Privacy

Astrodle is built to need as little about you as possible. You can play anonymously with no account at all; an account is optional and adds only what is listed below.

Anonymous play

• One cookie (astrodle_id) holding a random identifier. It is not linked to a name, an email, or any account. It exists so the game can give you one discovery per day and show your recent results.
• Your discoveries — for each UTC day you played, which object you drew and the frozen result card, keyed only to the random id above. Anonymous history lives on the device you played on and is not synced anywhere.

If you create an account

An account is an email address plus a 6-digit code — there is no password. Creating one stores:

• Your email address and the date it was verified. It is used to sign you in and, rarely, to contact you about the account. It is never sold or shared and is not shown to other players.
• A session cookie (astrodle_sess) holding a random token, so you stay signed in. You can revoke it any time with “sign out everywhere” in settings.
• A username and colour, assigned automatically (you can change the name once), plus any friends you add and your two favourite badge emoji.
• Your discovery history, now tied to the account instead of a single device, so it follows you when you sign in elsewhere.

What is public with an account

Registered players appear on the leaderboards and get a profile page at /u/<name> showing their username, colour, discovery totals and best finds. Profile pages are not indexed by search engines. You can turn this off with the “show my discoveries on the public leaderboard” switch in settings, which removes you from every board.

Analytics

The production site loads Google Analytics 4 (gtag.js), which sets its own _ga cookies and gives us aggregate traffic figures — page views, referrers, rough country. It is the only third-party script on the site and does not run in local development. Astrodle also keeps first-party, cookieless counts of a few in-app events (draws made, pages viewed) in its own database.

What is not done

• No passwords, and no third-party sign-in providers.
• No advertising, ad networks or ad cookies.
• No selling or sharing of data.

Public result links

When you share a discovery, the link shows only that result — the object, its facts and its badges, plus the finder’s username and colour if they have a public account. It does not reveal your identifier or your other discoveries.

Clearing and deleting your data

For anonymous play, clearing this site’s cookies in your browser detaches you from your discovery history. With an account, you can export everything as JSON or delete the account outright — deletion permanently removes your email, discoveries, badges, stats, friends, hearts and sessions, and cannot be undone.