Privacy Policy

The short version

You can play Squaredle Quest every day, forever, without an account. If you never sign in, your progress and your settings are kept by your browser, on your own device.

One exception, and only if you finish a board: your score, your time and how many reveals you used are sent to that day's leaderboard, under a random identifier created for your browser. No email, no name, nothing that says who you are. It is what lets you hold a place on the board rather than being told where you would have come.

If you do sign in, we hold your email address and a record of which puzzles you have finished. That is the whole of it — unless you write to us, in which case we also have whatever you wrote.

There is no advertising on this site. Nothing about you is sold, rented or shared for marketing, and there is no arrangement in place under which that could happen.

We do count visits, so that we know whether anyone is playing at all — but anonymously. No cookies, nothing stored on your device, nothing that identifies you, and nothing that connects a visit to your account. What that means in practice is set out below.

What we collect, and only if you sign in

• Your email address, which you give us when you sign in. If you sign in with Google we receive the email address on your Google account and nothing else from it — not your name, not your profile picture, not your contacts.
• Which puzzles you have finished: the mode (Standard or Express), the puzzle's date, and the moment you finished it. Your streak is worked out from these records each time it is shown, rather than stored as a number.
• Your progress on a puzzle you have not finished: the words you have found, how long you have spent on the board, and which hints you have used. This is what lets you start a puzzle on a phone and finish it on a laptop.
• The nickname you choose. This one is different from everything else on this page: it is public. It is shown beside your scores where other players can see it, which is what it is for. Your email address never is, and nothing else about you is shown with it.
• On the leaderboard specifically: your nickname, your score, how long the board took you, and how many words you had revealed rather than found yourself — all for the board you just finished, and nothing from any other day. No email, and nothing that identifies you beyond the name you chose.

We do not ask for, and have no way to receive, your name, your address, your phone number, your date of birth or any payment details.

Playing without an account

Finishing a board sends four things to the leaderboard: which board it was, your score, your time, and the number of reveals you used. They are stored against a random identifier your browser is given the first time you finish a puzzle — not an account, and not anything we can trace back to a person.

You appear on that board as “Anonymous”. Nobody, including us, can put a name to the entry, because there is no name to put.

Clearing this site's data in your browser discards that identifier, and the next board you finish is submitted under a new one. Entries already on a leaderboard stay where they are — they are part of that day's result, and pulling one out would change everybody else's ranking. Write to us and we will delete them.

Signing in is what makes a result yours rather than anonymous: your name goes on it, and your streak follows you between devices instead of living in one browser.

If you write to us

The “Email us” form sends your message and your email address to us, and nothing else — no account details, no puzzle history, and nothing about the board you were on. You do not need an account to use it.

Your address is used to reply and for nothing else. It is not added to a mailing list, because there is no mailing list.

Your message reaches us as an ordinary email and lives in an ordinary mailbox, so it stays there until it is deleted, the same as any other correspondence. Ask us to delete it and we will.

Counting visits

We use Matomo to count visits. It is configured so that it cannot identify anybody, and what it records is this:

• Which page you looked at, and when.
• Roughly how long you stayed.
• Which country you were in — the country, and nothing finer.
• Which site or search brought you here, if any.
• The kind of device and browser you used, and the size of the screen.
• Which parts of the game were used: a board started, a board finished or given up on, how long it took, and whether hints were used.

Three things make that anonymous rather than merely impersonal, and all three are deliberate:

• Your IP address is used to work out which country you are in and is then shortened before anything is stored, so the full address is never kept.
• No cookies are set and nothing is written to your device for counting purposes. This is also why you have not been asked to accept anything.
• If your browser sends a Do Not Track signal, you are not counted at all.

One qualification, because the point of this page is to be accurate rather than flattering. To avoid counting a single visit as five, Matomo has to recognise that five page views came from the same browser. Without cookies it does that from a temporary fingerprint recreated from your browser’s own settings — nothing is stored on your device, it cannot be traced back to you, and it is discarded every twenty-four hours, so you are a new and unrelated visitor again tomorrow.

None of it is attached to your account. Even while you are signed in, a visit cannot be matched to your email address, your nickname or the puzzles you have finished — those records live in a different system and there is nothing in common between them to join.

What we never collect

• Your location beyond which country you are in.
• Device identifiers or advertising IDs.
• Your contacts, photos or files.
• Any lasting identifier for you as a visitor — nothing we hold survives the day, and none of it can be traced back to a person.

What your own browser keeps

Squaredle Quest uses your browser's local storage rather than cookies. It holds the puzzle you are part-way through, your settings, your streak, and — if you are signed in, or you have finished a board without an account — the token that keeps that identity.

All of that stays on your device. Clearing your browser's data for this site erases it, and if you are not signed in it is erased for good, apart from any leaderboard entries you have already earned, which are described above.

Who else handles it

Squaredle Quest is run by one person and relies on a small number of services for things it cannot do alone. Each of them handles your data on our instructions and for no purpose of its own:

• Supabase — stores the account database and handles signing in.
• Matomo — counts visits, as described above.
• Cloudflare — serves the site, and routes mail sent to our contact address.
• Resend — sends the one-time codes used to sign in, and carries messages sent through the “Email us” form.
• Google — only if you choose to sign in with Google, and only to confirm that the account is yours.

These providers run their servers outside New Zealand, so your data is stored and processed overseas.

How long it is kept

Your records are kept for as long as your account exists. There is no separate archive and no backup we keep beyond our providers' own short-term ones.

Deleting your account deletes everything attached to it — your email address, your finished days and your progress — and that deletion cannot be undone. Write to us and we will do it.

Your rights

You can ask us what we hold about you, ask us to correct it, and ask us to delete it. Write to the address at the bottom of this page and we will answer within 20 working days, which is the timeframe the New Zealand Privacy Act 2020 sets.

If you are in the United Kingdom or the European Union, you also have rights of access, correction, erasure, portability and objection under the UK and EU General Data Protection Regulations, and nothing in this policy limits them.

If you are unhappy with how we have handled your information, you can complain to the New Zealand Office of the Privacy Commissioner, or to your own country's data protection authority.

Children

Accounts are for people aged 13 and over. The game itself can be played by anyone, without signing in; played that way it records nothing beyond the anonymous visit counting described above, which cannot identify anyone of any age.

If you believe someone under 13 has created an account, write to us and we will remove it.

Security

Everything travels over an encrypted connection. Account data sits behind database rules that permit an account to read only its own rows, and there is no password to be stolen — signing in is by one-time code or by Google.

No system is perfectly secure, and we do not claim otherwise. If something goes wrong in a way that affects you, we will tell you.

Changes to this policy

When this policy changes, the date at the top of the page changes with it. Anything material will also be announced in the app itself, so that a change is something you are told about rather than something you have to notice.

Contact

Squaredle Quest is operated by Glentertainment, in New Zealand. For anything in this policy — a question, a correction, or a request to delete your account — write to hello@squaredle.quest.