Privacy Policy

Who we are

Cryptogram Online is a small, independently run puzzle site. For anything in this policy — questions, corrections, requests — the contact page reaches the person who runs it.

What we collect

Account information. If you create an account we store your name, your email address, and either a cryptographic hash of your password (never the password itself) or, if you sign in with Google, a link to your Google account.

Puzzle activity. We keep track of the puzzles you start and solve and your progress within them, so the site can resume where you left off and avoid dealing you the same quotation twice. Without an account, this is tied only to a temporary browser session.

Contact messages. A message sent through the contact form — your name, email address, and the message — is delivered to our mailbox as email. It is not stored in the site’s database.

Consent records. When you make a cookie choice we record what was chosen, when, and under which version of the cookie policy, identified by a random id that lives in the consent cookie. These records do not include your IP address.

Analytics. If you consent to analytics cookies, Google Analytics collects usage data — pages visited, rough location derived by Google, device characteristics — as described in the cookie policy.

Cookies

Every cookie this site can set is listed, with its purpose and lifetime, in the cookie policy. Nothing beyond the strictly necessary ones is set without your consent.

Third-party services

Cloudflare Turnstile protects our forms from bots. It runs when you use those forms and processes technical signals from your browser to tell people from scripts.

Google Sign-In is involved only if you choose to sign in with Google, in which case Google tells us who you are and we link the account.

Google Analytics measures how the site is used, subject to your consent. Google processes this data on our behalf under the Google Ads Data Processing Terms.

We do not sell personal data, and we do not show ads.

How long we keep things

• Sign-in sessions last 30 days; expired sessions are deleted, along with the anonymous puzzle progress that belonged to them.
• Unfinished puzzles on an account are deleted after a year. Completed ones are kept — they are your solving history.
• Password reset links are deleted as soon as they expire or are used.
• Contact messages live in our mailbox for as long as the conversation needs them.
• Consent records are kept indefinitely: they are the audit trail proving what was consented to and when.
• Account information is kept while the account exists.

Your choices and rights

You can review or withdraw your cookie choices at any time via the Cookie settings link in the footer. You can ask what data we hold about you, ask for it to be corrected, or ask for your account and its data to be deleted — write to us through the contact page and we will handle it directly.

If your browser sends a Global Privacy Control signal, we point it out when asking for your cookie consent and record it alongside your decision. Either way, nothing optional is enabled without your explicit choice — every category starts off.

Changes to this policy

If this policy changes in a way that affects consent you have already given, the version number above is raised and you are asked to choose again on your next visit. Copy edits that change nothing material update only the date.