Simpocalypse was created by the STEM Explorer team in the spring and summer of 2020. It was written with the help of a lot of open-source software; you can see a full list of all of the open-source software that comes with Simpocalypse on the licenses page.
The STEM Explorer is a 38-foot mobile K-12 STEM Educational outreach vehicle deployed by Delta College in Michigan. The STEM Explorer program works with thousands of teachers, students and community members each year to promote STEM education in Michigan's Great Lakes Bay Region.
The Simpocalypse website collects access logs. This means that the server that runs this website records your IP address and the identification information sent by your Web browser every time you load a webpage. This is something that almost all websites do, so the administrators can see how busy the website is, watch for bad people trying to break in, and things like that. These access logs are kept completely private, and only the STEM Explorer team can see them. They're also normally erased after about four weeks. The nature of Web access logs means that we only record data that your Web browser sends us; this usually includes your computer's public IP address, the webpage or other file you downloaded, where you followed a link from to get to the Simpocalypse website (if you followed a link), and a User-Agent string that says which Web browser and platform you're using. If you don't want to give us this information, you can usually configure your Web browser to lie about it - we don't mind! Your Referer Is Showing explains how you can stop your browser from telling us where you came from, and most browsers provide ways to change their User-Agent strings, often with an extension.
The Simpocalypse application itself will never collect any kind of usage statistics, or snoop on you in any way whatsoever. It will create one text file, named .simpocalypse-settings.txt, to remember whether or not you've checked the box to disable the splash screen. The only other time that the desktop versions of Simpocalypse will save any other data is when you tell them to save a disease file, or to export your simulation data in CSV, EPS, or SQLite format. The desktop application will never try to use the Internet to contact the STEM Explorer team, or anybody else.
The Web version of Simpocalypse supports connecting to your Google Drive to save the same disease information and simulation data that the desktop versions can save as ordinary files. It will only access your Drive when you tell it to, and will only ever create files (when you save something) or read them (when you load a disease). Simpocalypse will never try to snoop around in your Drive; in fact, it isn't even allowed to access files it didn't create. It will also never save anything to the Simpocalypse servers, except the normal access logs that apply to all parts of the website. It will never send data anywhere except to Google's API servers, so they can store your saved files in your Drive.