Privacy

What we store

You never need an account to play. Signing in is optional.

• Two essential cookies: theme remembers day or night, and cf_consent remembers your cookie choice.
• If you sign in with Google, we keep your account: the email, name and picture Google shares with us, when you signed in, and the choices you make on your account page (the name we show, and whether and how the video credits name you). A session cookie keeps you signed in for 30 days while you use the site. Delete your account on your account page and all of it goes.
• If you are signed in, we keep your progress on each case and your ratings with your account, so they follow you to any device. The first time you sign in on a browser, the progress and ratings saved there join your account. Delete your account and they go with it.
• Your saved progress and player settings, in your browser's local storage. Signed out, they stay on your device and are never sent to us. Clear your browsing data and they are gone from the browser.
• If you rate a case after solving it, we keep your rating (how much you enjoyed it and how hard it felt), so each case keeps one rating from you. Signed out, it is kept with a random ID for your browser that identifies nothing else. Setters only ever see totals.
• A few short-lived notes in your browser's session storage, so an event such as “started a case” is counted once. They end with the tab.

Every cookie and storage key, what it does and how long it lasts, is listed on Cookies.

Memberships and video credits

You can support Sleuth on Patreon or Ko-fi and link that membership to your account, so your rank and its benefits show here.

• Link Patreon and we keep your Patreon user ID, the tier you pay for, whether it is active and when we last checked. Patreon tells us when that changes, and we check once a day.
• Pay on Ko-fi and Ko-fi sends us the payment: your email, the tier, the amount and the date. We use it to give your account its rank until the next payment is due.
• To link a Ko-fi payment, we email a one-time link to the address you paid with. We send it only when you ask, and use the address for nothing else.
• A Ko-fi payment we cannot yet match to an account is kept for 12 months, so you can still claim it. After that we delete it.
• Video credits are off until you turn them on. When they are on and you pay for a rank, the name you choose and your rank appear in the credits of our videos. Turn them off and later videos leave you out; videos already published keep their credits.

Delete your account and your links, ranks and credit choices go with it. Your payments stay with Patreon or Ko-fi, under their policies.

Who helps us run the site

• Cloudflare hosts the site and stores its data.
• Google signs you in.
• Patreon and Ko-fi take payments and tell us about memberships.
• Resend sends the one-time Ko-fi claim email.

Each handles only what its part needs.

Analytics

We use Google Analytics 4 through Cloudflare Zaraz to learn which cases and pages people use. We load no Google script ourselves; Zaraz sends the data from Cloudflare.

Analytics run only after you agree. Say no and nothing is collected.

What we collect:

• Pages visited, how you arrived (such as a YouTube or Discord link) and rough device and country details, as Google Analytics reports them.
• A handful of product events: starting and solving a case, opening or playing a video, following a suggested or “next” case, settling the case filters and following a link to our Discord, YouTube, Patreon or Ko-fi.
• Those events carry case numbers, video ids, variant tags, difficulty and timings. Never personal data and never free text: for a search we send its length, not the words.

Change your mind at any time on Cookies, linked at the foot of every page.

No ads, no selling

We show no ads and we do not sell your data. We share it only with the services above, for the part each plays.

Other sites

Links to YouTube, Discord, Patreon and Ko-fi take you to their sites. Each has its own privacy policy, and what you do there is between you and them.

Our video pages show a picture of each video, fetched from YouTube’s image server, until you press play. Only then does the player load, from YouTube’s privacy-enhanced domain (youtube-nocookie.com), and YouTube’s own privacy policy applies to it.

Contact

Questions about your data? Write to privacy@sudoku-sleuth.com.