What is stored

If you just play

The first time you finish a puzzle, the site gives you a random identifier and a name picked from a fixed list — something like "Quick Otter". Against that it keeps your times, your move counts and your daily streak.

That identifier is a random string. It is not derived from you, it means nothing anywhere else, and it is the only thing linking one solve to another.

If you make an account

An account is a passkey. Your device keeps the private half and never shares it; this site keeps the public half and a note that a passkey exists. That is the whole of it. Making an account changes nothing about what is stored except that it can now be reached from a second device.

Accounts are for people aged 16 and over. The account screen asks for a date of birth, works out an age, and then discards the date — it is never written down. Under 16, the answer is no, and everything on the site still works without an account.

What other people see

Your chosen name, your time and your move count — on a leaderboard, or to somebody who shares a challenge with you. Never your identifier. There is no profile page, no messaging and no way to find a particular person.

Names are picked from a list rather than typed, so nobody can put words of their own on someone else's screen.

Where it is kept, and for how long

• Where: a database in Ireland (AWS eu-west-1).
• Challenges and daily leaderboards: 30 days, then deleted automatically.
• Sync codes: 10 minutes. Sign-in challenges: 5 minutes.
• Server logs, which include IP addresses: 14 days, then deleted automatically. Used for rate limiting, counting visitors and fixing faults, nothing else.
• Daily totals — how many puzzles were solved and how many people played — kept indefinitely. These are numbers only. They contain no identifiers and cannot be traced back to anybody.
• Your profile and the all-time leaderboard: until you delete them.

Cookies

One, called gz_s, and it is not for measurement. It holds a signed session so the site knows you are the same player between one puzzle and the next. There are no advertising or analytics cookies, because there is no advertising or analytics.

The site also keeps a copy of that session in your browser's local storage, so clearing cookies does not silently lose your records, plus your theme and last difficulty.

Deleting everything

One button on the account page. It removes your profile, your passkeys and your leaderboard entries immediately. No form, no waiting and no identity check, because there is no identity to check.

One thing survives: if you played a shared challenge, the result stays so the other player still has theirs — with your name taken off it and nothing linking it to you.