Privacy policy

What this site collects today

PhonePlayers runs three analytics tools, and loads no advertising network. There are no reader accounts and no comments. We do not know your name, and nothing here asks for it.

• Google Analytics 4, which counts visits and reports how people arrive and which pages they read. It sets two cookies in your browser, _ga and _ga_CE9TLDF5WN, and sends the data it gathers to Google. It is loaded from googletagmanager.com and is a third-party script.
• Ahrefs Web Analytics, a page-view counter that sets no cookies at all.
• Cloudflare Web Analytics, also cookieless. This one is switched on at our hosting provider rather than added to the page markup, so it is injected when the page is served.

There is also a third cookie, and it is not for readers. Signing in to the staff dashboard at /admin sets a session cookie so the editor stays signed in between pages. It is set only after a successful sign-in, it is never set by visiting an article, and the dashboard is not reachable without a password.

Your browser sends a request to the server hosting this site in order to load a page, and that request is handled by the hosting provider. That is unavoidable for any website.

Search

Site search runs on our own server against our own content. Your query appears in the page URL, which means it is in your browser history, but it is not sent to any third party and no search service is involved.

The contact form

This is the one place on the site where you can hand us personal data, and only if you choose to. If you send a correction or a message, we receive what you typed: your message, and your name and email address if you filled those in. Both of those fields are optional, and a correction is perfectly useful without them — the only thing you lose by leaving them blank is our ability to reply.

Messages are delivered by Resend, an email provider, and arrive in an ordinary inbox. Resend handles the message in transit as part of delivering it. We use what you send to answer you and to fix what you reported. Your address is not added to any list, is not used for marketing, and is not passed to anyone else.

The form checks how long the page was open and includes a hidden field that real people never fill in. Both exist to catch automated spam. Neither identifies you, and there is no CAPTCHA, because a puzzle that locks out somebody using a screen reader is not a price worth paying for a quieter inbox.

On-page event tracking

Separately from the two counters above, the site can record actions on the page — a search being run, a code being copied, a link being followed. That pipeline has no provider configured and sends nothing anywhere today. If one is ever added, it will be named here.

If the newsletter opens

The newsletter is not accepting sign-ups. The form deliberately does not appear until a provider is configured, because a form that collects an address it cannot deliver to is a form that quietly loses your data. When it opens, the address you give is used to send that newsletter and nothing else, and every email carries an unsubscribe link.

External links

We link to app stores, official game sites and our own specialized products. Once you follow a link you are on someone else's site under their privacy policy, not ours.

Your rights

Two things are held about you. Google Analytics holds usage data tied to a random identifier in the _ga cookie — deleting that cookie ends the association, and Google's own controls cover the rest. And if you have written to us through the contact form, we hold that message in an inbox: ask us to delete it and we will, without your having to explain why. Beyond those, browsing this site leaves us holding nothing.