Privacy policy

1. The short version

Reading the site collects nothing about you: it adds one to a running count of visits for the day, and that count holds no address, name, or page. Opening citylayoutguessr adds one anonymous line a day noting that a browser opened the game. If you choose to sign in to the game, your name, email address, and profile picture are stored so that a name and a score can appear on the leaderboard. Your email address is never shown to anyone but me. Writing in the message box on the front page stores what you wrote and when, and nothing else. UCHRONIA’s historian needs the same Google sign-in. Asking it for a history sends what you type, and a description of your map, to Anthropic to write the reply; the site keeps none of it, only a count of how many requests each account made that day. Opening a state or a city in CHRONIA may ask an AI model, DeepSeek or else Claude, to write a short note about it; that sends only what the atlas shows about the subject, never anything about you. Ask, and I will delete all of it.

2. Who is responsible

In this policy, “I” and “me” mean Noah Darwin Lee, who runs noahdarwinlee.com and every page under it (the “site”), and who decides what the site collects and why. Where data protection law uses the term, I am the controller of the information described here. The site is a personal project, not a company. You can reach me about anything on this page at noahlee519@gmail.com.

3. Reading the site

The pages are plain files, with no cookies, no analytics, and no advertising. The one measure is a count of visits across the whole site. When a page opens and the browser has not opened a page here in the last thirty minutes, it asks the site’s database to add one to the day’s total. The database keeps only the date and that number: not your address, the page, where you came from, or anything else about the visit. To tell a new visit from the next page of the same one, your browser keeps the time it last opened a page here (see section 9). To deliver them, a few services necessarily receive the ordinary request your browser makes, which includes your IP address and the kind of browser you use: GitHub Pages, which hosts the site and its typeface, and Google Fonts, which serves the type of the blog's mail window and of GREATERCIRCLE. One tool also loads drawing libraries from cdnjs, which is run by Cloudflare. The satellite views of UCHRONIA and GREATERCIRCLE, once you zoom in, load their sharper imagery from NASA's Global Imagery Browse Services, and UCHRONIA's shaded relief comes from the open Terrain Tiles that Amazon Web Services hosts. CHRONIA’s cards load the opening of a Wikipedia article, and its picture, from Wikipedia and Wikimedia, and Drill looks up each figure’s picture on Wikipedia and loads it from Wikimedia. None of them is asked to identify you, and none of them reports anything back to me. Each handles those requests under its own privacy policy.

4. Playing citylayoutguessr

The visit counter. The first time a browser opens the game on a given day, the game records one line saying a visit happened: the kind of event, the date, the page address, and the address of the page you came from if your browser sends one. It is written once per browser per day. It contains no IP address and no name. If you are signed in, it also carries your account identifier; if you are not, nothing in it points to a person.

Everything else. The game remembers your round in progress, your settings, your colours, and your result on today’s puzzle in your own browser (see section 9). None of that is sent anywhere.

5. Signing in

Signing in is optional. In the game it puts a name next to a score on the leaderboard, and in UCHRONIA it is needed to use the historian, so that each person’s daily allowance can be counted. It uses your Google account, through Supabase, the service that runs the game’s database and sign-in; in UCHRONIA, the sign-in button and its window are Google’s own, loaded from Google when the historian is opened while you are signed out. Both use the same account, but UCHRONIA makes no profile and shows nothing about you to anyone.

What is collected. When you sign in, Google passes the site your name, email address, profile picture, and Google account identifier. Supabase stores that as your account. The game copies your name and picture into a profile, and you can replace the name with any display name you like.

What is public. Anyone who opens the game can see your display name, your profile picture, your daily scores, and your place on the two leaderboards.

What is not. Your email address. It is stored with your account and is visible only to me, only through the database’s own dashboard.

6. Scores

Finishing the daily challenge while signed in records one line: your account identifier, the date, how many of the ten you got right, how long the run took, and when it was posted. There is one line per person per day. Those lines are what the leaderboards are made of, so they are public in the way section 5 describes. Custom games are never posted.

7. Leaving feedback

The front page and the art page each have a box for telling me what you think of the site. Sending it stores the message you wrote, which of the two pages it came from, and the time it arrived, in a Supabase database. Nothing else is stored with it: no name, no email address, and no account, unless you choose to write one of them into the message. Supabase receives the ordinary request your browser makes, as the services in section 3 do, but nothing from that request is kept with the message. Nobody but me can read what is sent; the site itself can add a message but never read one back.

