Privacy

Conway's Kingdom has no accounts. There is no email address to give, no password to set, and nothing to recover if you lose it. That single fact decides most of what follows.

This page covers two things that are worth keeping apart: this website, at conwayskingdom.com, and the game, which runs at play.conwayskingdom.com and is a different piece of software on a different machine.

This website

It is a set of static files. There is no login, no form and nothing to submit.

It carries Cloudflare Web Analytics, which counts page views without a cookie and without an identifier of any kind.

It also carries PostHog, which is product analytics, and PostHog does set a cookie. The cookie holds a random identifier — not a name, not an email address, nothing you typed — and its purpose is to recognise the same browser on a later visit, so that "did anybody come back?" is a question this site can answer at all.

That cookie is set on conwayskingdom.com in a way that play.conwayskingdom.com can also read. That is deliberate and it is the point of it: it is what lets one visit to this site be connected to somebody later playing the game, which is the only way to find out whether anything written here is any use. When you first join a server, that random identifier is joined to your player key — so from then on, the person who read this page and the person who played are recorded as one person.

What it records is which pages were opened, which links to the game were pressed, and which desktop build was downloaded. It also records sessions — what was on the screen and what was clicked — so that a page nobody can use can be watched failing rather than guessed at.

PostHog is a processor here, on servers in the European Union, and it is the only third party this site sends anything to other than its host. That host is Cloudflare, which also carries the analytics: the requests go to e.conwayskingdom.com, a reverse proxy Cloudflare runs on PostHog's behalf, and are forwarded from there. A subdomain rather than PostHog's own address means ad-block lists that match on the word do not match it, and it means Cloudflare handles those requests on the way past.

There is no advertising, there are no advertising trackers, and nothing here is sold or shared.

Turning it off. Browser "do not track" is honoured. Clearing your site data for conwayskingdom.com clears the cookie, and the next visit starts as a new stranger.

The game

Who you are

Your identity is a keypair made on your own device. The private half never leaves it — joining a server means signing a challenge that server sent you, so what crosses the network is a signature and a public key, never the secret itself. The server can tell that you are the same person who played yesterday, and cannot become you.

Losing that key loses the person, and nobody can give it back to you. That is the cost of not having accounts, and it is deliberate.

What a server writes down

A server keeps six things in one directory, and this is all of them:

• The people it has met — a list of public keys and nothing else. No names, no dates, no addresses.
• A profile per person — the public key, the display name you last joined under, a rating, how many games you have played, the most ground you ever held at once, and the history behind the rating. Everything on it was counted by the server itself.
• Your saved patterns and your finished games — kept for you and shown to nobody else. The server holds them; it does not read them.
• Rooms — who made a room, its entry code if it has one, whether it is listed, and who has been let in.
• The worlds themselves — the cells, whose they are, and what each player holds.

The display name is whatever you typed. It is not verified, it is not unique, and two players can pick the same one. Ratings and records are that one server's own and do not travel to another.

Network addresses

The server reads the IP address your connection arrives from. It uses it to limit how many connections a single source can open before joining — which is what stops one machine exhausting the server — and it appears in the server's log lines. It is not stored in any of the tables above and it is not tied to your identity.

On your own device

The browser client keeps your key and a copy of your own record in your browser's local storage, so that closing the tab does not lose either. Clearing your browser's site data for play.conwayskingdom.com clears both — including the key, which cannot be recovered.

The analytics described under This website also runs here, and it is told your public key — the same public key the server already knows. It is not told your private key, which never leaves your device and which nothing outside the game can read.

Deleting things

There is no account to close. If you want a server to forget a person, the removable parts are the profile, the saved patterns and the game history, all keyed by your public key. Ask at privacy@conwayskingdom.com, and name the public key you mean: it is the only thing that identifies you here, so a request without it names nobody.

That address is also the one for this website. Write to it to have the identifier described under This website removed along with what was recorded against it, or to ask anything else about this page. It reaches a person, not a queue.

Changes

This page carries the date it was last changed, at the top. There is no mailing list to notify, because there are no email addresses to notify it to.