STO Academy Build Planner ("we," "us") is operated by AV Innovation LLC, a New Jersey limited liability company, as an unofficial, fan-made companion tool for Star Trek Online. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Cryptic Studios, Gearbox Entertainment, or CBS Studios Inc. This policy explains what information the site collects, why, and what choices you have about it.
Information We Collect
You can use most of the build planner without an account. Creating one gets you cloud save/sync, build sharing, and the community contribution system, and involves collecting:
Account information — email address and a display name, collected through Firebase Authentication when you sign up with a password or with Google sign-in. If you sign in with Google, we only receive the basic profile info Google shares (name/email), never your Google password.
Build data — whatever you enter into the planner and choose to save: skill point allocations, equipped items/abilities/traits/officers, ship selection, and notes. Saved cloud builds are tied to your account.
Community contributions — if you submit new content (an item, trait, ability, or ship) for the shared catalog, or approve/report someone else's submission, that action is recorded against your account so we can enforce one-vote-per-person and show submission history.
Payment information — if you purchase additional cloud save slots, payment is handled entirely by Stripe on Stripe's own checkout page, with AV Innovation LLC as the merchant of record. We never see or store your card number; we only receive transaction metadata (amount, product, a receipt link) to credit your account and show your purchase history.
Standard infrastructure logs — our hosting and database provider (Google Firebase/Google Cloud) automatically logs things like IP address and request timestamps for security and abuse prevention, the same way most web hosting does. We don't separately collect or analyze this.
Cookies and Local Storage
Some pages show advertising served by Google AdSense, which uses cookies and similar technologies (see "Advertising" below). Apart from that, the data the site itself keeps in your browser is:
A short-lived sessionStorage safety net so an in-progress build survives a trip to Account Settings/My Builds without being lost — automatically cleared when you close the tab or sign out.
A couple of small local flags (e.g. whether you've dismissed a one-time mobile UI hint).
Firebase Authentication's own session storage, which keeps you signed in between visits.
None of the data the site itself stores is used to track you across other websites.
Advertising
We show ads on some pages using Google AdSense. Google and its advertising partners, as third-party vendors, use cookies and similar technologies to serve ads based on your prior visits to this and other websites, and to measure ad performance and prevent fraud. Google's use of advertising cookies enables it and its partners to serve ads to you based on your visit to this site and/or other sites on the Internet. We don't give advertisers your account information, builds, or email address.
You can opt out of personalized advertising by visiting Google's Ads Settings, or opt out of some third-party vendors' use of cookies for personalized advertising at aboutads.info.
If you are in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom, or Switzerland, you will be asked for your consent to ad cookies and personalized ads through a consent message provided by Google, and you can change your choice at any time from the privacy settings link that message provides.
How We Use Your Information
To operate the planner: save and load your builds, keep you signed in, sync across devices.
To run the community contribution system: attribute submissions/votes, enforce moderation rules.
To process and credit purchases, and show you your own purchase history.
To detect abuse (e.g. spammed submissions) and, where necessary, restrict an account's ability to submit or vote — see the Terms of Service for what that involves.
We don't sell your personal information, and we don't share your account information with third parties for their own marketing. (Advertising cookies set by Google are covered under "Advertising" above.)
What's Public
Some of what you do on the site is, by design, visible to other people:
Your display name (never your email) is shown on any build you choose to share via its link, and on your public profile page.
If you submit content for community review, your display name is visible to other signed-in users reviewing it, and on the approvals/reports lists for that submission.
Nothing is public by default — a saved build stays private until you turn sharing on for it.
Service Providers
We rely on a small number of infrastructure providers to run the site, each of which processes data under their own privacy policy:
Google Firebase / Google Cloud — authentication, database, file storage, and server functions. See Firebase's privacy policy.
Your account data is kept for as long as your account exists. From Account, you can update your display name, change your password, and permanently delete your account — which immediately deletes your account record, every saved build, and every share link, and cannot be undone.
Two things are deliberately kept after account deletion, delinked from any active login: content you previously submitted to the community catalog (and your approval/report votes) remains part of the catalog's history, since removing it would corrupt records other users rely on; and payment/purchase records are retained for accounting purposes, since we're required to keep those regardless of whether the account that made the purchase still exists.
Your Choices
You can review and correct your display name at any time from Account, and export or delete any of your saved builds from My Builds. For anything Account doesn't cover directly — such as requesting a copy of your data — contact us using the details below.
Children's Privacy
This site is not directed at children under 13, and we don't knowingly collect information from them.
Changes to This Policy
If this policy changes in a meaningful way, we'll update the "Last updated" date above. Continuing to use the site after a change means you accept the updated policy.