Privacy Policy

What is stored in your browser

The site keeps a small amount of data in your browser’s localStorage, under keys beginning “guessthe:”. This never leaves your device on its own; it is not a cookie and it is not sent with requests. Clearing site data for guesstherest.com removes all of it, and the games carry on working from scratch.

The display name you play under. Auto-generated on first play from a pair of harmless words, and editable in Settings. It is stored along with a flag recording that you chose it yourself, and your sound-effects preference, in a single settings entry.

A random player id. A UUID generated in your browser the first time you finish a game. It is not derived from anything about you, it is never sent to an advertiser, and its only job is to key the leaderboard that lives on this device.

Your recent play history: up to sixty entries, each one a game slug, a timestamp and a score. This is what fills the “recently played” row on the home page.

A per-game leaderboard for this device: up to fifty of your own runs per game, each with the name you played under, the score, rounds won and best streak. Every game keeps its own, and this is what you see when global boards are unavailable.

Cached answers from the outside services described below — Wikipedia page summaries and image URLs, iTunes search results, and the list of retired rounds described under Moderation — kept for about a month, or a few minutes in the case of the retired-rounds list, so the same lookup is not repeated every time you play. These hold facts about songs, films and animals, not about you. Apple rate-limits its search API by IP address, so caching is also what keeps the games playable.

If you sign in, the Supabase client library stores your session token in localStorage too, so you stay signed in between visits. Signing out removes it.

If you paste your own Supabase project URL and key into the Settings panel — an option that exists for people running their own copy — those are stored in the same settings entry, in your browser only.

Leaderboards, and what becomes public

Global leaderboards run on Supabase, a hosted Postgres database. They are optional: with no database configured, every board is local to your device and nothing at all is uploaded.

When they are configured and you finish a run with a score above zero, one row is written. It contains: the game’s slug, the account id described below, the display name you chose, your score, the number of rounds you won, your best streak, and the time. That is the whole row. No IP address, no browser fingerprint, no email, no location.

Separately from what the row contains: Supabase, as the company hosting the database, necessarily sees the IP address and user-agent of any request your browser makes to it, in the ordinary way of any web server receiving a request. We do not read or use those logs, and nothing in this site’s own code records them.

Leaderboard rows are readable by anybody. That is the point of a leaderboard, and it means the display name you pick is published next to your score, together with the random account id the row belongs to. Do not use your real name, or anything you would not want a stranger to read, if that matters to you. Names are checked against a rude-word filter before they can be saved or posted, and a name that fails is swapped for a generated one.

Scores cannot be edited or deleted from the site once posted — the database refuses both, for everyone, so that nobody can rewrite their run or wipe somebody else’s. If you want a row of yours removed, write to us and we will remove it by hand.

Accounts and signing in

Posting a score needs an account, but not one you have to create. The first time it is needed, the site signs you in anonymously: the database issues an account id and nothing else. There is no email, no password and no profile behind it. Merely looking at a leaderboard does not create one.

Signing in with Google is offered, and is entirely optional. Its only purpose is to carry your name and your scores between browsers. If you use it, Google tells our database your email address, your display name and your profile picture URL, and the site reads your name — to offer it as your leaderboard handle, unless you have already chosen one — and your picture, to show it in the corner. Your email address is stored by Supabase as part of your account. It is not published on any leaderboard, not used for marketing, and not shared with anyone.

You can sign out at any time from the home page, and you can revoke the site’s access to your Google account at any time from your Google account’s security settings.

The suggestion form

The form at the bottom of the home page — “Which game is missing?” — sends whatever you type into a database table that only the site owner can read. Nobody else can read it back, including the person who wrote it: the table has permission to accept new rows and no permission to return any, so submissions cannot be listed by anyone using the site.

A suggestion stores your idea, the optional email address you may type into the contact box, and the account id you happened to be using at the time. The email field exists so we can tell you if your idea gets built. It is optional, it is never used for anything else, and leaving it blank does not weaken the suggestion.

Moderation

A short list of moderators can retire an individual round — a broken image, a silent audio preview, a misattributed quote, anything unfair or offensive — so that it is never dealt again to anyone.

