privacy

ON YOUR DEVICE

One cookie, uk_uid, holding a random identifier and a signature. It’s what lets your games still be yours when you come back. It isn’t shared with anyone, it follows you nowhere else, and losing it means losing access to your games - which is why it’s set to last two years.

Your chosen game mode, whether you last played alone or with a friend, whether you have turned the sound off, and which of the game's one-time explanations you have already been shown are remembered in your browser's local storage. They are preferences, they keep the game from repeating itself at you, and they never leave your device.

A guess you are part-way through building - the pegs you have placed and the ones you have pinned - is kept there too, for the games you still have on the go. It’s what lets you close the tab mid-thought and come back to the row as you left it. It holds nothing but pegs you placed yourself, it is forgotten when the game it belongs to ends, and it never leaves your device either.

Today’s code is timed in your browser rather than on the server, so the clock stops whenever the day isn’t in front of you - another tab, another app, a locked phone - and picks up where it left off when you come back. How long you have spent on it is kept in local storage while you are playing, sent with the guess that ends your go, and forgotten as soon as the day is over.

Solo is played entirely in your browser, so it works without a connection. Your current solo game - its code and your guesses - is kept in local storage and replaced by the next one. Your browser also keeps a count of how many solo games you started, finished, won and gave up, and how many guesses you played, per mode. When it is online it sends those counts to the server and starts counting again. The counts carry nothing that identifies you or a game, and are added to everyone else’s.

So that solo works offline and home opens without waiting, the browser also keeps a copy of the solo pages, the files they need, and your home page as you last saw it. It stays on this device.

ON THE SERVER

Your display name, the games you have played, and the guesses in them. Your name is visible to anyone you play against, which is the whole reason it’s stored. You can change it at any time from the home page, and changing it updates the name they see you under.

Everyone you have played is kept as a list, so you can play them again without another link. It holds their name, the game you played, and how many each of you has won.

Today’s code keeps your go at it: the rows you played, how long you took, and where that put you. Everybody plays the same code, so the day itself also keeps how many people entered and finished - as counts, with nobody named. The people you play can see your result once they have finished theirs.

NOTIFICATIONS

If you choose to turn notifications on - they are always off until you do - your browser creates a delivery address for this device and unkoad keeps it, so the server can tell you about the games you are in. Which kinds you asked for is kept beside it, and nothing else is: a switch is on or it’s off. It’s used for exactly that and nothing else. Turning them all off, on the home page or in your browser's own settings, deletes the address with them.

WHAT IS COUNTED

unkoad keeps a count of what happens: a game started, a guess played, a code cracked. The counts are what tell us whether the game is being played at all. Nothing in them names you, points back at you, or joins up with anything that could - a game appears in them under a scrambled label that belongs to the board and not to either player.

One of those counts is the country a game was played from, worked out from the address your request arrives on. The address itself is used for that and thrown away: it is never written down, and the country is as fine as it ever gets - never a city, never a place. It exists so that a chart can say roughly where the game is being played, and it is the only thing here that comes from anywhere but the game itself.

WHAT THERE ISN'T

No advertising, no third-party trackers, nothing following you to another site, and no profile of you beyond the games you chose to play.