This describes what EricRobbRC.com actually does with information, service by service, as the site is built today. Where a third-party service is involved, its own policy governs what it keeps.
What this site stores itself
- Contact messages: what you write in the contact form, with your name and email, is kept in the site's database so I can reply. It is never published.
- Community build submissions: the name or handle, build details, text and photos you submit are stored and, once I approve them, published on the site under that name. Photos are stored with the site's hosting provider (Vercel) at a public address. Comments on community builds are stored and shown with the name you give. Ask by email and I will take a submission down.
- Plan and curriculum revision notices: if you bought the plans or the curriculum, your email address from the order is used to send you free revisions, through the email service Resend.
- Site analytics, first-party: pages visited, how you arrived (referrer), approximate location from your IP address (country, region, city), device and browser type, time on site, and which links and buttons were used. A random identifier is stored in your browser. IP addresses are not stored. No advertising cookies or third-party trackers are used, and your browser's Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control setting is honoured: with either on, nothing is recorded.
- Abuse limits: to stop the AI troubleshooter and the photo upload being abused, a one-way salted hash of your IP address — never the address itself — is kept for up to about a month to count requests.
What stays in your own browser
The Build Workspace (your saved airplane designs, electronics choices, wiring and checklists), the shopping cart, email-signup drafts and the "I'd buy this" votes on the plans page are stored in your browser's local storage. They never leave your device unless you export a file or place an order, and clearing your browser data removes them. There are no accounts.
Third-party services, and what they see
- Stripe processes every payment. Your name, email, shipping address, phone number and card details are entered on Stripe's page and held by Stripe under its own policy; card details never reach this site. This site reads the order back from Stripe to show your order page and, for a physical order, I see the address in Stripe to post it. Order history lives in Stripe, not in this site's database.
- Mailchimp holds the email list. Signing up sends your email address and the interest you ticked to Mailchimp, which sends a confirmation (double opt-in). Every email has an unsubscribe link, and unsubscribing removes you from the list.
- Resend sends transactional email from this site: replies to community submissions, revision notices, designs you ask to have emailed to you, and the notice I receive when you place an order, which carries the order details and the shipping address so I can send it.
- The Flight Doctor's AI mode sends what you type to an outside AI provider — Anthropic or OpenAI, whichever the site is configured to use — to generate the answer. This site does not store the conversation, but the provider processes it on its own servers under its own terms and may retain it for whatever period its policy allows; I do not control that and cannot delete it on their side. Please do not type personal information into it. The guided troubleshooter on the same page runs entirely in your browser and sends nothing anywhere.
- Vercel hosts the site and keeps ordinary server logs; its Speed Insights script measures page-load performance in aggregate. Neon hosts the site's database. YouTube embeds load only when you press play on a video, after which Google's policy applies.
- Affiliate links to Amazon, Horizon Hobby, FMS, Bambu Lab and OMTech are ordinary links; what those stores collect once you are there is governed by them. Clicks are counted here, first-party, as above.
How information is used
To fulfil orders, deliver downloads, send revisions you paid for, answer your messages, publish what you asked to have published, run the tools, keep the site working and see what people use. It is not sold and not shared beyond the services named above.
Your choices
Email eric@ericrobbrc.com to ask what is held about you here, or to have a contact message, community submission or list signup removed. For data held by Stripe, Mailchimp or an AI provider, their own processes apply, and I will point you to them.
Updates
This policy is rewritten when the site's services change. The latest version is always this page.
