Privacy Policy

1. Who we are

Unbeaten Season is a free browser game at www.unbeatenseason.com, operated by Unbeaten Season from Australia (we, us, our).

You can reach us about anything in this policy at privacy@unbeatenseason.com. If you want to make a privacy request or a complaint, that is the address to use.

For the purposes of the EU and UK GDPR we are the controller of the personal data described here. For the purposes of the Australian Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) we treat ourselves as bound by the Australian Privacy Principles and handle information accordingly, whether or not the Act applies to an operator of our size.

2. What this policy covers

This policy covers www.unbeatenseason.com and every game, league and mode on it. It applies wherever you are in the world.

It does not cover other people’s websites. When you share a result, the platform you share it to — a messaging app, a social network — is running its own rules, and you should read theirs.

3. What we collect

Things you choose to give us. All of these are optional:

• A handle — a display name of your own choosing, if you decide to put a score on a public board. It does not have to be, and should not be, your real name.
• A private league name, if you create a private league for your friends.
• A push subscription, if you turn on reminders. This is an address your browser vendor issues so that a notification can reach your device.
• Anything you write to us in an email.

Things that happen automatically when you play:

• An anonymous ID — a random identifier your own browser generates. See the next section; it is the centre of how this works.
• Game results — your picks, scores, win-loss records, streaks, badges and where you placed.
• Analytics events — which pages were opened and which game actions occurred, so we can tell whether a change made the game better or worse.
• A hashed IP address, used only to stop one machine hammering our API. The address is put through SHA-256 and shortened before it is stored; we never write down the address itself, and the stored value cannot be turned back into it.
• Ordinary server logs kept by our hosting provider, which include IP addresses, in the way that every website on the internet has server logs.

What we never collect. Not "collect but promise not to misuse" — never ask for, and have no code to receive:

• Your location, precise or approximate. There is no GPS permission, and we do not derive a location from your IP address.
• Your contacts, photos, camera or microphone.
• Advertising identifiers, or any cross-app or cross-site tracking identifier.
• Payment details. The game is free and there is nothing to pay for.
• Anything from a third-party sign-in. There is no Google, Apple or Facebook sign-in, because there is no sign-in.
• Your email address, unless you choose to email us.

4. Your anonymous ID, explained properly

This is the part worth understanding, because it explains both the good and the awkward parts of playing without an account.

The first time you play, your browser generates a random identifier — a UUID, of the form 9f2c1b74-… — and saves it in that browser’s local storage. It is created on your device, not issued by us. It is not derived from your hardware, your network, or anything about you. It is the key our server uses to recognise a returning player so that your streak survives until tomorrow.

Two consequences follow, and they cut in opposite directions:

• In your favour: we cannot connect that ID to a person. We do not know your name, we have no email address for you, and nothing in our records identifies you. If you play on your phone and your laptop, we see two unrelated players.
• Against you: if you clear your browser data, use private browsing, or switch device, the ID is gone and a new one takes its place. Your progress does not follow you, and we cannot recover it — not as a policy choice, but because there is nothing on our side that could link the old ID to you.

In some jurisdictions an identifier like this is still treated as personal information even though we cannot put a name to it. We have written this policy on that basis, which is why the rights below apply to it.

5. Where it is stored, and for how long

On your device. Your game history, your card collection, your local statistics and your settings are kept in your browser’s local storage. They are not uploaded. Clearing site data for unbeatenseason.com erases all of it, permanently and immediately.

On our server. Only what a shared board needs in order to work. Nearly all of it expires by itself — we do not have to remember to delete it, and there is no archive behind it. The few records that are kept while you play are marked below, and are deleted on request:

