Privacy
What we store, why we store it, and how to get rid of it. In plain English, because a policy nobody reads protects nobody.
The short version. We keep what the service needs to work and nothing else. There is no advertising, no tracking across other sites, and nothing is sold or shared for marketing. The two cookies we set are the ones that sign you in and count your free generations. If you use the designer without an account we record your IP address, because the free allowance is counted against it.
Who we are
LCD Wizard is operated by lcdwizard.online, of 77 Forrestal Street, Edzell Woods, Scotland, DD9 7XG. It runs
lcdwizard.com and app.lcdwizard.com, and is the data controller
for the personal data described here.
Contact us about anything in this policy at admin@lcdwizard.online. That address reaches a person, not a queue, and it is also the address to use for any of the rights set out below.
This policy was last updated on 12 September 2026.
What we collect, and why
If you use the designer without an account
You can open the designer, build a design and generate code a handful of times without registering. To meter that we create a guest record holding:
- a generated handle, such as
copper-quarry-7145, which is what the activity log shows instead of a name; - how many generations you have used;
- your IP address. IPv4 is stored in full. IPv6 is truncated to its /64 prefix, because the rest of an IPv6 address is yours to change at will and would make the record meaningless;
- when the record was created and last used.
We store the address because the guest allowance is a lifetime one and is counted against the connection rather than the browser. Without it, clearing your cookies would reset the allowance, which would make it no allowance at all. It is used for that and for spotting automated abuse - nothing else. We do not attempt to identify you from it and we do not combine it with anything else.
Two consequences worth knowing. If several people share one connection - an office, a campus, a mobile network behind carrier NAT - they share one allowance, and the second person may be asked to register. And if you create an account, that guest record is marked as converted and stops being used for metering.
If you create an account
- Email address. Required: it identifies the account, confirms it, and is how a password reset reaches you.
- Password. Stored only as a bcrypt hash. We cannot read it, and neither can anyone who obtains the database.
- Display name and avatar, if you set them. Both appear next to anything you publish or comment on. An avatar is scaled to 256 px in your browser before it is uploaded.
- A Google account identifier, if you choose to sign in with Google, so the same account is found next time.
- Plan, credit balance and usage counters - how many generations you have used in the current period, and a lifetime total.
- A Stripe customer reference, if you have ever paid. See below.
What you make
- Saved projects. Stored on the server so you can open them from another machine. Private to your account unless you publish them.
- Published designs. Publishing to the gallery takes a copy of the design and makes it, its previews, its title and its description public, with your display name and avatar against it. You can unpublish at any time.
- Comments and likes. Public, with your display name and avatar.
Collected automatically
- An activity log of things that happened - an account created, a generation run, a design published - with a reference to the account or guest, a timestamp and a small amount of context such as which board was targeted. It is how the service is monitored and how abuse is spotted.
- Visitor counts for the marketing pages. These use a one-way hash of your IP address and browser string that is re-salted every day, together with the page you landed on and the site that referred you. No cookie is set, no raw address is kept, and yesterday's hash cannot be linked to today's. Obvious crawlers are excluded.
- Web server logs. Our web server records the usual request line for each request, including IP address, for diagnosing faults and attacks. These rotate daily and are deleted after fourteen days.
If you support us
Coffees are bought through Buy Me a Coffee, a separate service with its own privacy policy; we never see your card. If you support us, Buy Me a Coffee sends us a notification and we keep the display name you chose, the number of coffees, the amount, and your message if you did not hide it - that is what the About section shows. The notification also carries your email address, which we do not store. A refund removes the entry. The number of Pro purchases is shown as a count only - never who.
What we do not collect
No advertising or analytics networks are loaded on this site. There are no third-party tracking scripts, no fingerprinting, no cross-site profile. We do not ask for a postal address, a phone number or a date of birth. We never see your card details - see Stripe, below.
