Privacy Policy

Effective date: July 3, 2026 · Version: 2026.07.03 · Last updated: July 15, 2026 (clarified website analytics & advertising cookies)

This Privacy Policy explains what Verdict Strategy Builder — operated by Jacob Hyde (the "Operator", "we", "us") — collects when you use the Verdict Strategy Builder (NT8) desktop application and verdictstrategybuilder.com, why, who can see it, and what your choices are.

The short version: your strategy data backs up privately to your own account, the Operator can see it, other customers never can, and your market data never leaves your machine. The desktop application runs no analytics or advertising trackers; the marketing website uses common analytics and ad-measurement cookies (Google and Meta) that you can opt out of.

1. What we collect

Account data. Email address, name (if you give one), password hash, and whether you are a beta or subscription customer.

Billing data. Checkout and payments are processed by Stripe as merchant of record. We never receive or store card numbers. We store what we need to operate your license: subscription plan, status, and paid-through date, plus Stripe's identifiers for your customer and subscription.

Licensing and device data. When the application activates or checks in ("heartbeat"), we receive your license key identity, an install UUID generated by the app, the OS name/version, the machine name, the app version, the request's IP address, and timestamps (activated / last seen). This is the entire "telemetry" surface of the desktop application — there are no analytics events, no usage tracking, no crash uploader, and no advertising identifiers in the app. (Analytics on the marketing website are covered separately below.)

Synced strategy data (mandatory backup). As a condition of the license, the application uploads your builds, run results, strategy definitions, and their leaderboards — small JSON metadata — to your account. Imported market data (bars, parquet files) is never uploaded.

Consent records. Which version of the EULA and this policy you accepted, when, from which device, and from which IP address.

Support. Emails you send to support, and their contents.

Website. verdictstrategybuilder.com uses the session cookie Laravel needs to keep you signed in. It also loads third-party analytics and advertising measurement:

• Google Analytics 4 / Google Ads (Google's gtag.js) — measures page views and which ads or searches bring visitors to the site, and records when a visit leads to a subscription.
• Meta Pixel — reports page views, checkout starts, and completed purchases back to Meta so we can measure and improve our Facebook and Instagram ads.

These set third-party cookies and share the corresponding events with Google and Meta, who act as our measurement providers. They run on the website only — never in the desktop application and never against your synced strategy data — and you can opt out with your browser's cookie controls or Google's and Meta's ad-preference settings. This covers website visitors and is separate from the account and strategy data described above.

2. Why we collect it

• To provide the service: accounts, activation, license renewal, seat enforcement, private backup, and cross-device restore.
• To support you: reproducing a problem usually means looking at the affected build or run in your account.
• To protect the service: enforcing seat limits, spotting key sharing and abuse, keeping billing state correct.
• To meet legal obligations: tax and accounting records (via Stripe), and the consent log above.

We do not sell your data, we do not use your account, licensing, or strategy data for advertising, and we do not train machine-learning models on your strategies. The website advertising cookies in section 1 measure ad performance from website visits only; they never touch your account or strategy data.

3. Who can see your data

• You — your synced builds, runs, and leaderboards, in the app and portal.
• The Operator — can access your account and synced data in the admin console, for backup integrity, support, abuse prevention, and product oversight. Your strategies are treated as your confidential intellectual property.
• No other customer, ever. There is no public leaderboard, no sharing, and no cross-user visibility of any kind.
• Service providers, only as needed to run the product: Stripe (payments, as merchant of record), our hosting and infrastructure providers (the application server and database), our email delivery provider (magic links, receipts, notices), and — on the website only — Google and Meta for the analytics and ad-measurement described in section 1. Each processes data only to provide its service.
• Authorities, if the law genuinely requires it; we will push back on overbroad requests.

4. Retention

Account, licensing, and synced strategy data are kept while your account exists. If you ask us to delete your account, we delete or anonymize it within 30 days, except: consent records and billing/tax records, which we retain as long as the law requires, and short-lived server backups, which roll off on their own schedule.

5. Security

All app-to-server traffic is HTTPS. API access uses per-device tokens that are revoked when a seat is deactivated. Synced data is scoped to your account and checked for ownership on every write. Secrets (including the license signing key) live only in server configuration. No system is perfectly secure — if we learn of a breach affecting your data we will notify you without undue delay.

6. Your rights and choices

Email support@verdictstrategybuilder.com to access, export, correct, or delete your data; we honor these requests regardless of where you live, and they include the rights granted by the GDPR (EU/UK) and CCPA/CPRA (California). Note two consequences honestly: deleting your account revokes your license and its device seats, and backup sync cannot be disabled while a license is active — the alternative to mandatory sync is not using the product.

7. Children

The Software is for adults trading derivatives. It is not directed at anyone under 18, and we do not knowingly collect data from them.

8. Changes to this policy

This policy is versioned. Material changes are presented for acceptance in the application at startup, and the current version is always published on the website. The version and effective date at the top tell you what you are reading.

9. Contact

Verdict Strategy Builder · Jacob Hyde support@verdictstrategybuilder.com