Privacy Policy

The short version

• There are no accounts. We never ask for your name, email, phone number or date of birth.
• Your nickname and chosen character are kept in your own browser, not in a database.
• While you are in a match, the server holds the room so the game can be refereed — and deletes it shortly afterwards.
• The site sets no cookies.
• There is no advertising and no analytics on the site today.

Word Search Battle is run by an independent developer. It is not a company, and this page describes only this website and game.

What you give us

Two things, both optional and both chosen by you:

• A nickname. Anything you like. The game suggests one such as “BravePixel” if you would rather not think of one. It is limited to 14 characters and stripped of anything that is not a letter, number, space, hyphen or underscore.
• A character. One of five coloured avatars.

To play with a friend you may also type a six-character room code they sent you. That is the complete list of things a player types into this game. There is no chat, no profile, no uploads and no comments.

What is stored in your browser

Two entries in your browser's local storage. They stay on your device, are readable only by this site, and are never sent anywhere except as described below.

• wsb:profile — your nickname and chosen character, so you do not have to type them again next time.
• wsb:client — a random identifier generated by your browser. It exists so that if your connection drops mid-match you get your own seat back rather than starting again. It is not linked to you as a person, and we cannot use it to recognise you anywhere else.

Clearing your browser's site data for this site removes both. The game keeps working; it will simply suggest a new nickname.

What your opponent sees

Your nickname, your character, and whether you are currently connected and ready. That is all. Your wsb:client identifier is deliberately never sent to the other player, and there is no way to message, follow or find another player afterwards.

Choose a nickname you are comfortable showing a stranger, because in an online match a stranger is exactly who sees it.

What the server keeps, and for how long

Online play is refereed by the server, because a game where the browser decides who won is a game anyone can cheat at. To do that, a room holds while it exists: its code and settings, each seat's nickname, character and reconnect identifier, and the state of the match — whose turn it is, the pool of words, the target, and each player's grid.

This is short-lived and deletes itself:

• 30 minutes after a match finishes, so both players can read the result.
• 2 hours after a room falls idle without a match.

When that time passes the room's storage is erased in full. Nothing is archived, and there is no history of matches you have played.

Matchmaking keeps nothing at all. The queue is simply the set of open connections, so closing the tab removes you from it — there is no list to be on.

Playing against the bot, or two players on one device, involves no server at all. Those modes run entirely in your browser and work with no connection.

Technical information and our hosting provider

The site runs on Cloudflare. As with any website, your device has to connect to a server for a page to load, and that connection necessarily involves technical information such as your IP address, the time of the request and your browser's user-agent string. Cloudflare processes this as our hosting and network provider — to route requests, serve pages and protect the service from attack.

It is worth separating two things: we do not read, store or log that information in the application. There is no analytics table, no request log we keep and no code in this game that looks at your IP address. What Cloudflare does at the infrastructure level is described inCloudflare's privacy policy.

Cloudflare serves the site from data centres around the world, so a request is normally handled near you. Rooms are created in the region where the match begins.

Cookies

This site sets no cookies. The two things it remembers are the local storage entries above, which are not cookies and are not sent with every request.

If advertising is added later, ad providers may set their own cookies. This page will be updated before that happens, and the advertising section below explains what it would mean.

Analytics

No analytics service runs on this site today. No third-party analytics script is loaded, and no analytics requests leave your browser.

The game does contain the wiring for counting a small number of events — that a match started, that a match finished, that someone joined the matchmaking queue, that a queue search found an opponent, that a private room was created or joined, and that a bot match began. That wiring records an event name and nothing else: there is deliberately no place to attach a nickname, a room code, a score or an identifier, so none can be sent. It stays inactive until a provider is connected, and this page will say which one before it is.

Advertising and Google

There is no advertising on this site today — no ad script is loaded and no ad requests are made. We intend to apply to Google AdSense, and this section describes what will apply once ads are actually running, so you can read it before rather than after.

• Third-party vendors, including Google, use cookies to serve ads based on your prior visits to this website or other websites.
• Google's use of advertising cookies enables it and its partners to serve ads to you based on your visit to this site and/or other sites on the internet.
• These technologies — cookies, web beacons, device and browser identifiers, and IP address — may be used to select and measure advertising, and to limit how often you see the same ad.
• We do not give advertisers your nickname, your room codes or the contents of your matches. We do not have your name or email address to give anyone.

You can control this:

• Turn off personalised advertising inGoogle's My Ad Center.
• Readhow Google uses information from sites that use its services.
• Opt out of personalised advertising from many other vendors ataboutads.info or, in Europe,youronlinechoices.eu.

Where consent is legally required for advertising cookies, that consent will be collected through Google's own privacy and messaging tools before personalised ads are served. That cannot be configured until an AdSense account exists for this domain, so it is not in place yet — and neither is any advertising.

Children

Word Search Battle is a simple word game with no violence, no chat and nothing to buy. It is suitable for a wide range of ages, and we would not pretend it is unlikely to be played by children.

That is precisely why it asks for so little: no name, no email address, no phone number, no date of birth, no photograph and no way for players to send each other messages. The one piece of information a player provides is a nickname of their choosing, which is visible only to the opponent in that match and is deleted with the room.

If you are a parent or guardian and have a question about your child's use of the game, please get in touch using the contact details below.

Your choices

• Change or remove what is stored. Edit your nickname on the home screen at any time, or clear this site's data in your browser settings to remove both entries.
• Play without a server. Play vs Bot and Two on this device run entirely in your browser. Nothing about those matches is sent anywhere.
• Leave a room. Closing the tab ends your part in the match; the room is deleted on the schedule above.

Depending on where you live, you may have rights over personal information held about you, such as asking for a copy or asking for it to be deleted. Because we hold so little and it deletes itself within hours, most requests are already satisfied by clearing your browser data. If you want anything else, write to us and we will do what we reasonably can — though note that after a room has expired there is genuinely nothing left for us to look up.

Security

The site is served over HTTPS, and the connection your game runs on is encrypted. Room codes are drawn from cryptographic randomness rather than counted upwards, so they cannot be guessed in order, and a room seats exactly two people — a third person with the link is turned away.

No system is perfectly secure. What limits the damage here is how little there is to take: no passwords, no email addresses, no payment details, and nothing that outlives the match.

Changes to this policy

If what the game does with information changes — most likely when advertising or analytics is switched on — this page is updated first, and the date at the top changes with it.

Contact

Questions about privacy, or a request about your information: contact@wordsearchbattleonline.com.