What we collect, and what we do not.
Last updated 15 August 2026
This is a small site run by one person. It has no advertising, no analytics, no trackers and no cookies. It does, however, have to hold on to your message long enough to deliver it, so here is exactly what happens to it.
pidgee me is operated by Andrew Metcalf. For anything on this page, including requests to see or delete your data, write to andrew@textstr.com. For the purposes of the UK and EU GDPR, that is the data controller.
| What | Why | How long |
|---|---|---|
| Your message | It is the thing being delivered. There is no service without it. | 7 days, then deleted automatically |
| The two cities | To draw the route and work out the flight time. | 7 days |
| Your name (optional) | So the note says who it is from. Leave it blank and it will not. | 7 days |
| Recipient phone number (optional) | Only to guess their nearest city, and to pre-fill a message in your own phone's messaging app. We do not send any texts and the number is never transmitted anywhere by us. | 7 days |
| Email address (Express purchases only) | Collected by Stripe at checkout so they can send you a receipt, and so we know a sale happened. | Held by Stripe. We do not store it or write it to our logs. |
| Usage counts | Plain daily totals, so we know whether the site is being used: flights sent, pages viewed, sales made. Counters only, with nothing in them that could point at a person. | Kept, because a total is a number and not a person |
| IP address | To stop one person flooding the site. It is held in memory only and is never written to disk. | Up to 1 hour |
The aviary shows every bird currently in the air: the two cities, the bird's name, how far along it is, and whether it has stopped for a rest. Anyone can see that, and anyone can watch a flight cross the map.
Nobody but the recipient sees the message. The watch link deliberately omits it. The sender's name and the phone number are never shown publicly either.
Flight links are long random strings and are not listed or indexed anywhere, but they are not secret in a cryptographic sense. Anyone you forward the link to can read the note. Please do not send anything genuinely sensitive through a cartoon pigeon.
There are none. No advertising cookies, no analytics cookies, no third party scripts of any kind. That is why you are not being asked to accept anything.
The one piece of browser storage we use is sessionStorage, straight
after you send, to hold the ready written text so you can copy it. It is strictly
necessary for that feature, never leaves your device, and disappears when you
close the tab.
We count how many flights are sent, how many pages are viewed and how many Express upgrades are bought, as a running total per day. That is how we know whether anyone is actually using this.
We also count how many separate devices visit each day. To do that without a cookie and without an account, your IP address and browser description are combined with a random value and turned into a fingerprint that cannot be reversed. That random value is thrown away every night and a new one is made, so today's fingerprint cannot be matched to tomorrow's, by us or by anyone else. The fingerprints themselves are never written to disk. Only the count is kept.
The consequence is deliberate: we can tell you how many people came today, and we cannot tell whether any of them came yesterday.
These are aggregate counters and nothing else. There is no profile, no visitor record, no identifier, no cookie and no third party analytics service involved. We cannot tell from them who visited, what any individual did, or that two visits came from the same person, because none of that is recorded. A day is stored as a handful of numbers.
Nobody else. No data brokers, no advertisers, no mailing lists.
If you are in the UK or EU, we rely on:
If you type in another person's number, you are handing us their personal data. Only do that if they would be happy about it. We use it for nothing except guessing a city and pre-filling a message on your own phone, and it is deleted with the rest of the flight after 7 days.
Under the UK and EU GDPR you can ask for a copy of your data, ask us to correct it, ask us to delete it, object to how it is used, or ask us to restrict it. Email andrew@textstr.com and we will deal with it within 30 days.
You do not have to ask us for deletion. Open your flight link and there is a Delete this message now link at the foot of the page, which removes the message and the flight from the server immediately and permanently. Everything self destructs after 7 days anyway, whether you ask or not.
If you are in the EEA or UK and you think we have handled this badly, you have the right to complain to your local data protection authority.
The server is in the United States (Oregon). If you are writing from the UK or the EU, your message is transferred to the US to be stored there for those 7 days.
This site is not intended for children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect anything from them.
The site is served over HTTPS, payment details never reach it, and the secret keys it needs are held in AWS Secrets Manager rather than on disk. It is still a hobby project run by one person, not a bank. Treat it accordingly.
If this page changes, the date at the top changes with it.
Not legal advice, and not written by a lawyer. It is an honest description of what the code actually does.
© 2026 pidgee me · built by www.andrewjmetcalf.com