What we store, and why

This site has no passwords. You can use it without signing in, and until you do we hold nothing that identifies you. Signing in is optional and exists so anything you save can follow you to another browser; it is also the only thing that gives us your email address, which the section below says what we do with. This page describes everything actually kept, which is not much.

The cookies

The first time something needs to be saved for you we set one cookie, app_uid, containing a randomly generated identifier. It is HttpOnly, SameSite=Lax, marked Secure in production, and expires after one year.

Until you sign in, that identifier is the only thing connecting you to what you have saved. It is not linked to your identity, and we do not use it to track you across other sites. There is no advertising and no third-party cookie is set. Page views are counted, by our hosting provider's own analytics, from a script served from this domain; the section on it below says what that does and does not record. Fonts are served from our own domain rather than fetched from Google at page load.

Signing in sets a second cookie, app_session, protected the same way. It holds your account number, the date it stops working, and a signature made with a key only this server has. It grants nothing anywhere else and is useless anywhere but here. It lasts thirty days, and signing out deletes it. A third cookie exists for ten minutes during sign-in and holds a random number used to check that the sign-in coming back is the one this browser started.

Signing in also sets a fourth, app_account, and it is the one cookie here the page itself is allowed to read. It holds a single character, meaning only that the cookie above exists, and its only job is to let the header show you a way out rather than a way in before the page has finished drawing. It carries no account number, nothing about which service you signed in with, and no name or address. It expires with the session and signing out deletes it too.

Your picture, and your email address

When you sign in, Google tells us two things about the account you signed in with: the picture on it, and the email address. With anything you send us from the contact page, described below, they are the only things stored here you would recognise as yours.

The picture is what you see in the header, and we store the web address of it rather than a copy. Your browser never fetches it from Google - it asks us, and we fetch it. That means Google is never told your IP address, what page you were on, or that you were here at all. It is the same arrangement as the fonts, which we serve ourselves rather than fetching from Google as you load the page. If your account has no picture, you get the drawn one instead and nothing is fetched from anybody.

The address we do not currently use for anything you can see. We do not send you email - there is no mailing list and nothing to unsubscribe from - and we do not pass it to anyone. An address Google has not confirmed is theirs is ignored rather than stored.

Kept in your browser

Five things are stored by your browser rather than sent to us, and apart from the one address described under the daily notification, none of it ever reaches the server or leaves the device. Your theme is one, under dc_theme, because which colours the page wears is a question your browser can answer for itself. Whether we have already offered to put the site on your home screen is another, under dc_install, and it exists so that the offer is made once and a no is remembered. Whether we have already offered you an account is the third, under dc_signup, and it is there for the same reason. The fourth, under dc_push, is the same kind of note about the daily notification: whether we have offered it, what you answered and on which day, and whether you arrived from an ad today, because that is a day we do not ask.

The fifth is a cache. The site registers a service worker, which keeps copies of the artwork, the logo, the icons and the stylesheets and scripts the pages are built from, so a second visit draws without fetching them again. It is deliberately limited to those files: no page and no puzzle is ever cached, so nothing about what you played is kept there. Clearing this site’s data in your browser removes all five.

The daily notification

If you turn on the daily notification, your browser gives us an address at its push service and two keys to encrypt messages to, and we keep those against the same identifier as your results, together with your time zone and the days a notification was sent. The time zone is what lets it arrive at 08:00 where you are, or when the new puzzles go up if that is later. It comes from your browser, or if your browser does not say, from the approximate location of your internet connection. We send at most one a day, never between 22:00 and 07:00 your time, and none on a day you have already opened one of the puzzles.

The push service belongs to whoever makes your browser: Google for Chrome and most Android browsers, Mozilla for Firefox, Apple for Safari and Microsoft for Edge. It carries the notification to your device, but the message is encrypted to keys only your browser holds, so the service can see where it is going and when, not what it says. Your browser keeps a copy of the address in dc_push, beside your answer, so that our copy can be found and deleted if you block notifications. A “Not now” waits 14 days before we ask again, and “Don’t ask again” is kept.

