Privacy

The short version

You can play without an account and nothing leaves your browser. If you sign in, your finished rounds are stored so they can appear on the scoreboard. There are no ads, no trackers, no analytics scripts, and nothing is sold or shared with anyone.

Playing without an account

Rounds are kept in your own browser's local storage. They never reach a server. Clearing your browser data deletes them, and nobody else can see them.

The game does ask Datamuse for the synonyms of each word you enter. Those requests carry the word and your IP address, as any web request does. They are not linked to you here.

If you sign in

Accounts and data are held in Supabase. Two kinds of account exist:

• Anonymous — no email, no name, nothing identifying. It exists only on this device and cannot be recovered elsewhere.
• Google — your email address and display name reach Supabase through Google's sign-in. Your email is never shown publicly; only the username you choose is.

What a finished round stores

• the seed word, the difficulty tier, the date, and how long the round took
• every word you found, with its rung and the word it linked from
• words that missed, and words set aside for sharing a root
• the score, entries used, hit rate, and the rest of the metrics panel
• how many times the page lost focus during the round, and for how long
• your chosen username

That last one deserves a plain word: the page can tell when it stops being the frontmost window, and records a count. It cannot see what you switched to, and it records nothing at all while you are not playing a round.

What is public

Rounds filed while signed in are readable by anyone — that is what a scoreboard is. Your username, scores, words found, times and click-away counts are all visible to other players. Your email address is not.

Aggregate use

Rounds may be studied in aggregate — which words prove reachable, how recall changes with practice, which links people find and which they miss. Anything published from that will be about patterns across players, not about individuals.

Deleting your data

Ask and it will be deleted: the account, the rounds, all of it. Write to you@example.com from the address you signed in with. For an anonymous account, clearing your browser data removes your side of it; say so and the stored rounds go too, though without an email there is no way to prove which ones are yours.

Cookies

None for advertising or tracking. Signing in stores a session token in your browser so you stay signed in; that is its only purpose.