Moderators are identified by the verified email address on their Google account, held in a table that lists nothing but those addresses and a note about why each one is there. That table cannot be read by players; a signed-in person can only ever see their own row in it, which is how the site answers the single question “am I a moderator?”. The list of retired rounds is public, because every player’s copy of the game has to read it to filter its own deck. It records which game and item was hidden, the reason given, and the account id of the moderator who did it.

Other companies your browser talks to

The games are built out of material that is fetched live, so playing them means your browser makes requests directly to other companies. Those requests carry your IP address, your browser’s user-agent string and, in some cases, the page you came from — that is how the web works, and it is true of every embedded image or player anywhere. We do not control what those companies do with it; each has its own privacy policy. They are:

Apple. The iTunes Search API at itunes.apple.com supplies the song, album and app data used by several games, and the thirty-second audio previews and cover artwork are streamed from Apple’s own servers.

The Wikimedia Foundation. Wikipedia’s summary API and the image servers at upload.wikimedia.org supply the photographs of animals, birds, plants, dishes, landmarks, cars, objects, people and company marks that the picture games are played with.

Google, for YouTube. The film-scene and television games embed the YouTube player, loaded from youtube.com. YouTube may set cookies in your browser when its player loads.

Google, for Maps. The Street View game embeds a Google Street View panorama from maps.google.com. Google may set cookies in your browser when it loads.

Google, for advertising — described in its own section below.

Supabase, if global leaderboards are configured, for the database and sign-in described above.

That is the complete list. There is no analytics service, no tag manager, no social-media widget, no A/B testing tool and no error-reporting service on this site.

Advertising, and cookies set by Google

This site carries advertising served by Google AdSense. The AdSense script is loaded from Google on every page.

Third-party vendors, including Google, use cookies to serve ads based on your prior visits to this website or to 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.

Third parties may also place and read cookies in your browser, or use web beacons or IP addresses, to collect information as a result of ad serving on this site.

You can opt out of personalised advertising by visiting Google’s Ads Settings at https://www.google.com/settings/ads. You can opt out of a third-party vendor’s use of cookies for personalised advertising at https://www.aboutads.info/choices.

A full description of how Google uses the information it collects from sites that use its services is published at https://policies.google.com/technologies/partner-sites.

Where the law requires consent before personalised advertising cookies may be used — in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom and Switzerland — that consent is handled through Google’s own consent message. If you are in one of those places and were not asked, tell us at the address below and we will put it right.

We do not receive, store or have access to any of the information Google’s advertising collects. We are not given your identity, your browsing history or anything else about you by Google; we are given a report of how many ads were shown.

Children

This is a general-audience site. It is not directed at children under 13, it has no features aimed at them, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from them.

The only place a child could type personal information into this site is the optional contact box on the suggestion form. If you believe a child under 13 has sent us an email address there, write to us and we will delete the submission.

How to delete your data

Everything stored in your browser: clear site data for guesstherest.com in your browser’s settings, or use its “clear cookies and site data” control. That removes your name, your player id, your play history, your device leaderboards, your cached lookups and your sign-in session in one go. There is no “delete everything” button inside the app itself. One caveat, if you signed in with Google: your posted scores stay in the database, and the “recently played” row will fill itself back in from them next time you sign in. Deleting those means deleting the rows, below.

A leaderboard row: write to us with the display name and the game, and we will delete the row. The site deliberately gives nobody — including you — the ability to delete scores directly, because the same power would let anyone delete anyone else’s.

Your account: ask us and we will delete it. Deleting the account deletes every score attached to it at the same time; the database is set up so scores cannot outlive the account that posted them.

A suggestion you sent: tell us roughly what it said and we will find and delete it.

Google’s advertising cookies are not ours to delete. Use Google’s Ads Settings, linked above, or clear cookies in your browser.

Changes, and how to reach us

If this policy changes in a way that affects what is collected or who sees it, the effective date at the top changes with it.

Questions, deletion requests, or anything you think this page has got wrong: hello@guesstherest.com. PLACEHOLDER ADDRESS — not yet in service. It must be replaced with a working inbox before this policy is relied on.