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Privacy

Lick of Fire is a free game. There are no accounts, no ads and no tracking services, and we never sell or share anything about you. This page says what the game keeps, in plain words.

Your nickname

Pick a nickname, not your real full name. Other players in your game can see it. Your browser also remembers it for next time.

Chat

Chat is not saved. The last few lines are kept in the server's memory while a game is open, so that people who join late can see them, and they disappear when the game closes. The only exception is a report (below).

Bad words (English and Dutch) in chat are replaced by stars before anyone sees them, and a nickname with a bad word in it is not accepted. The Dutch word list is from the LDNOOBW project (licence CC BY 4.0).

Reports

If a player reports someone, the game saves the names of the players in that game and the last 20 chat lines, so the owner can look into it. Only the owner can read reports, and they are deleted after 30 days.

What your browser keeps

• A random browser ID, made up by your browser. It has no name or address in it. The server keeps only a scrambled copy of it, with the first and last day it was seen, to count how many different browsers play. While you are in a game, the server also remembers the ID so that a player who was removed from that game cannot walk back in.
• A secret seat ticket for your game, so you can come back after a refresh. The server forgets it when the game closes.
• Your settings (nickname, sound, graphics). They stay in your browser. The game does not use cookies for players.

Played with you before

When a private game is played to the end, the server remembers which browsers played it together: a pair of scrambled browser IDs and the day, and nothing else (no names). It is kept for up to 6 months and is only used to show Played with you before when somebody asks to join your private game. Public games are never remembered this way. A player who clears the browser's data gets a new ID and simply shows as a new player.

Music

In private games, players can add songs for everyone in the game to listen to. The songs are stored on the server only temporarily, for that game room: a song is deleted at once when it is removed from the playlist, and all the songs of a game are deleted when the game closes (and the whole music folder is emptied whenever the server starts). They are never backed up and never shared outside the game. The song's title, artist and the small picture inside it (the cover), if it has one, are shown to the players in that game, together with the nickname of the player who added it. Nobody else can see them: people who are only asking to join a game get nothing. The cover is made again as a small new picture, and no picture is looked up online. Only people sitting in the game can listen.

Logs and addresses

The server writes a short log: when a game opens, and the nicknames that join it. Docker keeps only the latest 30 MB of it. The web server in front of the game keeps normal access logs, which include IP addresses. The game also uses your network address, only in memory and only for a while, to stop one visitor from overloading it. Nothing is built into a profile of you.

Webcams and microphones

• They are off unless you turn them on, your browser asks your permission first, and they only work in private games, never in public games.
• Video and sound are never recorded or stored. They go from player to player, encrypted.
• They are sent through our own relay server, so the other players never see your IP address. The relay cannot watch or listen; it only passes along encrypted data, and its log keeps the addresses that connect to it for a short while, like the other logs.
• Nothing is connected until someone in the game turns a camera or microphone on, and it all stops when everybody turns theirs off.

Wanting something removed

Parents and players can ask for anything on this page to be deleted. Write to unbeheld@protonmail.com with the nickname.