Privacy

Short version: this is a small independent community site. There are no ads and no third-party trackers, your data is never sold or shared beyond the technical services listed below, and the only "analytics" is a plain visit counter described below. Contact: fuwahanakishidev@gmail.com.

What is stored

Account (only if you create one): email address, username, and your password as a strong one-way hash. The actual password is never stored and cannot be recovered by anyone, including us.
Your library (only if logged in): played/favorite/wishlist marks and notes.
Daily-puzzle leaderboard (only if you finish a puzzle while logged in, or log in afterward in the same browser): one win/loss and miss count per day. Your public username, total solved count, and rank appear on the public leaderboard. Anonymous puzzle progress is never placed on the leaderboard.
Chat with friends (only if you use it): messages you write to a friend are stored so the two of you can read the conversation later. They stay until deleted: you can delete any message you wrote, or a whole conversation, from the chat itself, and deleting an account removes its conversations too. Deletion is immediate, applies to both sides, and there is no copy kept beyond the nightly backup, which ages out within a week. These messages stay between you, your friend and this server. No AI reads them and they are not passed to anyone else.
Technical logs: IP addresses appear briefly in server logs and in-memory rate-limit counters, used only to keep the service working and abuse-free.
Feedback you submit (only if you use the feedback form): your message, the category you picked, and — only if you choose to leave one — an email address for replying. A copy is emailed to the operator via our email provider. An irreversible hash of your IP address (never the address itself) is kept with the report solely to enforce a daily submission limit.
Visit counts: so we can tell whether anyone is actually out there, the server keeps a running count of page views per day. To count people rather than clicks, your IP address and browser type are combined into an irreversible hash — we never store the address itself, and the hash is re-scrambled every night, so it cannot be used to follow you from one day to the next or linked to anything else. What's left is a number: "N views from about M visitors today". Nothing is shared with anyone.
Discover taps: when you use the find-me-a-game loop, the site keeps an anonymous record of which cards it dealt and whether you loved, skipped, hid, or marked them played, filed under a random session number. That number is rolled fresh each time you open the loop and is never derived from your account or IP, so it can't be used to follow you. It exists so we can tell whether the picks are any good.

Cookies

Only strictly necessary ones: a login session cookie (expires after 30 days of inactivity) and, on invite-protected deployments, an access cookie. No tracking or advertising cookies — the visit counter above needs none — which is why there is no cookie banner.

Third parties involved

AI chat: the messages you type into the chat are sent to DeepSeek, our AI provider, to generate the reply — only the text you typed, nothing else about you. DeepSeek is based in China, so chat text is processed there; if you'd rather not, simply don't use the chat, browsing sends nothing. If you are signed in, your conversations are saved to your account so you can reopen one later: we keep your last 20 conversations for 30 days, and you can throw any of them away yourself (chat pad → "old pages" → the bin next to a conversation). If you are not signed in, nothing is kept: the chat lives in your open tab and a short-lived server memory, then it is gone. Deleting a conversation, or your account, removes it from the site straight away; the copy in that night's backup ages out within a week. Please don't put personal information into chat messages.
Cover images load directly from the game databases' image servers (IGDB, RAWG, Steam), so your browser contacts them like it would for any image on the web (they see your IP address; we send them no page information).
Daily screenshot checking: Google Gemini checks the selected game's public title and screenshots for title spoilers before the next puzzle is published. No account, visitor, or other personal data is included.
Steam import (optional): if you paste a Steam profile URL, our server fetches that public game list once; the URL itself is not kept.
Email: verification and password-reset codes, and copies of feedback-form submissions, are delivered via our email provider; no other emails are sent.

Your rights & deleting your data

You can see everything the site knows about you in your library. You can delete your account yourself at any time (account menu → "Delete account"). This immediately and permanently erases your account, library, notes, daily-puzzle results, chat history, messages with friends, and friend links. For anything else (access, correction, complaints), email fuwahanakishidev@gmail.com.

This page describes the community deployment of Underplayed Gems and is kept deliberately plain-language. See also: about & credits.