Cookie Policy

We set a small number of cookies. Every one of them is strictly necessary for something you asked for: staying signed in, staying in the game you joined, or completing a verification step you started.

There are no advertising cookies, no third-party trackers, no Google Analytics, and no pixels. Nothing on this site tracks you across other sites.

Session cookie. Set when you sign in, so the site knows who you are on the next page. Without it you would be signed out on every page. It is removed when you sign out, and it expires on its own.

Play token, hhg_play_<session>. Set when you join a game. It allows you to answer as yourself for the rest of that round and to claim your own result at the end, without creating an account. It is scoped to that one game session.

Event player token, hhg_event_<event>. Set when you join a multi-round event, so that you carry across rounds as the same player and your running score follows you. Scoped to that one event.

Pending signup, hhg_pending_signup. Set while you are part-way through creating an account and we have emailed you a verification code. It holds the signup in progress so that the code you enter matches the one we sent. It is short-lived and is cleared when the signup completes or expires.

Pending email change, hhg_pending_email. The same function for changing the email address on an existing account. It holds the requested address and a hash of the code, never the code itself, so that nothing changes until you prove you can receive mail at the new address.

Device ID, hhg_device. Set when you join a game. It holds one random ID and nothing else: no name, no email address, no IP address. We use it only so that the games avoid serving you questions you have already been served, across games and hosts, even if you play without an account. It is not used for advertising or analytics and is not linked to an account. It lasts up to 400 days and is renewed each time you join a game.

All of these are sent over HTTPS and marked so that browser scripts cannot read them. All except the device ID are signed or encrypted; the device ID is a random value that identifies nothing on its own.

Strictly necessary cookies do not require consent, and strictly necessary cookies are all we set. A banner requesting permission for cookies the site requires in order to function would offer no meaningful choice.

Consent banners derive from the EU cookie rules and the GDPR. This platform operates in the United States, US state privacy laws use an opt-out model rather than a consent model, and we do not carry out the activities that model addresses. There is nothing here to consent to.

If you send a Global Privacy Control signal, we honor it. What that changes in practice is set out in the privacy policy.

We do not run analytics on this site today. No Google Analytics, no session recording, no heatmaps.

If we add analytics later, it will be a cookieless product such as Vercel Analytics or Plausible, which measure page views without storing anything on your device and without following you between sites. That constraint is recorded alongside this policy in the code, so that adding a tracker would require changing the rule deliberately rather than leaving this page inaccurate.

Our hosting providers keep ordinary server logs, which include IP addresses and request details. Those are not cookies and are not used to profile you.

Every browser allows you to view, block, and delete cookies. Because ours are the necessary kind, blocking them has the following consequences:

• Block the session cookie and you cannot stay signed in.
• Block the play or event token and you cannot join a game, because the game has no way to identify which answers are yours.
• Block the pending-signup or pending-email cookie and you cannot complete signing up or change your email address.
• Block the device ID and the games still work, but they cannot tell which questions you have already been served, so you may see some again.

Nothing we set is used for advertising, so blocking these cookies removes functionality without preventing tracking that does not take place.

Questions about this policy go to hello@hivehousegames.com.