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-- Writing, games & side quests - Bart's small website --
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Privacy and compliance

Contents

Privacy notice

arcade.ly respects your privacy. All information you give us is held with the utmost care and security.

Please take time to review this privacy policy as it sets out our privacy practices and tells you how your personal information will be treated by us. We do not sell, rent or loan any identifiable information regarding our users or customers to any third party. Only in the circumstances described within this Privacy Policy would we share your information with any third party.

Our use of personal data is in accordance with the General Data Protection Regulations 2016 (GDPR).

How arcade.ly uses your information

arcade.ly will not collect any personal information about individuals except as set out in this privacy policy.

When you play our games, the personal information we collect and keep with each score you submit is:

Our hiscore tables are public: anyone can see the name, score, country flag, type of device (computer, phone, or tablet), and date of each score in them. Because they’re public, names are checked automatically for profanity (in English and many European languages): a name that fails the check is replaced with your generated nickname, and we may hide any hiscore whose name is offensive.

We will use the personal information provided to us in order to:

Certain information is collected automatically, as described later in this privacy policy.

Third-parties and their sites

Points covering all third parties

arcade.ly is served through Cloudflare’s content delivery network, which, as part of handling each request, tells us the country it came from - see “Specifics of handling log files and IP addresses”, below, for how we use that.

Where our services make use of hosted tools, hosted data storage and payment services provided by third parties any of your personal information stored by such third parties shall be subject to their privacy provisions.

Whilst we choose our business partners carefully, unfortunately we cannot be responsible for their privacy policies and practices or those of other sites that you access using links from our site. Therefore we recommend that you check the policy of each site you visit.

The following is a list of links to the privacy policies of partner sites and services we use:

In addition, if you linked to arcade.ly from a third party site, we cannot be responsible for the privacy policies and practices of the owners or operators of that third party site and recommend that you check the policy of that third party site and contact its owner or operator if you have any concerns or questions.

How arcade.ly uses analytics

arcade.ly uses GoatCounter to monitor usage of the site and games, replacing the Google Analytics service we used previously. We use the data it collects to improve your experience, and to help diagnose and fix user experience issues and bugs.

GoatCounter is designed with privacy in mind: per its own published privacy policy, it doesn’t use cookies to track you, and it doesn’t store your IP address, full User-Agent header, or any other tracker ID. GoatCounter’s own position is that it “probably doesn’t require a GDPR consent notice” for this reason, though this isn’t a legal conclusion we’re making ourselves - see their privacy policy, linked above, for the full detail.

We also use GoatCounter’s event-tracking feature to record specific interactions within our games (e.g. starting a game, completing a level, submitting a hiscore) so that we can understand whether players are able to play and complete our games properly.

Our MCP server counts its tool calls (e.g. looking up a game’s hiscores, or reading a blog post) as GoatCounter events too, so that we can see whether, and how, it’s used. These are sent from our server, not your browser, and never include your IP address or User-Agent header. Each records only which tool was called, what for (e.g. which game, or which post), and the name of the MCP client that called it (e.g. the AI assistant). The same details go in our server logs.

Specifics of handling log files and IP addresses

When you visit our website, we automatically log your IP address, which is recognized by our web server.

We use IP addresses:

  1. To help us administer arcade.ly sites - specifically to ensure we provide a good service to users across the globe - and to collect broad demographic information for aggregate use and to track your engagement with us,

  2. To isolate and prevent abuse of our website that might compromise security or degrade the experience we can offer to legitimate users,

  3. To record the country each score in our hiscore tables was submitted from. Cloudflare determines the country from your IP address and passes us only a two-letter country code: that code is all we store with your score - your IP address is never stored in our hiscore database.

In the case of (1) and (2) records may be stored for up to 7 days. In the case of (3), the country code is kept with your score, along with the rest of its record, indefinitely.

Non personal information

arcade.ly may share non-personal aggregate or summary information regarding its customers with partners or other third parties, such as information relating to the number of users linking to our website from their sites but arcade.ly does not sell or share any information at the individual level.

We also use non-personal aggregate or summary information to monitor use of the site, which helps us to identify and fix problems as they occur.

Cookies

Introduction to cookies

Cookies are very small text files saved to your computer and used to track session information and user navigation around a website. However, from a legislative point of view the term “cookies” covers the following

Many website still just use cookies, but more complex websites and web applications will often use web storage or IndexedDB to store information about the state of the site or application, or to support offline operation.

arcade.ly uses a mixture of cookies and web storage for a variety of purposes, described below, but from the point of view or PECR and similar legislation, both mechanisms fall into the category of “cookies”.

arcade.ly only uses essential cookies, and doesn’t use cookies for advertising, tracking or analytics.

How arcade.ly uses essential cookies

Essential cookies are those that are absolutely required for the site to work properly. Without them the site would malfunction in ways that would make it very difficult or frustrating to use.

arcade.ly uses three types of essential cookie:

  1. A session cookie that is used to keep track of information related to your session: your games, hiscores, and validation/anti-cheating functionality.

  2. A cookie that records that you’ve seen and agreed to our cookie notice. If we didn’t do this we’d have to show it to you every time you visit the site, which would get pretty annoying.

  3. Your site and game preferences: whether music and sound effects are enabled, and the visual settings you choose on our settings page. These are only stored when you change a setting, and stay on your device: they’re never sent to us or anyone else. Strictly, arcade.ly uses web storage for this but, as previously stated, from a legislative perspective web storage falls into the “cookie” category.

Because these only remember the choices you make, they count as essential and can’t be turned off. If you’d rather they weren’t kept, you can clear this site’s data in your browser at any time: everything will go back to its default settings.

Your rights

Under the GDPR, you have rights as an individual which you can exercise in relation to the information we hold about you:

If you object to the way we are processing your data, or would like us to erase your personal data, contact webmaster@arcade.ly.

Complaints and queries

arcade.ly tries to meet the highest standards when collecting and using personal information. We take complaints very seriously. If you feel our collection or use of information is unfair, misleading or inappropriate, we encourage you to bring this to our attention. We also welcome any suggestions for improving our procedures.

If you have any questions regarding this policy, or wish to make a complaint about the way we’ve handled your personal information, contact webmaster@arcade.ly.

If you are unhappy with how we have used your data, you can complain to a supervisory authority. In the UK, this is the Information Comissioner’s Office.

Reporting security issues

We have implemented technology and policies to help safeguard your privacy from unauthorized access and improper use. For example, arcade.ly itself exclusively communicates over HTTPS, and our servers are firewalled and protected appropriately.

If you become aware of a security vulnerability in any of arcade.ly’s services or websites, contact webmaster@arcade.ly.

We encourage the responsible disclosure of security issues, and will act quickly on any vulnerabilities reported. We will not take legal action against you if you:

Changes to this privacy policy

We regularly review our privacy policy. This policy was last updated on 27th October 2026.

Questions about data privacy

arcade.ly is the data controller for the information you provide unless otherwise stated. If you have any queries about the process or how we handle your information, contact webmaster@arcade.ly.

Filed Under

Category:Legal

Tags:legal · boring · necessary · privacy · compliance · gdpr · cookies · pecr · ccpa · termsandconditions

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