Privacy at Sudokuno

Optional player accounts

You can play without an account. If you register, we store a permanent internal account ID, your public username, a securely hashed password and a verifier for your recovery code. No email address or real name is required. Qualifying scores and the existing attributed gameplay records, including hint events, precise durations, timestamps and board signatures, are linked to your account ID across devices. Your username and qualifying times appear on the existing public leaderboard.

Strictly necessary authentication cookies keep you logged in for up to seven days. Logout revokes that login. We use short-lived authentication security counters without IP addresses, device IDs or advertising trackers. A guest completion can carry a signed, browser-bound proof for 30 minutes; only an explicit registration/login claim saves that individual time to an account. It does not transfer other guest activity.

You may optionally provide a private recovery email. It is stored with your account, is not published, and is used for manual password recovery, not marketing. Contact us with your username; a short-lived, single-use reset link is sent only to the saved address. Completing recovery verifies mailbox access. Until then the address is unverified. Keep access to that mailbox.

Public accounts without email receive a recovery code shown once; only its verifier is stored. Save it securely and supply it when requesting recovery. Developers may have an email assigned by the trusted operator and use the same reset page; developers without email need operator help. Reset revokes existing logins and rotates the code for code-based public accounts. Recovery email records are removed with their account. Operator access to saved addresses is restricted to account administration and recovery; they never appear on the leaderboard.

To request account deletion, contact contact@sudokuno.com. After ownership verification, we delete the account and its attributed scores and gameplay records. Shared aggregate statistics remain; individual scores are not retained merely under another label. Backup copies and contact correspondence follow the separate retention limitations described below. This does not resolve retention of historical device data.

Controller

Brynjar Skartland is the controller for Sudokuno. Questions and privacy requests may be sent to contact@sudokuno.com.

Information processed when you play without an account

Necessary session and local settings

• A necessary session cookie keeps your game and selected puzzle together between requests. It has no fixed expiry and is normally a browser-session cookie.
• The board, notes, recent puzzles, personal bests from the current session, and Random-selection history are held temporarily in server memory. An inactive game session is normally removed after six hours and may disappear sooner after a restart or capacity cleanup.
• Browser local storage is used only for theme and dashboard settings you choose, and to restore those settings after Zen mode. They remain until you change them or clear browser data.

Sudokuno does not create a persistent device ID. The current version removes older Sudokuno IDs and retired local storage for game mode, selected cell, candidate mode, and paint colour.

Leaderboard

Playing without an account does not put you on the leaderboard. Sudokuno does not store an individual score row for an anonymous solve, and does not give you a name, number or guest label to display one under. The leaderboard shows scores belonging to named accounts, such as the developer accounts, and will later show registered users.

Aggregate gameplay statistics

Anonymous play instead contributes to shared counters for the puzzle and game mode you played. Sudokuno counts:

• that an attempt was started, and that an attempt was completed;
• whether a completed attempt used at least one hint;
• the completion time, added into a shared total so an average can be shown; and
• which puzzle step, technique and hint level hints were requested at.

These are totals. Your completion time is added into a sum and is not kept as a separate record, and a hint request is counted against the step it was requested at rather than stored as part of your attempt. Sudokuno does not keep a player, device, browser, session or attempt identifier alongside any of it, so these observations cannot be joined back together into a personal history: it is not possible to tell that two attempts, or two hint requests, came from the same person. There is no IP address, location, browser fingerprint, board signature, exact event timestamp or free-form text in these tables.

Because the counters have no lifetime, there is nothing to expire and no scheduled cleanup job. The figures shown in the game are described as attempts rather than players: the same person playing on two days counts twice, and nothing stored can distinguish that from two people. A statistic is only displayed once enough attempts have been recorded, so a figure is never computed from a handful of them.

Developer accounts

Signed-in developers are identified by developer username. To inspect puzzles, hints, and defects, developer sessions may store raw gameplay attempts and technical telemetry, including session ID, puzzle, game mode, exact durations, hint or error details, board signatures, and timestamps. No device ID is stored. This processing does not apply to anonymous players.

Purposes and legal basis

The information is used to:

• provide the game and remember choices you request;
• show a fair leaderboard and limit repeated or unreasonable statistical observations;
• understand puzzle difficulty and improve hints and game quality; and
• operate, troubleshoot, and secure the service.

The legal basis is the controller's legitimate interest under Article 6(1)(f) of the GDPR in providing, securing, and improving a data-minimised Sudokuno service. That interest is limited by not assigning anonymous players a persistent ID, not retaining their raw events, and storing statistics in aggregate form. You may object to this processing.

Sudokuno uses no optional tracking or marketing cookies. The necessary session and the settings you expressly choose are used only to provide those functions, so this version does not display a consent banner.

Providers, recipients, and storage locations

• Render provides web hosting in Frankfurt, Germany. Technical operational and security logs may contain connection data such as IP address, requested URL, browser information, and timestamp. On the current plan, logs are available for seven days.
• Neon provides the PostgreSQL database in AWS region eu-central-1 (Frankfurt). Scores, aggregates, and developer data are stored there when database functionality is enabled.
• An email provider processes the sender address, message, and ordinary technical email metadata when you contact us. This is used only to handle the enquiry, not to build a game profile or for marketing.

Webhuset is used only as the domain registrar in this setup; it does not host the app, database, or contact mailbox. Information is not sold or shared for advertising. Providers may use their own subprocessors. Any transfer outside the EEA must have a valid transfer mechanism under data protection law.

Retention

• Inactive game sessions in server memory are normally removed after six hours.
• An earlier version of Sudokuno used a persistent device ID. New collection has stopped, but previously collected data may still remain in the database. No automatic deletion period has yet been set for that historical information; it is deleted after a specific assessment or on request.
• Anonymous aggregate counters are retained while the quality measurement remains useful, or until deleted after a specific assessment. They have no expiry of their own, because they describe puzzles rather than people.
• Render logs are available for seven days on the current plan.
• Developer telemetry is deleted manually when no longer needed for testing, quality, or security. This foundation does not introduce an automatic deletion period for developer data.
• Email is kept as long as necessary to answer and document the enquiry, subject to the provider's backup and deletion routines.

Your rights

You may request access, rectification, erasure, or restriction, and you may object to processing based on legitimate interests. The right to data portability applies where its conditions are met. Sudokuno does not use automated decision-making with legal or similarly significant effects.

Send requests to contact@sudokuno.com. Please note that anonymous play leaves nothing that identifies you: it contributes only to shared counters, which cannot be traced back to a person or separated out again. If your request concerns data held under a developer account, or a score recorded before this version, say so and we will look for it there.

You may lodge a complaint with Datatilsynet, the Norwegian Data Protection Authority. You are welcome to contact us first so we can try to resolve the matter.

Changes

This notice will be updated before new purposes, optional tracking technologies, or public accounts are introduced. Material changes will be made visible in the service.