• Daily leaderboard entries — your ID, handle and score for a given day: 14 days.
• Weekly leaderboard entries — 35 days.
• How many people played a given day — a counter, no IDs: 48 hours.
• Anonymous totals — how many results landed on each score each day, and how often each player was named as a Siren Rush answer. Counts only, with no IDs and nothing that identifies you: kept for up to 3 years to show game-wide statistics.
• Challenges you send or accept: 60 days.
• Private leagues — the league name and the member IDs and handles: 400 days, refreshed each time somebody uses the league. An abandoned league deletes itself.
• Push subscriptions, if you turned reminders on: 180 days, refreshed while you keep using them.
• Device-transfer snapshots, only if you start a transfer — a copy of your own record so another browser can pick it up: 180 days. The short code that unlocks it lives for 15 minutes, after which the snapshot can no longer be claimed by anybody.
• Draftlock — a match in progress: 1 hour; your match feed (who played your sides): 30 days; the sides you draft, which other players then play against: 60 days; the spins you have already seen: 90 days. Your Draftlock rating and win–loss record are kept while you play.
• Club tribes — the points your daily results earned your club: 70 days. The club you chose is kept while you play.
• GOAT votes — each head-to-head vote adds to anonymous counts of how often each player was shown and picked. Counts only, with no IDs, no handle and no IP address: kept indefinitely to show the crowd ranking. So that one browser votes on a pair only once a day, your ID is kept beside the pair you voted on, with a count of your votes that day, for 2 days.
• Rate-limit records — the hashed IP described above: seconds to minutes.

With our analytics provider. Product analytics events are retained by PostHog under their own retention settings; see the analytics section below.

6. Analytics

We use PostHog to understand how the game is actually used — whether people finish a draft, which modes get played, where a screen loses everybody. We would rather change the game based on evidence than on a hunch.

What that does and does not involve:

• Recorded: page views, and specific game events we have deliberately added, such as a game starting or a daily being completed.
• Turned off: session recording. We do not record your screen, your mouse or your keystrokes.
• Turned off: autocapture. We do not hoover up every click on the page — only the events we chose.
• No advertising use. PostHog is a product-analytics tool, not an ad network. The events are not used to target advertising, because there is no advertising.
• Analytics events are tied to the same anonymous ID described above, so that a returning player is not counted as a new one. PostHog processes your IP address as part of receiving those events.

If your browser sends a Global Privacy Control signal or you use a content blocker that blocks analytics, the game carries on working exactly as it does otherwise. Nothing in the game is gated on analytics loading.

7. Push notifications

If you turn on reminders, your browser gives us a push subscription — an address at your browser vendor’s push service, plus the keys needed to encrypt a message to it. We store it against your anonymous ID and use it for one thing: sending you the notifications you asked for.

Turn them off in the game, or revoke notification permission in your browser, and it stops. The stored subscription then expires on its own within 180 days.

8. Cookies and local storage

The game itself runs on local storage, not cookies: your ID, your progress and your settings are stored by your browser and read back by the game. Nothing about them is sent to a third party.

Our analytics provider sets its own cookies to recognise a returning browser. Those are the only cookies on the site.

There are no advertising cookies, no third-party ad trackers, no social media pixels and no cross-site tracking of any kind. Clearing cookies and site data for unbeatenseason.com removes everything we or our analytics provider have placed in your browser.

9. Who else sees it

We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share it for advertising. We have never done so and the game has no advertising in it. The only parties who touch your data are the services that make the site run:

• Vercel — hosting. Serves the site and keeps ordinary server logs.
• Upstash — the database that holds leaderboards, private leagues, challenges and push subscriptions.
• PostHog — product analytics, as described above.
• Browser push services — Google, Apple, Mozilla or Microsoft, depending on your browser, and only if you turned reminders on. They deliver the notification; they are not given anything else.

Each of these is a service provider acting on our instructions, not a party free to use your data for its own purposes.

We may also disclose information where we are legally required to — a court order, or a binding request from a regulator — or where it is necessary to investigate a genuine security problem or abuse of the game. If this site is ever sold or transferred, the data would move with it, and this policy would continue to apply until you were told otherwise.

10. What other players can see

If you submit a score to a public board, your handle and that score are public. So that two people who pick the same handle can be told apart, boards show it with four characters of your anonymous ID attached — Yourhandle#8A3F.

Choose a handle accordingly: it does not have to be your real name, and we would gently suggest it should not be. Handles and private league names are filtered for obvious abuse before they are shown, and we may remove any that get through.

Submitting a score is always a choice. You can play every mode of this game, keep every statistic and never appear on a public board.