Turning it off on the settings page deletes the address and the keys. So does blocking notifications for this site in your browser: the next page you open here removes them, and the push service refuses anything sent to a blocked address, which removes them too.

Counting visits

How many people come here, and which of the three games they open, is the difference between writing puzzles for an audience and writing them for nobody. That count is measured about you as a visitor rather than as a player, by our hosting provider's own analytics, so it adds nobody new to the list below.

It sets no cookie and keeps nothing in your browser, and its script is served from this domain rather than somebody else’s. It is handed nothing we know about you: not the app_uid above, not your account number, and nothing you have saved. What it records is the page, where you followed a link from, and the coarse facts every web server is told anyway - roughly which country, and what kind of device and browser. Two facts about playing are added to that, and they are the whole list: which game you opened, and how a puzzle you finished ended - solved, failed, or the answer shown - with how many hints it took. Not the puzzle, not your answers, and not which day’s edition it was, beyond whether it was the one running now or an older one. There is no profile of you in it and nothing that follows you off this site, which is the whole reason it is the one measuring tool here.

How fast the page was

The other thing measured about you as a visitor is how quickly this page appeared on the device you opened it on, by our hosting provider's own timing report, so it adds nobody new to the list below either. It is here because the alternative is guessing: a slow phone on a bad connection is invisible from a developer’s laptop, and nobody reports a game being slow, they just stop opening it.

It sets no cookie, keeps nothing in your browser, and its script is served from this domain. What it sends is a handful of timings - how long the biggest thing on the screen took to arrive, how much the layout shifted while it did, how quickly the page answered your first tap - labelled with the shape of the page rather than the page itself, so every game board is one line and not one line per day’s puzzle. No app_uid, no account number, nothing you have saved, and nothing about the puzzle you were on.

When something breaks

When a page fails - a board that will not load, a move that throws instead of landing - a report of the failure is sent to a third-party error tracking service, so that it can be fixed. Nothing is sent while the site is working. This is the only thing described on this page that is not routine: most visits produce no report at all.

What it contains is what the software was doing when it failed: the error and the line of our code that raised it, the page it happened on, which version of the site was running, and what kind of browser and device it was running in. It sets no cookie and keeps nothing in your browser. It is handed no app_uid, no account number, no puzzle, no answer of yours and nothing you have saved - and the report travels through this domain rather than from your browser to somebody else’s.

If you write to us

The contact page has a form. Sending it stores what you wrote, which of the listed topics you picked, the time, and your email address if you chose to give one - that field is optional, and without it there is no way for us to reply. Nothing else is taken from the page: not your IP address, not your browser, not the page you came from.

The message goes into the same database as everything else here and is read by us. It is not forwarded anywhere, and no third party is involved in carrying it - there is no mailing service behind the form, which is the reason nothing in this section names a company. Sending one also sets the app_uid cookie above if you did not already have it, and that is what ties the message to you, so the delete button can find it later.

Emailing us directly instead is exactly what it looks like: your message arrives in an ordinary inbox, with whatever your own mail provider puts in it, and it is kept until it is dealt with.

Where it is stored

The site runs on infrastructure rented from third-party providers, and what you save is kept in a managed database one of them supplies. All of it sits on servers in Germany, inside the European Union. We do not sell your data, and we do not share it with anyone except those providers, which process it only to run the site.

Deleting your data

There is a button for this on the settings page. It deletes your boards, results, ratings and streak, your email address, and any message you have sent us from the contact form, and turns off the daily notification. It asks once and there is no undo. Signing in again afterwards starts you over and asks your provider for your address again - nothing is being kept back, it is being told to us a second time.

Clearing your browser cookies is not the same thing. If you have not signed in, it makes anything saved permanently unreachable to you, but it does not erase it from the database - it only discards the identifier that pointed at it. If you have signed in, clearing cookies loses nothing: signing in again finds it.

To have it actually deleted, write to contact@daycrumb.com and include nothing more than the request; we will need the account you signed in with, or the app_uid value from your browser, to find it.

Children

The site is not directed at children and is intended for people aged 16 or older.

Changes

If this policy changes we will update the date at the top of this page. Questions go to contact@daycrumb.com.