Privacy Policy

• No account is needed to play. Your browser holds a random device id issued by our server. It is not your name, email or IP address.
• One cookie, parlor_session, and only when you sign in. It keeps you signed in for up to 180 days.
• Scores and moves you submit are stored so we can verify them and show leaderboards.
• Analytics are first-party (ours, on our own database). We do not record your IP address or your browser’s user-agent string. No Google Analytics, no ad network, no social pixels.
• Accounts are a handle and a password. Email is optional. We never sell or share your data for advertising.
• Cloudflare hosts the site and stores the database on our behalf.
• This is a draft for a public beta and has not been reviewed by an attorney. It is written by the operator of parlordaily.com.

The first time you load Parlor, your browser asks our server for a random identifier (a UUID) and a signature proving we issued it. Both are kept in your browser’s localStorage under the keys parlor:playerId and parlor:playerSig. That id is sent with every score you submit and every analytics event, so we can keep leaderboards honest (one ranked daily per device per day) and count sessions without knowing who you are.

The id tells us nothing about you. It is not derived from your IP address, hardware or browser. It lives only in that browser profile; a private window or a cleared site-data setting starts fresh with a new one. If you later create an account, you can claim that device’s play history (up to 8 devices per account).

Everything Parlor stores in your browser uses a key that starts with parlor:. None of it is a tracking cookie; it is how a site with no login remembers your streak, your preferences and a game you left half finished. The full list is on the Cookies & Tracking page. In brief:

• Your device id and signature (above).
• An analytics session record (parlor:session): a random session id, the time of your last action, and a count of games started this sitting. A session ends after 30 minutes of inactivity.
• Your local streak and today’s completed games; per-game personal bests; a marker that you already played today’s daily.
• A checkpoint of an in-progress turn game so a reload does not lose it, and a queued score submission if you were offline.
• Preferences: sound muted, haptics, the backgammon auto-play setting, the install prompt dismissed, and the guest name you typed for a multiplayer room.
• A 24-hour marker if you arrived via a shared link, so we can tell whether sharing brings new players.

You can delete all of it at any time by clearing this site’s data in your browser settings.

When you sign in, we set a cookie named parlor_session. It contains only a random token (no account id, no handle). It is HttpOnly (scripts cannot read it), SameSite=Lax, marked Secure in production, and expires after 180 days. Signing out deletes it and the matching record on our server. The only other cookie in the codebase is ruckus_session, the equivalent for the separate Ruckus experiment at /ruckus, with the same attributes and lifetime. We do not use cookies for analytics or advertising. There is no consent banner because the only cookie is one you asked for by signing in.

When you finish a ranked game, your browser sends the game, the day’s seed, the difficulty, your score and the full list of moves you made. Our server replays the moves to confirm the score is real, records how long the run took from when we issued the board, and stores the result. For word games, the moves are the words you typed. We keep these records so that leaderboards can be audited and cheating can be investigated.

Leaderboards are public. A signed-in player appears by display name and handle. An anonymous player appears as a short label derived from the device id (for example “Guest 4K7P”). The moves themselves are never shown to other players.

For a few board games, the post-game review computes an accuracy figure and move grades on your device and sends the totals to us. They appear only on your own Stats page and unlock cosmetic badges; they never affect a leaderboard.

An account is a handle and a password. We store the handle, a display name, your avatar, your level and XP, badges, per-game stats, daily-task progress, cosmetics, and the date you joined and were last seen. Your password is stored only as a salted PBKDF2-SHA256 hash (100,000 iterations); we cannot read it.

Email is optional. If you add one, we store it lowercased, mark it unverified, and send a verification link. We use a verified email for exactly two things: sending a password-reset link when you ask for one, and — if a prize programme is ever introduced — contacting a winner. We do not send newsletters or marketing. You can remove your email from your account at any time. Verification and reset links are one-time tokens that expire (24 hours and 1 hour respectively); we store only a hash of each token.

What is public: your handle, display name, avatar, level, badges, cosmetics and per-game stats, on your profile page and on leaderboards. What is not: your email, your password hash, your friends list, your private messages, your moves.

