Privacy Policy
Last updated September 14, 2026
Bird Dog is a fantasy football draft and lineup assistant, available as a website at birddogfantasy.com and as a Chrome extension. This policy covers both. It describes what we actually collect and what we do with it, nothing here is aspirational.
The short version
- We do not sell your data. There is no advertising on Bird Dog.
- The Chrome extension reads your ESPN session cookies only when you click “Connect ESPN league,” and only to link your own league to your own Bird Dog account.
- The draft overlay reads the public contents of the ESPN draft page you already have open. It does not read any other site.
- The free draft cheat sheet requires no account and no personal data.
The Chrome extension
The extension runs in exactly three places, listed in its manifest: ESPN draft room pages, and two pages on birddogfantasy.com. It cannot run anywhere else.
Ask Bird Dog conversations
Questions you send to Ask Bird Dog, and the answers it gives, are stored with your account so we can find and fix bad answers and improve the product. They are not shared with other users or used for advertising. Email support@birddogfantasy.com to have them deleted.
Usage measurement
When a draft board is built, Bird Dog records that a board was built, which platform it was for, and the anonymous draft-kit identifier already stored in your browser if you arrived through a Bird Dog draft-kit link. That identifier is one we issued to your browser; the extension does not create a new one, and it is never read from any other site. This exists so we can tell how often the draft tools are actually used, which the Chrome Web Store does not report.
If you installed the extension directly from the Chrome Web Store and never used a draft-kit link, these records contain no identifier at all and cannot be traced to you. We never collect your name, your ESPN credentials, or any player, team, or roster information from your draft room for this purpose.
ESPN session cookies
When, and only when, you click the Connect ESPN league button in the extension popup, Bird Dog reads two cookies from your browser for fantasy.espn.com: espn_s2 and SWID. These are the credentials ESPN itself uses to identify you, and they are the only supported way to read a private league’s rosters and settings.
Those values are placed in the extension’s local storage and handed to a Bird Dog page you open in your own browser, which submits them to your own Bird Dog account. The handoff is one-shot and expires after two minutes; the extension then deletes its copy. They are never sent to any third party, and the extension never reads cookies for any site other than ESPN, or at any time other than that button click.
If you never click that button, the extension never reads a cookie. The draft overlay and the live draft board work without it.
The draft room overlay
Inside an ESPN draft room, the extension reads the already-visible draft board to see which players have been picked, so it can remove them from your board. It sends the list of drafted players to your own Bird Dog draft board tab, if you have one open. It reads player names, positions, and teams, public draft information. It does not read your ESPN account details, messages, or anything outside the draft page.
Why each permission exists
cookies, read your ESPN session so a private league can be linked, on button click only.activeTab, read the league ID out of the URL of the ESPN tab you are looking at, so you don’t type it manually.storage, hold the drafted-player list and the brief credential handoff described above.- Host access is limited to ESPN and birddogfantasy.com. The extension does not request access to all websites.
The website
If you create an account, we store:
- Your email address, used to sign in and to send the alerts you opt into.
- Your connected leagues, teams, and rosters, fetched from ESPN or Sleeper, so we can give advice about your actual team.
- Your ESPN credentials, if you connected an ESPN league, stored so rosters can refresh, and readable only by our server, never by other users.
- Push notification subscriptions and your notification preferences, if you enable them.
- Payment records from Stripe if you buy a season pass. Card numbers are handled by Stripe and never reach our servers.
The free draft cheat sheet requires no account. If you give us your email for a draft kit, we store that email and nothing else.
Who we share with
We do not sell or rent personal data, and we do not share it for advertising. We use a small number of service providers to run the product: Supabase (database and sign-in), Vercel (hosting), Stripe (payments), Resend (email), and Anthropic (which generates written explanations of player recommendations). Player analysis is run on NFL player data, not on your personal information.
Your choices
- Disconnect a league at any time, which deletes its stored credentials.
- Turn off email or push notifications in your settings.
- Uninstall the extension to end all of its access immediately, Chrome deletes its local storage with it.
- Ask us to delete your account and everything attached to it by emailing the address below.
Contact
Questions, or a deletion request: support@birddogfantasy.com.
Bird Dog is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by ESPN, Sleeper, or the National Football League.