Privacy Policy
The short version
- We collect what it takes to give you an account and run our games: your name, email, sign-in details, and what happens in the games you play.
- No ads, no selling or renting your data, no third-party trackers or analytics on our site.
- Voice chat isn’t recorded, except the last 30 seconds when a player is reported, which our moderators review.
- You can delete your account yourself from your account page, and see or fix your data by emailing privacy@vinylowl.com.
- Accounts are for people 13 and older.
Who we are
Vinyl Owl Studios is Vinyl Owl Studios LLC, a Florida company (“we”, “us”). This policy covers vinylowl.com, your Vinyl Owl account, and our games and their servers — Four Color War, Canasta Club, LastEve and Pug — including test builds.
What we collect
| What | When and why |
|---|---|
| Account details: your player name and number (like Name#1234), email address, and password | When you sign up, so you can sign in and we can reach you about your account. We never store your password itself — only a scrambled version (a hash) that can check it. |
| Sign-in records: sessions, which game apps you’re signed in to, and when you were last active | To keep you signed in, let you sign apps out from your account page, and spot problems. |
| What happens in our games: your profile, results, ratings, stats, achievements, progress, characters and items, friends and blocked players | When you play online — it’s what makes the games work and lets you pick up where you left off. |
| Play time: when each play session started and ended | Each game’s server tells vinylowl.com how long you played, so you can see it on your account page and we can see which games people enjoy. |
| Chat | Messages are passed to the other players they’re meant for. We don’t keep a chat log; a game keeps a short recent history in memory, and saves the messages around a report if a player reports someone. |
| Voice chat (Four Color War): your voice while you talk in a match or lobby | Passed live to the players it’s meant for (your team, or everyone in the match) and not recorded or stored, with one exception: when a player reports someone, the match server saves the last 30 seconds of the reported player’s voice that reached the reporter, the reporter’s own voice from the same 30 seconds, and the chat the reporter could see, and sends them to our moderators with the report. Nobody else’s voice is included. We also keep how many seconds each player talked in each match, for our statistics. Captions and echo cancellation run on your own device; that audio isn’t sent to us or anyone. |
| Feedback you send: what you write, a screenshot if you include one, and technical details (game build, platform, where you were in the game, and the recent part of the game’s log) | When you send feedback from inside a game, so we can understand and fix what went wrong. |
| Reports and moderation: reports about players (with a voice clip for Four Color War, see above), mutes, players you always mute or block, bans and our moderators’ actions | To keep the games safe and fair. |
| Downloads and testing: which builds you downloaded and when, and whether you’re a playtester for a game | To give testers the right builds and know which ones are in use. |
| Technical information: IP address, browser or device type, and times of requests | Our servers log this automatically to keep the site running and stop abuse such as bot sign-ups. Game servers also see your IP address so your game can connect to them. |
| Guest play (Four Color War): a random code the game makes on your device | If you play as a guest, so the game can recognize your device. We store only a scrambled version of it. |
Offline modes (like Canasta Club’s “Play offline against the regulars”) run entirely on your device and send us nothing.
What we don’t do
- We don’t sell or rent your personal information, and we don’t share it for advertising.
- We don’t show ads, and our site has no third-party analytics, tracking pixels, or scripts and fonts loaded from other companies.
- We don’t take payments today. If we ever sell anything, it will go through a store such as Steam, the App Store or Google Play, and we’ll update this policy first.
How we use it
- To run your account and the games: signing you in, matching you with other players, keeping your progress, ratings and history.
- To send account emails: confirming your email address and resetting your password. We don’t send marketing email.
- To improve the games: fixing bugs from feedback and logs, and seeing which games and builds get played.
- To keep things safe and fair: stopping cheating, harassment and abuse, and enforcing our Terms of Service.
- To follow the law when we have to.
Who sees it
- Other players see your player name and number, and in the games things like your ratings, results, achievements, profile and chat messages.
- Leaderboards on vinylowl.com list your player name and number with your rating, standing and games played for each game you’ve played rated games in. While a game is in testing, only its playtesters can see its board. You can take yourself off every leaderboard from your account page at any time.
- Companies that help us run things, only for that job: DigitalOcean (our servers, in the United States) and Resend (sends our account emails).
- App stores and test programs such as TestFlight or Google Play testing, if you install a build through them. Their own privacy policies apply there.
- The law: if we’re legally required to, or to protect someone’s safety or our rights.
- A new owner: if Vinyl Owl Studios is ever sold or merged, your information would go with it, still covered by this policy.
Cookies and your devices
vinylowl.com uses only the cookies it needs to work:
| Cookie | What it’s for | How long |
|---|---|---|
vo_session | Keeps you signed in | 30 days, renewed while you use the site |
vo_flash | Carries a one-time message (like an error) to the next page | 1 minute |
Our games save their settings and keep you signed in on your device. Four Color War keeps its sign-in encrypted on your device. Uninstalling a game removes these.
How long we keep it
- Your account and game data: for as long as you have an account. When you delete it, you’re signed out right away and we erase it from our systems, and every Vinyl Owl game, 14 days later — sign back in before then if you change your mind. Copies in backups are gone within 30 days after that.
- Server logs (IP addresses and requests): about two weeks.
- Email links (confirm, reset): they stop working after 3 days and 1 hour respectively.
- Feedback, reports and moderation records: as long as we need them to fix the problem or keep the games safe.
- Voice clips attached to a report: deleted 30 days after a moderator closes the report. The report itself stays with the moderation records.
- During testing we may reset game progress, ratings or stats — see the Terms.
Your choices
- Delete your account from your account page (or from a game’s settings, which brings you there). It’s erased 14 days later, everywhere.
- See or get a copy of your data, or correct it: email privacy@vinylowl.com from the address on your account. We’ll answer within 30 days. You can ask us to delete your account that way too.
- Change your name any time on your account page.
- Voice chat: turn it off, choose whose voice you hear, or mute any player in a game’s Settings › Voice and from the scoreboard. Players you always mute or block are listed in Settings › Profile, where you can take that back.
- Sign a game app out from “Signed-in apps” on your account page.
- Depending on where you live (for example the European Union, the United Kingdom or California), the law may give you more rights over your data. We honor these requests from everyone, wherever you live, and you can also complain to your local data protection authority.
Children
Vinyl Owl accounts are for people 13 and older. We don’t knowingly collect personal information from children under 13. If we learn that an account belongs to someone under 13, we’ll delete it. If you’re a parent and think your child made an account, email privacy@vinylowl.com and we’ll take care of it.
Security
Everything travels over encrypted connections (HTTPS). Passwords and sign-in tokens are stored only as hashes, access to our servers is limited to us, and we keep our software up to date. No system is perfect; if a breach affects your information, we’ll tell you without undue delay.
Changes
We’ll update this page when what we collect or how we use it changes, and change the date at the top. For significant changes we’ll also tell you on the site or by email before they take effect.
Contact
Vinyl Owl Studios LLC · Florida, USA · privacy@vinylowl.com