As contributors to the Dolphin Emulator project, we always try our best to keep our users' best interests in mind. Dolphin and some of its associated services (for example, this website) do sometimes collect information about our users and their activities. This page will attempt to explain in what situations we collect data, how we process it, and how do we keep it secure if needed.
Dolphin collects data and transmits it to the internet for several different use cases:
The first time you launch Dolphin, you are asked whether you consent to sharing anonymous data about your usage of Dolphin to help us improve the software. This section describes the type of information collected through our analytics reporting.
We try our best to not collect information that can identify a Dolphin user from their reported analytics. Analytics reports are tied to a random analytics ID which is generated at initial Dolphin setup time. You can generate a new analytics ID through Dolphin's settings.
Due to how the internet works, Dolphin also shares your IP address with Dolphin's analytics service when submitting a report. We do not link this IP address with any other information from the report. The IP address is kept in logs for up to 7 days for anti-abuse purposes.
High level aggregated data generated from Dolphin's analytics may be shared publicly with anyone. This includes for example usage trends for Dolphin as a whole, or reported performance increases between two Dolphin versions.
Raw unaggregated data is shared on a need-to-know basis within the Dolphin development team and infrastructure maintenance team.
Normal usage data is kept for up to 365 days. Performance samples are kept for up to 90 days.
If you have opted-in to this reporting but have changed your mind, you can disable analytics reporting in Dolphin's settings window.
Dolphin's websites feature ads to help us pay our bills (build and testing infrastructure, domain name, hosting, backups, etc.). These ads are not targeted to any single users, and the providers of this advertisement are not collecting any information about your usage patterns on our websites.
We use cookies. Who doesn't? Specifically, we use them for login sessions as well as language preferences.
We do not store IP addresses or any other identifying information in our logs. We do keep IP addresses for an indefinite amount of time for anti-abuse purpose on our forums and Wiki (spam prevention, ban evasion prevention).