The short version: we don't ask you to sign up, we don't sell your data, and your game progress never leaves your device. Here are the details.
1. No accounts, no personal data
TimeWellLost has no login, no registration, and no user profiles. We do not ask for your name, email, phone number or any other personal information to play, and we do not collect it.
2. Data stored on your device
To make the games pleasant to use, we store a small amount of information locally in your browser using localStorage:
- Your settings (sound, difficulty, and similar preferences).
- Game progress and saved games, so you can resume where you left off.
- Best times and results (for example, your fastest Minesweeper solve per board size).
- The date of your last visit, so we can tell roughly how many people come back. It is a date and nothing else — no times, no history of previous visits, and no identifier.
- For the current browser tab only: which site you arrived from, so a visit that starts on the home page and continues into a game is still counted as one arrival rather than as two. This is cleared the moment you close the tab.
Almost all of this stays on your device and is never sent anywhere. The two exceptions are the last two items, and they are deliberately blunt before they leave: the site you arrived from is reduced to one word from a fixed list (for example “search” or “reddit”, or “other” for anything we do not recognise), and the visit date becomes a coarse bucket such as “returned within a week”. The full address you came from never leaves your browser, and neither does the date itself. If you send a Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control signal, neither item is recorded in the first place — see section 3b.
Clearing your browser storage removes all of it completely.
3. Analytics
We measure how the site is used — which games people open, whether a game gets finished, whether pages load correctly — so we can improve them. One system does this, it is our own, and it runs on our own domain. It records nothing you type, and it cannot identify you, because we never collect anything that identifies you.
There are no third-party analytics on this site. Google Analytics was removed in September 2026 and no Google script is loaded on any page. Nothing on the site now contacts Google, and the site's content-security policy no longer permits it to.
3a. Our own first-party counter
Gameplay events are sent to a counter we run ourselves, on our own domain. It sets no cookies and stores no identifier of any kind — there is no way to tell one visit from another, or today's visit from last week's. Each event records only:
- What happened — an event name from a fixed list we control (for example "a game started", "a round finished", "a hint was used"), plus which game it was, the outcome where there is one (win or loss, or whether a bid was made), the difficulty level the game was set to, whether it was a daily challenge, and a single number where the event has one (a score, a round number).
- The page path — for example /callbreak. Never the full address, never anything after a ? or #.
- The referring site's domain — for example google.com — and never the full link you arrived on.
- A coarse location: country, region or state, and a city-level guess, worked out from your IP address by our hosting provider at the moment the event arrives. This tells us which parts of the world our games are played in, so we know which ones to feature first. Your IP address itself is never stored, and the city is an approximation from IP data — it is often wrong, and it is only ever read as a total, never as a single visit.
We do not store your IP address, your browser's user-agent string, or any device fingerprint, and this data is never sold or shared with advertisers.
3b. Do Not Track and Global Privacy Control
If your browser sends a Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control signal, the counter is switched off before it sends anything at all — no events, no location, nothing. It also stops writing the last-visit date and arrival note described in section 2.
Any tracking blocker also works here, though there is now very little for one to block: the counter is on our own domain and sends no cookies and no identifier.
4. No advertising trackers
The website does not run third-party advertising or ad-tracking scripts. There are no ads between moves and no ad networks profiling you here.
5. Children
TimeWellLost is a general-audience site suitable for all ages. Because we collect no personal information, we do not knowingly collect data from children.
6. Changes to this policy
If we change how the site handles data, we'll update this page and its "last updated" date above.
7. Contact
Questions about privacy? Email [email protected], or see our contact page.
See also our About page and Disclaimer.