Privacy

Your account

An account is an email address and a display name. Your display name is public everywhere you appear — the board, the archive, leaderboards. Your email address is never shown to anyone else.

Signing in

Four ways in: a magic link, Google, Apple, or a password. Magic-link tokens are never stored in readable form — only their SHA-256 hash — and each one expires after 15 minutes and works once. Sessions are cookie-based and session-only; there's no ad tracking and no third-party analytics on this site@if (\App\Support\Analytics::enabled()) — see “Counting visits” below for what is counted, and by what@endif. The typefaces are served from this site too, so loading a page doesn't announce you to a font CDN either.

Signing in with Google or Apple tells us an address, a name and an id for that account, and nothing else — we don't ask for, and can't see, anything in your Google or Apple account. If you use Apple's Hide My Email, we only ever hold the relay address, which is the point of it. Whichever door you come through, one email address is one account: signing in with Apple using an address you already registered links the two rather than making a second you.

Counting visits

We count page views with Umami, which we run ourselves on the same server as the game. No analytics company gets a copy and nothing is sold to anybody. It sets no cookies and builds no profile that follows you between sites: a visit is counted against a daily hash of your address and browser that cannot be reversed and does not survive the day.

Alongside the page views we record a handful of things about the game itself — that a shot was submitted, which of your five it was and what the multiplier was worth at that moment, whether the day screen or the night screen was shown, and that somebody signed in and by which door. That is there to answer one question: whether waiting for the board to fill up is a trade people actually make. None of it carries your name, your address, your pictures or anything about the day's prompt.

Your images

Every image you upload is public to other players — it appears on the day's board, the archive, and (if it wins) the leaderboards. Before it's stored, it's re-encoded from scratch, which strips all metadata — including EXIF data and GPS location, if your photo had any. What gets stored is pixels only.

Each upload is also sent to OpenAI twice: once for content moderation, and once to the AI judge that scores it and writes the quip. That's the whole point of the game — it has to actually look at the picture.

You can delete any of your own shots, from the board or from the archive. That one really is a delete: both stored files are destroyed, and the picture comes off the board, the archive and every leaderboard total. The row itself stays, because it is still holding one of your five slots for the day — deleting an image doesn't buy you another shot.

Images are stored on DigitalOcean Spaces (Sydney region) in production. If staff hide a submission from public view — for a moderation call, say — the row and the file both stay put; hiding is not deleting.

Leaving

There's a Delete your account button at the bottom of your profile page, and it does what it says. Your email address, your display name, your account and every picture you've ever uploaded are destroyed — the image files themselves, not just the database rows that point at them. Any sign-in links still sitting in your inbox stop working. You come off the board, the archive and every leaderboard.

If you'd won a day, that day is re-crowned to whoever came closest after you, rather than being left with a winner nobody can see.

One thing survives, and it's fair that we say so: our own record of what each call to the AI judge cost us. Those lines keep a model name, a token count and a price, and we detach them from you — no address, no name, no picture, nothing that says it was ever anybody. It's our accounts, not your data.

It happens immediately. There's no grace period holding your pictures back for a fortnight in case you change your mind — if you asked us to drop it, we've dropped it. Sign up again whenever you like; it starts from scratch.

Email

Two kinds, both through AhaSend. Sign-in links and password resets, which you get because you asked for one. And three game notifications — a new prompt, the day's winner, somebody overtaking your best shot — which are off until you turn them on in your account, and off again the moment you turn them off. No marketing mail, ever.

Push notifications

The same three notifications can buzz your phone instead, if you tap the bell and let your browser ask. Turning it on stores a subscription for that device — an address your browser generates, two keys it generates with it, and which browser it is. We can't work out who you are or where you are from any of it, and it's one row per device, not per person.

Every notification is encrypted with those keys before it leaves us, so Apple and Google carry the message without being able to read it. Tap the bell again and the subscription is deleted outright. Uninstall or clear the site and they'll tell us it's gone, and we delete it then too.

Chipping in

Donations go through Stripe, and card details never touch Close Enuf — you type them on Stripe's own page and we never see them, store them, or get them back. Stripe gets your card and the email address you give them, which is theirs and separate from any account here.

What we keep is the amount, the date, Stripe's reference for the payment, and the name you chose to put on the list — which can be nothing at all, and is the only part anybody else sees. Donating doesn't create an account, get you any advantage in the game, or put you on any mailing list.

Questions

Ask us anything: close@div.nz.