself, so that search engines see them sooner. Only page addresses are sent; there is nothing about you in them.

An ordinary server log is also kept automatically. Every time the server is accessed, it records the address the connection came from, the time, and which page was opened. Any web server works this way; I need it to fend off spam sent through the contact form and to figure out what went wrong if something breaks.

The bots run on my server, and your conversation with them goes through Telegram. The audit bot and the site check bot do not store your name, your @username, or the text of your messages, only your Telegram ID, the number Telegram uses to tell people apart. The bot in the channel’s chat works differently; more on it below.

The “Talk to the developer” button in the report opens a chat with me. If you send a message, it is an ordinary Telegram conversation, and the bot doesn’t see it.

@jw_video_channel_audit_bot writes a report on a public YouTube channel. To do that, it uses YouTube API Services: the link or the channel’s @handle that you send goes to Google. Nothing else about you goes there.

The bot stores:

• your Telegram ID;
• the bot language: Russian or English;
• the tag on the link you came through, for example, from the website or from the channel;
• when you ran checks and how they ended;
• the ID and @handle of the channel you checked, for 20 days, after which they are erased. The bot does not store a channel’s name, description, or numbers.

The rest is kept until you ask me to delete it. Copies of the database are kept for 7 days.

By using the bot, you agree to the YouTube Terms of Service.

How Google handles data is described in the Google Privacy Policy.

If you pay for a subscription in Telegram Stars, the bot also stores your Telegram ID, the amount, the Telegram payment numbers, the dates, and the subscription period. These are kept for 12 months after the payment, in case of a refund or a dispute. The payment is made inside Telegram, and the bot does not receive your card details.

If you ask me to delete your data, within 7 days I’ll erase everything except the payment records: those stay for their full 12 months. What was erased disappears from the copies of the database after another 7 days. Deleting your data from the bot does not cancel the subscription (you cancel it in Telegram itself, under “My Stars”) and changes nothing on YouTube.

@jw_site_check_bot checks a website from the link you send. It opens the page itself, the way a browser does, while the speed is measured by Google PageSpeed Insights, and the page address goes there. The bot also asks public domain registries about the domain name, to find out when its paid period ends.

The bot stores:

• your Telegram ID, the bot language, and the tag on the link you came through;
• the address of the website you checked, without anything after the “?”;
• the scores and numbers from the measurement, and when the check took place.

The bot does not save the screenshot from the report. There is no set period for keeping this data yet: it stays until I delete it myself. Ask, and I’ll delete it, from the copies of the database too.

My helper bot is in the @jw_dev_pro_chat chat. The bot itself doesn’t post in the chat; it keeps a copy of the messages: the author’s name and @username, the text, the time, and who joined and who left. It doesn’t download photos or files. I am the one who reads this copy, sometimes together with Claude, the AI assistant from Anthropic. The copy doesn’t go anywhere else.

The copy of the messages is kept for 12 months, the internal record of each event for 90 days, and the copies of the database for 7 days. If you delete a message in the chat, the bot won’t notice, and it will stay in the copy: message me, and I’ll delete it myself.

If you send this bot, @jw_dev_pro_channel_bot, a direct message, it won’t reply, and the message will be erased after 90 days.

Contact me directly. I reply myself; you don’t need to fill out any form, and you don’t need to explain why you’re asking either.

If it’s about a bot, message me from the Telegram account you used it with: that is how I’ll find your records.

Contact me on Telegram, on WhatsApp, or by email.