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Privacy Policy

Effective date: July 5, 2026

1. Introduction

The Favorites Game (the "Service") is operated by Benjamin Porter ("we," "us," or "our"). This Privacy Policy explains what information we collect when you use our website and multiplayer game service, how we use and share it, and the choices you have. Please read this policy carefully.

2. Information We Collect

2.1 Information You Provide

  • Account information: username, email address, name, and password when you register. We store only a cryptographic hash of your password — never the password itself.
  • Profile information: display name, avatar (a provided design or an image you upload), and optional details you choose to add, such as your birthday and preferred language.
  • Game content: answers, aliases, quiz guesses, reactions, and other responses you submit during gameplay.
  • Reports and communications: reports you file about other players' content, and messages you send to us for support or feedback.

2.2 Guest Play

You can join games as a guest without registering. Guest accounts use an auto-generated username, and we do not ask guests for a name or email address. Guest accounts expire about 24 hours after creation; when they expire, we remove them from active games, sign them out, and anonymize their identifying details. Gameplay content submitted by a guest may remain part of the game's record in anonymized form.

2.3 Information Collected Automatically

  • Usage and log data: IP address, requests and pages visited, access times, referring URLs, and browser type and language, collected in standard server logs.
  • Gameplay records: games joined, prompts answered, guesses, scores, reactions, and connection timestamps, generated as you play.
  • Approximate location: our network provider derives a country code from your IP address. We use it to enforce the regions where the Service is available and to protect the Service from abuse. We do not collect precise location.
  • Cookies: see Section 5.

3. How We Use Your Information

We use the information we collect to:

  • Provide, operate, and maintain the Service, including your account and real-time multiplayer game sessions.
  • Internal analytics: measure and analyze how the Service is used — including features used, game sessions played, and engagement patterns — to operate, secure, troubleshoot, and improve the Service. We perform this first-party analytics ourselves and through service providers acting on our behalf. This processing is a core part of providing the Service and is not an optional setting.
  • AI-assisted quiz adjudication: when a quiz guess is not an exact match to an answer, we may send the guess, the answer, and the category — but not your name, username, or contact details — to a third-party AI provider to judge whether the guess is "close enough" and to generate plausible wrong-answer quiz options. See Section 4.2.
  • Moderation and safety: filter submitted content against banned-word lists and review content that players report.
  • Communicate with you about the Service. We currently send only service emails — such as email verification, account notices, and support replies — not marketing email.
  • Detect, prevent, and address technical issues and abuse, including rate limiting and CAPTCHA verification at registration.
  • Comply with legal obligations.

4. Sharing of Your Information

We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share it with third parties for advertising. We share information only in the following circumstances:

4.1 Other Players and Shareable Game Pages

Multiplayer gameplay is inherently shared: your display name, avatar, answers, guesses, reactions, scores, and connection status are visible to the other players in your games. After a game ends, its recap and favorites pages can be shared by link, and anyone with the link can view those pages — including people who did not play. Consider that before submitting content you would not want shared.

4.2 Service Providers

We share information with third-party vendors that process it on our behalf and are permitted to use it only as necessary to provide their services to us, such as:

  • Cloud hosting, databases, and file storage (currently DigitalOcean).
  • Content delivery, network security, and CAPTCHA verification (currently Cloudflare).
  • AI guess adjudication (currently Google and/or Anthropic), which receives gameplay text as described in Section 3 but not your account identity.
  • Error monitoring and email delivery providers.

4.3 Legal Requirements

We may disclose your information if required to do so by law or in response to valid requests by public authorities (e.g., a court order or government agency).

4.4 Business Transfers

If we are involved in a merger, acquisition, or sale of assets, your information may be transferred as part of that transaction. We will notify you of any such change.

5. Cookies

The Service currently sets only an essential session cookie. It keeps you signed in, secures forms (for example, against cross-site request forgery), and remembers preferences such as your language. We do not currently use analytics cookies, advertising cookies, or other third-party trackers; if that changes, we will update this Policy first.

You can set your browser to refuse cookies, but without the session cookie you will not be able to sign in or play.

6. Data Retention and Deletion

We retain your personal information for as long as your account is active.

You may delete your account at any time from your profile page, or by contacting us at [email protected]. Deletion takes effect immediately: we deactivate the account, sign out all of its sessions, remove you from any games in progress, delete your saved favorites and aliases, remove your uploaded avatar, and delete your profile information (such as your name and birthday). We send one final confirmation email to the account's address. For security and abuse prevention, we retain your email address and username in a deactivated form, along with a one-way hash of the email address. Records of games you played (such as answers, scores, awards, and the player name shown in those games) remain part of those games' history so that other players' game records stay intact.

Additional retention details:

  • Guest accounts are anonymized automatically about 24 hours after creation (Section 2.2).
  • AI adjudication logs: the gameplay text sent to and received from AI providers is deleted from our logs within about 30 days; we keep only aggregate statistics (such as token counts, latency, and decisions) without the content.
  • Server logs and backups are retained for limited periods before being deleted or overwritten.
  • We may retain some information where required to comply with legal obligations, resolve disputes, or enforce our agreements.

7. Data Security

We implement reasonable administrative, technical, and physical safeguards to protect your personal information, including encryption in transit (HTTPS) and storing passwords only in hashed form. However, no method of transmission over the Internet or electronic storage is 100% secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security.

8. Your Rights and Choices

Depending on your jurisdiction, you may have the right to:

  • Access the personal information we hold about you and download a copy of it (available from your profile page, or on request).
  • Request correction of inaccurate information.
  • Request deletion of your personal information (see Section 6).
  • Object to or restrict certain processing of your data.
  • Withdraw consent where processing is based on consent.

To exercise any of these rights, please contact us using the information provided below. We may need to verify your identity before acting on a request, and we will respond within the time required by applicable law.

9. Children's Privacy

The Service is not directed to children under the age of 13, and our Terms of Service require users to be at least 13 years old. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13. If you believe a child under 13 has provided us personal information, please contact us and we will take steps to delete that information promptly.

10. Changes to This Privacy Policy

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. If we make material changes, we will notify you — for example, by posting the updated Policy on this page and updating the effective date, by emailing the address associated with your account, or by asking you to accept the updated Policy before continuing to use the Service.

11. Contact Us