Cookies
Two, both strictly necessary for the service to function, which is why you are not asked to consent to them. There are no analytics or advertising cookies to decline.
| Name | What it does | How long |
|---|---|---|
lw_refresh |
Keeps you signed in. HTTP-only, so no script on the page can read it. Your short-lived access token is held in memory only and never written to disk. | Until it expires or you sign out |
lw_guest |
Identifies your guest record, so the designer knows how much of the free allowance is left. Kept separate from the sign-in cookie so that signing out does not discard it. | Long-lived |
The designer also uses your browser's own localStorage to autosave the
project you are working on, so closing the tab does not lose it. That never leaves your
machine unless you save the project to your account.
Our lawful bases
| What | Basis |
|---|---|
| Running your account, storing your projects, generating code | Performance of a contract |
| Metering the free allowance, including the guest IP address | Legitimate interests - offering a usable free tier without it being farmed |
| Server logs, abuse detection, the activity log | Legitimate interests - keeping the service available and secure |
| Visitor counts | Legitimate interests - knowing whether the site is read. No identifier is retained |
| Payments and the records that go with them | Contract, and a legal obligation to keep financial records |
| Service email: confirmation, password reset | Contract |
We do not send marketing email. If that ever changes it will be opt-in, and asked for separately.
Who else processes it
Only the providers the service genuinely runs on. Each acts on our instructions.
- Stripe - payments. Card details are entered on Stripe's own checkout page and never reach our server; we hold only a customer reference and whether a payment succeeded. Stripe is a controller in its own right for its fraud and compliance purposes.
- Google - optional sign-in. Only used if you choose "Continue with Google", and then only to confirm the address and identifier.
- Gmail / Google Workspace - the mail server that sends confirmation and password-reset email.
- Our hosting provider - a virtual private server located in Germany, where the application and its database run.
Personal data is stored in the EU. Stripe and Google may process some of it outside the EEA under their own standard contractual clauses. We do not sell data, and we do not share it with anybody for their own marketing.
How long we keep it
| What | Kept |
|---|---|
| Your account and its projects | Until you delete them |
| Guest records that never generated | 90 days from last use, then deleted automatically |
| Guest records that used the allowance | Kept, so the allowance stays spent |
| Web server logs | 14 days |
| Visitor count rows | Aggregated by day; the hash cannot be reversed |
| Payment records | As long as tax and accounting law requires |
Your rights
If you are in the UK or the EEA you have the right to ask us for a copy of your data, to correct it, to delete it, to restrict or object to how we use it, and to receive it in a portable form. You can also withdraw consent where we relied on it.
Some of this you can do yourself and immediately:
- Change your display name, avatar or password in the designer under your account menu.
- Delete any project, or unpublish anything in the gallery.
- Delete your account, which removes your projects, your published designs and your comments with it.
For anything else, email admin@lcdwizard.online
and we will respond within one month. If you are unhappy with the response you can
complain to your data protection authority - in the UK that is the Information
Commissioner's Office, ico.org.uk.
One limit worth being straight about. A guest record holds an IP address and no other identifier, so if you ask us to delete it we can only act on the address you are writing from or one you can tell us. Deleting it also releases the free allowance attached to it, which is why we will not do it repeatedly for the same address.
Security
The site is served over HTTPS only. Passwords are bcrypt hashed with a work factor of 12. Sign-in tokens are short-lived and the refresh cookie is HTTP-only, so a script injected into a page cannot read it. Avatars are re-checked on the server and SVG is refused, because an SVG can carry script. Gallery previews are rendered by our own code from the design rather than accepted as markup from a client. Access to the server is by key only.
No system is perfect. If you find a security problem, please tell us at admin@lcdwizard.online before telling anyone else, and we will credit you if you would like us to.
Children
The service is not aimed at children and we do not knowingly collect data from anyone under 13. If you believe a child has created an account, email us and we will remove it.
Changes
If this policy changes materially we will update the date at the top and, for anything that affects how your data is used, tell account holders by email. The previous wording is in the project's version history.