Last updated: 19 June 2026
Draft — pending legal review. Operator, contact, and hosting region are filled in. This document describes the service's actual data practices; have it reviewed for Danish / EU law before relying on it.
This Privacy Policy explains what information Competitive Crosswords ("the Service", "we", "us") collects, why, and your rights over it. The Service is operated by Thomas Hymas. By using the Service you agree to this policy.
You can play as a guest with no account; we store no personal data about you. (When you complete a Solo puzzle as a guest, we may save an anonymous "ghost" recording — see section 8 — which by design contains nothing that identifies you.) If you sign in, we collect and store:
We do not sell your data, show advertising, or use third-party analytics or tracking.
Leaderboards are public. They display your display name alongside your results (solve times, points). Your email address is never shown publicly. Choose a display name accordingly — you can change it any time in Settings.
eu-west-3 — Paris, France, in the European Union). See
Supabase's privacy policy at
supabase.com/privacy.We use your browser's local storage to keep you signed in, and per-tab session storage to remember your in-game identity. These are essential to the Service. We do not use third-party tracking or advertising cookies.
We keep your account and gameplay data until you delete your account, after which it is erased (see section 7). Anonymised ghost recordings (section 8) contain no personal data and are kept to keep the game populated; because they cannot be linked to you, they are not affected by account deletion.
You can exercise these directly in Settings:
Depending on your location (e.g. under the GDPR) you may also have rights to rectification, restriction, or to lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority. For any request not covered by the in-app tools, contact us at info@competitivecrosswords.com.
To keep competitive races feeling populated even when few people are online, the Service uses computer-controlled opponents called "ghosts", built only from Solo puzzles played by guests (players who are not signed in).
When a guest completes a Solo puzzle, we create a recording of the order in which the clues were worked and how long each took. It stores only the clue sequence and relative timings (elapsed milliseconds from the start of the solve) — never clock times, and nothing about the letters typed.
Because ghosts are made only from guest play, there is no account involved in the first place. The recording is stored with a random identifier and no link to any account, email, IP address, device, or the original game, and with no date or time. A ghost cannot be traced back to the person who generated it, even by us with full access to our systems.
Ghost recordings contain no personal data and are never linked to an account. Deleting your account erases all of your personal data (see section 7) and does not affect ghost recordings, which are anonymous.
Some opponents you race may therefore be ghosts rather than live people.
Opt-in named ghosts. Separately, if you are signed in you may choose (Settings → “Become a ghost”) to let your own Solo solves be replayed to other players under your display name. This is off by default and entirely optional. Unlike the anonymous ghosts above, these are linked to your account: they show your chosen display name, you can switch them off at any time (which deletes the ghosts made from your solves), they are included in “Download my data”, and deleting your account removes them. The recording itself holds the same clue-sequence and relative-timing data — never the letters typed or any clock time.
The Service is not directed at children under 13 (or the minimum age of digital consent in your country). We do not knowingly collect data from them.
We may update this policy; we will revise the "last updated" date above and, for material changes, provide notice in the app.
Questions about this policy or your data: info@competitivecrosswords.com.