11. International transfers

We operate from Australia, and the service providers listed above run infrastructure in the United States, the European Union and elsewhere. Playing the game therefore involves your information being transferred and stored outside your own country, including outside the EEA, the UK and Australia.

Where we transfer personal data out of the EEA or the UK, we rely on the European Commission’s Standard Contractual Clauses and the UK Addendum to them, as incorporated in our providers’ data processing terms. For transfers out of Australia, we take reasonable steps under APP 8 to ensure recipients handle information consistently with the Australian Privacy Principles.

12. Your rights

Rights differ by country. We apply the following to everybody, wherever you live, because operating two standards would be more work than operating one: you may ask us what we hold about you, ask us to correct it, and ask us to delete it.

Australia. Under the Australian Privacy Principles you may request access to the personal information we hold about you and ask us to correct it. If you are unhappy with how we have handled a privacy issue, write to us first, and if we have not resolved it you can complain to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner at oaic.gov.au.

European Economic Area and United Kingdom. Under the GDPR and UK GDPR you have the rights of access, rectification, erasure, restriction, objection, and data portability, and the right to withdraw consent at any time without affecting processing that already happened. Our legal bases are:

• Legitimate interests — running the game, keeping leaderboards honest, protecting the site from abuse, and understanding how the game is used. We have considered your interests against ours and kept the data collected to the minimum the feature needs.
• Consent — push notifications, and appearing on a public leaderboard. Both are opt-in and both can be withdrawn.
• Legal obligation — where the law requires us to keep or produce something.

You may also lodge a complaint with your local supervisory authority — in the UK, the ICO; in the EEA, your national authority, listed at edpb.europa.eu.

California and other US states. We do not sell your personal information and we do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising, as those terms are defined in the CCPA and equivalent state laws. There is accordingly nothing to opt out of, but you retain the rights to know, to delete, to correct, and not to be discriminated against for exercising them. We honour Global Privacy Control signals.

Everywhere else. Write to us and we will do the same things. We are not going to make you prove your country first.

13. How to delete your data

There are two halves to this, and you control the first one outright.

Your device. Clear site data for unbeatenseason.com in your browser settings. That erases your ID, your progress, your collection and your settings immediately and permanently. You do not need our permission or our help.

Our server. Because there is no account, your anonymous ID is the only way we can find your rows — so a deletion request has to include it. To find it: open the site, open your browser’s developer tools, and look in Local Storage for the key ps-identity. The id value inside it is what we need. If you would rather not go digging, the #8A3F suffix shown next to your handle on a board, plus the handle itself, is usually enough for us to locate an entry.

Send that to privacy@unbeatenseason.com and we will delete what we hold within 30 days, and tell you when it is done. If you do nothing at all, every server-side record linked to your ID expires by itself on the timetable set out above. Anonymous totals hold no ID and are not linked to you.

A caveat we would rather state than bury: if you clear your browser data first, we can no longer identify which records were yours, and we will not be able to act on a later request. Ask us first, then clear.

14. Children

This game is not directed at children under 13, and we ask that under-13s do not play it. We do not knowingly collect information from them. Because there are no accounts and no age gate that would mean asking every player for a birthdate — itself a collection of personal information we would rather avoid — we rely on this statement and on the absence of anything worth collecting.

If you are a parent or guardian and believe a child has put a handle on a public board, write to privacy@unbeatenseason.com and we will remove it.

15. Security

Everything is served over HTTPS, and our database and analytics providers encrypt data in transit and at rest. Submissions are size-limited, validated and rate-limited before they reach storage.

The strongest protection here, though, is structural rather than technical: a breach of our database would expose handles and scores. There are no passwords to leak, no email addresses to sell, no payment details, and no real names. We designed it that way on purpose.

No system is perfectly secure, and we cannot guarantee against every risk. If you find a security problem, please tell us at privacy@unbeatenseason.com before telling anyone else, and we will work with you.

16. Changes to this policy

If we change what we collect or what we do with it, we will update this page and change the date at the top of it. Because we have no way to email you, this page is the notice — if a change materially affects you, we will also flag it in the game itself.

17. Contact

Questions, requests, complaints or corrections: privacy@unbeatenseason.com.

We read everything sent there and we answer.