Signed-in players can use the social features. Here is what they store:

• Friends and blocks: which accounts you are friends with, pending requests, and whom you have blocked.
• Public chat: each message you send to a lobby, game or room channel is stored with your account id, your display name at the time, and a timestamp. Messages are limited to 140 characters and pass through a filter that rejects slurs, phone numbers, email addresses and links. Others in the channel see the most recent 200 messages. Older messages are currently kept indefinitely; a retention limit is on our list.
• Whispers: private messages to a friend are stored the same way and are visible only to the two of you. They are also currently kept indefinitely. Like any operator, we can read the database; we do not read whispers except to investigate a report or a legal request.
• Presence: while you are on the site, a heartbeat records that you are online, in a game, or away, and a short label such as the game or room you are in, so friends can see it. Stale entries are ignored after a short time.
• Multiplayer rooms: a room stores the account or device id in each seat, the display name each player typed, and the moves played. Guests can join without an account.

To learn which games people play and where visitors come from, your browser sends small events to our own server (/api/event), which stores them in our database. There is no third-party analytics script by default. Each event contains:

• Your device id and the event name (for example visit, game_start, game_complete, share_clicked).
• The game, difficulty and mode, where relevant, and a score on completion.
• The path of the page (never the query string), the host name of the site that referred you (never the full URL, and blank for internal navigation), a source bucket (search / social / referral / direct), and a utm_source campaign tag if one was in the link.
• A device class (phone / tablet / desktop) from the window width — not your user-agent string — and whether the site is running as an installed app.
• The analytics session id and an event counter, so events can be grouped into sittings.
• A server-side timestamp.

Not recorded: your IP address, your user-agent string, your screen resolution, your location, cookies, or anything you type. Our server reads the user-agent header once, only to discard traffic from bots and headless browsers, and does not store it. Only the site owner can view the analytics dashboard, behind a secret key.

Cloudflare Web Analytics may additionally be enabled by the site owner. If it is, your browser loads a script from static.cloudflareinsights.com that reports page-timing metrics to Cloudflare. Cloudflare states that this product uses no cookies or localStorage and does not fingerprint visitors by IP address or user agent. As of this draft, whether it is switched on in production is UNSPECIFIED; the Cookies & Tracking page will be updated when that is confirmed.

• Cloudflare hosts Parlor (Workers) and stores our database (D1) and a small cache (KV). As the host, Cloudflare processes your IP address and request logs to deliver the site and protect it from abuse, on our behalf as a processor. Where the database physically lives is chosen by Cloudflare at creation and is UNSPECIFIED in this draft.
• Resend (an email delivery service) receives your email address and the verification or reset message, only if you add an email and only when email delivery is configured for this deployment.
• Fonts, sounds, confetti and the word list are bundled with the site and served by us. No Google Fonts request is made.

We do not sell personal information, and we do not share it with advertisers. There are no ads on the site today; if that changes, this policy and the Cookies page will change first and will say exactly what the ad partner receives.

The same information as above, as a table. “Indefinite” means we have not yet built a deletion or expiry rule.

Parlor is not directed to children under 13 and we do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 13. We do not ask for ages. If you believe a child under 13 has an account, write to us at the contact address published on this page once it is set (UNSPECIFIED — a contact address has not been published yet during the beta), and we will delete it.

• Play anonymously. Nothing requires an account.
• Clear your browser data to remove everything stored on your device, including the device id.
• Sign out to end a session; remove your email from the account page.
• Blocking a player is supported by the server but has no button yet; ask us and we will apply it.
• Delete your account. There is not yet a self-service deletion button. To have your account and the data tied to it deleted, or to ask what we hold about you, write to us at the contact address published on this page once it is set (UNSPECIFIED — a contact address has not been published yet during the beta). We will act on a verified request within 30 days. This is a known gap and is on the list before the beta ends.

Depending on where you live you may have legal rights to access, correct, delete or port your data, or to opt out of its sale or sharing. We do not sell or share personal data. Because Parlor is a small beta run by one person, some state privacy laws may not apply to it yet; we will honour reasonable requests regardless.

Passwords are hashed with PBKDF2-SHA256 and a random salt. Session tokens and device ids are random and, for device ids, signed by the server. Email tokens are stored only as hashes and expire. Traffic is served over HTTPS. No system is perfectly secure; if we learn of a breach affecting you we will tell you as the law requires.

We will update this page as the beta changes, and the date at the top will change with it. Questions or requests: write to us at the contact address published on this page once it is set (UNSPECIFIED — a contact address has not been published yet during the beta).