Privacy Policy

No accounts

You don't need an account to play, and there is no sign-up. We don't ask for your name or email unless you choose to write to us through the contact form.

Your streaks and stats

Your game progress, streaks and stats are saved only in your own browser's local storage. They are not cookies and are never sent to us. Clearing this site's data in your browser resets them. If you used our earlier preview site, the "bring your streaks over" link copies them from that site's storage into this one, entirely inside your browser.

Advertising and cookies

We don't show ads today. We plan to show ads from Google AdSense to help pay for the site, and this section describes how that will work once ads are turned on.

Third-party vendors, including Google, use cookies to serve ads based on your prior visits to this website or other websites. Google's use of advertising cookies (including the DoubleClick cookie) enables it and its partners to serve ads to you based on your visits to this site and/or other sites on the internet.

You can opt out of personalized advertising by visiting Google Ads Settings. You can also opt out of some third-party vendors' use of cookies for personalized advertising by visiting www.aboutads.info. To learn more, see how Google uses cookies in advertising and how Google uses information from sites that use its services.

If other ad networks or vendors serve ads here, we'll list them on this page with links to their sites and their opt-out options. If you visit from the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom or Switzerland, we will ask for your consent through a Google-certified consent message before advertising cookies are used, and you can change your choice at any time.

Analytics

We don't use analytics or tracking scripts. Our host, Cloudflare, keeps standard server logs (such as IP address, browser type and pages requested) for security and operations.

Contact form

If you use our contact form, we collect what you submit: your email address, your name if you give it, the topic, an optional puzzle link and your message. It goes straight to our own server on Cloudflare and is stored in a private Cloudflare database that only we can read. No third-party form service is involved, and nothing is added to a mailing list. To limit spam, we count messages per connection using a one-way scrambled (hashed) version of your IP address combined with the current hour. That hash is kept only to enforce a limit of 5 messages an hour, is deleted periodically, and is never stored with your message. We use what you send only to read and reply to you, and to fix the site if you report an error.

Other services our pages load

The map games load their map software from unpkg.com and map tiles from OpenFreeMap. Mystery Object photos load from The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Those services receive the normal web requests your browser makes to show that content, under their own privacy policies. Our fonts are served from our own site. Puzzle answers link to outside sources; those sites have their own privacy practices.

We don't sell your data

We do not sell or rent your personal information to anyone.

Children's privacy

Timely Puzzles is made for a general audience. It is not directed to children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from them. If you believe a child has sent us information, please contact us and we will delete it.

Changes to this policy

We may update this policy, for example when ads are turned on. The effective date at the top shows when it last changed.

Questions

Reach us through the contact page.