Privacy

The short version: you do not need an account, we do not track you, and everything you leave behind during a game or a colour hunt is deleted automatically within a day and a half. If you send us a message through the contact form, that is the only thing that stays longer, and it goes by itself too.

Who we are

This website is run by Belgium City Games. If you have a question about your data, email info@belgiumcitygames.com.

This website is run by Ruben Van den Broeck, a private individual rather than a company. Questions about your data go to info@belgiumcitygames.com.

What we keep when you play

There is no account to create. When you start a city game, we store only:

• the name or team name you type in yourself (feel free to make one up, it appears on the public leaderboard);
• your score and your playing time;
• which stops you have already solved;
• a random game code, so you can continue on another device.

We do not ask for your email address, your phone number or your address, and we do not link your game to any profile.

How long

All game data is deleted automatically once it has gone 36 hours without being touched. That includes the leaderboard, which is therefore always a snapshot of the last few hours rather than a permanent ranking.

Separately, we keep an anonymous daily counter of how many games are started and finished. There is nothing personal in it: it is one number per day per game.

Your location

You can choose to show your location on the map while playing. It is entirely optional, your browser will ask your permission first, and your position stays on your own device. It is never sent to us and never stored.

The colour hunt

The colour hunt works differently from the city games: there, a group photographs things in their own colour, and those photographs do land on our server. While a hunt is running we keep:

• the name you type when you join (a first name or a made-up one is plenty, it appears next to your photos);
• the colour you claimed;
• a random code on your device, so we know which photos are yours and you can remove them yourself;
• the photos you take, as files on our server.

Those photos are visible to everyone in the same hunt. That is the point of the game: together you make one collage. Each photo sits behind an unguessable link, so nobody finds them by searching or by counting upwards, but anyone with the hunt code or the link can look at them. So photograph things rather than passports, and put nothing in the frame you would rather not share with the group.

Everything from a hunt, the names and the photos together, is deleted automatically once nothing has happened in it for 24 hours. We keep no copy, we show them nowhere else, and we do not use them to recognise anything or anyone.

If you send us a message

If you fill in the contact form, we keep what you type into it: your name, your email address, your message, the subject you picked and the language you wrote in. We need that to be able to answer you, and to see which cities and which games people ask for.

Your message lands in our own admin panel and is also forwarded by email to the site's mailbox. A copy may go to a second address belonging to the operator, because a question that sits unread in an inbox for a week may as well never have arrived.

Messages we have dealt with are deleted after six months: the reply has been sent, so your address has done its job. Messages we have not dealt with stay longer, because a question nobody has acted on is still an open question, but after twelve months everything goes, handled or not. That happens automatically, not when somebody remembers.

Cookies and storage on your device

There is no Google Analytics, no Facebook pixel, no ad network and no third-party tracker of any kind on this site. Your browsing is not followed beyond this website.

We do count how busy the site is, on our own server. For that we keep daily totals only: which page, which city that page was about if any, in which language, on what kind of device (phone, tablet or computer), which website referred you if any, and which country the visit came from.

That country comes from your IP address, using a lookup table that sits on our own server. Your address is read, turned into a two letter country code, and immediately forgotten. It is not stored, not logged, not written next to anything else and not sent to any outside service. A country on its own cannot identify anybody, which is exactly why it is the only geography we keep: it answers "should we invest in French" without answering "who was here". No cookie is set for that counter. To tell whether a visit is new we use the session cookie already described below.

What we do use is strictly necessary to make the site work:

• a session cookie, so the server can follow your visit while you play;
• a security cookie (XSRF), which protects forms against abuse;
• local storage in your browser, holding your game code (so you can carry on if you close the page) and your sound preference.

Strictly necessary cookies do not require consent, which is why we do not put a choice dialog in your way. If we ever add anything that is not strictly necessary, we will ask your permission first and you will be able to say no.

Who else sees your data

Your name, score and time appear on that game's public leaderboard, visible to other players, until they disappear after 36 hours. Your photos in a colour hunt are visible to the others in that hunt, until they disappear after 24 hours. Beyond that we sell nothing and share nothing.

Outside our own server, three parties are involved, and no more:

• our hosting partner, who runs the servers holding the site, the database and the photos. Those servers are inside the European Union;
• CARTO, where your browser fetches the map background on the pages that have a map (the city game and Then & now). Your device talks to their servers directly for that, and in doing so CARTO sees your IP address and which piece of map you asked for. We send them nothing about you and get nothing back. On pages without a map this does not happen;
• the email provider our outgoing post goes through. It only comes into play if you send us a message or we reply to you: then your name, your address and your message pass through their servers, as with any email.

Beyond that there is nothing. No fonts loaded from elsewhere, no scripts from a CDN, no embedded videos, no social sharing buttons. Everything the site needs in order to work sits on our own server.

Why we are allowed to keep this

The law asks us to say, per kind of data, on what ground we process it. For completeness, though it is a short list:

• your game, your place on the leaderboard, your colour hunt: to provide the service you asked for yourself (performance of a contract, article 6.1.b GDPR). Without a name there is no leaderboard, without photos there is no collage;
• your message through the contact form: to be able to answer what you asked (article 6.1.b), and to keep track of which cities and games get requested, which is our legitimate interest (article 6.1.f);
• the visitor counter: legitimate interest (article 6.1.f), namely knowing how busy the site is and in which language, without anything personal in the numbers;
• the session cookie and the security cookie: strictly necessary to run and to secure the site (article 6.1.f, and exempt from consent under the ePrivacy rules);
• your location on the map: your consent, which your browser asks for and which you can withdraw at any moment (article 6.1.a). It stays on your own device and never reaches us anyway.

Backups

The database is copied every night, and we keep the fourteen most recent copies, so roughly two weeks. That is the honest footnote to every period above: something deleted today can still sit in an older copy for a while. Those copies are used for nothing unless something actually breaks and we have to restore, and they fall off the end by themselves once they are past the fourteen. The colour hunt photos are not in them: those live as files beside the database, and after 24 hours they are genuinely gone.

Your rights

You have the right to see your data, to have it corrected, to have it deleted, to have its processing restricted, to object to processing that rests on our legitimate interest (such as the visitor counter), and to receive the data you gave us in a readable file or have it passed on.

In practice this is rarely needed, because everything from a game or a hunt disappears by itself within 36 and 24 hours respectively. If you want it sooner, email info@belgiumcitygames.com with your game code or team name. Your own photos, incidentally, you can simply remove yourself during the hunt.

If you sent us a message and want it gone before the six or twelve months are up, say so from the same email address and we will delete it.

You also have the right to complain to the Belgian Data Protection Authority.

Children

Our games are made for families. We deliberately ask for nothing that could identify a child. If you are playing with children, pick a team name rather than a real name, and on a colour hunt keep the photos about the city rather than about the children.