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. It sets no cookies, and 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 that follows you between visits or between sites. It is served by Cloudflare, which sees the requests it serves in order to serve them, as any host does.

That is the whole of it. There is no advertising, there are no third-party trackers, and nothing here is sold or shared.

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.

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.

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.