Privacy & Analytics

Basketball Ideas uses limited analytics and operational monitoring to understand which research tools are useful, find performance problems, and diagnose errors.

What analytics collect

The site uses PostHog for product and web analytics. It can record page visits, browser and device information, interaction events, and performance measurements used to understand whether the research tools are working well. PostHog session recording is disabled in this release.

Analytics are configured to store the anonymous browser identifier in localStorage rather than a tracking cookie. Anonymous visitors are not deliberately identified by email or name. Browser Do Not Track is honored as a best-effort opt-out signal.

Why this is collected

• Measure which Basketball Ideas tools and pages people use.
• Detect slow pages and broken interactions.
• Use privacy-filtered technical error reports to diagnose crashes and JavaScript failures.
• Improve the NBA Coaching Forest, Trade Tracker, Trade Archive, and NBA Window Explorer.
• Verify that releases are functioning after deployment.

Operational monitoring

The site also performs automated availability and data-integrity checks. Those checks test public routes, release versions, and research-data validation. They are operational checks rather than user-behavior tracking.

Third-party services

Basketball Ideas currently relies on Supabase for application data and authentication infrastructure, PostHog for anonymous product analytics and performance measurement, and Sentry for technical browser-error reporting. Sentry is configured with default personally identifiable information disabled, session replay disabled, performance tracing disabled, and request/user details removed before reports are sent. Public pages may also load NBA or Basketball-Reference-hosted image resources where the product uses them.

Contact messages and preferences

If you use the contact form, Netlify processes the name, email address, topic, optional page URL, and message you submit. Patrick can review those submissions in the site’s hosting dashboard to respond or investigate corrections. Avoid including sensitive personal information.

Your light or dark edition choice is saved in this browser’s local storage. Feature editing uses the existing private sign-in.

Daily game progress

Trade Recall and Missing Link each save a separate random guest session key and your last edition in this browser’s local storage. The database stores a hashed version of that key with your game progress, submitted player identifiers, strikes, used hints, and timestamps so refreshing or reopening a tab can resume your run. The session key is not included in share links or analytics. No account is required. Clearing site data removes this browser’s access to its saved runs.

Game analytics record starts, displayed trades or chains, whether submitted guesses were correct, hint use, completed trades or chains, run endings, exits, returns, share actions, and archive visits. They help improve difficulty and reliability. Free-text player search entries are not included in these custom events, and the search form is excluded from automatic interaction capture. The analytics controls above apply to these events; opting out does not stop essential game progress saving.

Changes

This notice includes the Phase 1 contact form and theme preference. It should be updated when the site begins using materially different analytics, advertising, session recording, or other user-data processing.