8. Using UCHRONIA and CHRONIA

Your map. The map you draw is kept in your own browser (see section 9) and goes nowhere unless you send it. A map you save as a file stays wherever you save it. A share link carries the whole map inside the link itself, after the # sign, a part of an address that browsers never send to a server; anyone you give the link to can open the map, and nobody else can see it.

The historian. The Historian menu asks Claude, an AI model made by Anthropic, to write a history of your map, to redraw the map from a turning point, or to answer your questions about the world it has written. Each request sends what you typed, a written list of the ways your map differs from the world as it is, and, for a question, the history and the questions and answers before it. They go first to a small program of mine that runs on Supabase and holds the key to Anthropic’s service, and from there to Anthropic, which writes the reply and sends it back to your browser. That program keeps none of what you send or what comes back. Anthropic receives it as a request from a business customer and handles it under its privacy policy and commercial terms, which do not let it train its models on what you send; it may keep requests for a limited time to watch for misuse. The program checks that you are signed in, but it does not store what you send with your account, and it does not pass your name or email address to Anthropic. Even so, don’t put anything personal in it.

The daily count. To keep the historian within a daily budget, each account may make five requests a day: a history, a redrawn map with the history written for it, and a question each count as one. The program counts them under a code made from your account identifier and a secret, which cannot be turned back into the identifier. Each count is a date, that code, and a number, and counts older than thirty days are deleted.

Saved histories. The histories written for you, and the conversations under them, are kept in your browser, up to the last thirty. They are not kept anywhere else.

CHRONIA’s notes. When you open the card for a state, a people, or a city in CHRONIA, the atlas asks an AI model to write a short note about it as it was at that date. The request carries only what the atlas shows about the subject: its name, the date, and facts such as its ruler, its capital, and its neighbours, or, for a city, where it is on the map. It goes to a second small program of mine on Supabase, which passes it to DeepSeek, a model made by the Chinese company DeepSeek, or, when DeepSeek can’t answer, to Anthropic’s Claude in the same way as the historian’s requests. DeepSeek and Anthropic each receive it as a request from my program, under their own privacy policies, not from you. The program keeps the note that comes back and shows that same note to anyone who opens the same card later. Nothing about you is stored with it, and no sign-in is needed.

CHRONIA’s daily count. To keep the notes within a daily budget, the program counts how many new notes each visitor asks for in a day, under a code made from your IP address, the date, and a secret, which cannot be turned back into the address. Each count is a date, that code, and a number. Your IP address itself is not stored, and each day’s counts are deleted the first time a note is written on a later day.

9. What stays in your browser

Some things are kept in your own browser’s storage so the site remembers them next time: whether you chose day or night; in the game, a round in progress, your custom setup, your colours, the leaderboard tab you last opened, your result on today’s puzzle, and whether it has been posted, the date of your last visit, and, if you have signed in, the token that keeps you signed in; in the flash card tool, your lists, drafts, and colours; and on the blog, which letters you have read or starred and how you sized the panes; on every page, the time you last opened one, for the visit count; and in UCHRONIA, your map, the one you had before opening a shared map, your view settings, your saved histories, and, if you have signed in, the token that keeps you signed in to the historian; and in CHRONIA, which map layers you turned on or off, whether the key is open, and whether you chose the flat map; and in Drill, your progress and settings in each deck, and the addresses of the figures’ pictures, for a week.

This information stays on your device. It is not sent to me or to anyone else, and clearing your browser’s data for noahdarwinlee.com removes all of it. The sign-in tokens are the one exception in kind: your browser presents them to Supabase to prove it is you, which is all they are for.

10. Why this is allowed

Where the law asks for a legal basis, these are mine. Your account, profile, and scores are kept because you chose to sign in and post them; that choice is your consent, and you can withdraw it at any time by asking me to delete your account. A message you send through the feedback box is kept because you chose to send it. The daily visit counter rests on my legitimate interest in knowing, roughly, whether anyone plays the game, which it serves without identifying anyone who is not signed in. UCHRONIA’s daily counts rest on my legitimate interest in keeping the historian within its budget, CHRONIA’s on keeping its notes within theirs, and the site’s visit count on my interest in knowing, roughly, how many people read the site.

11. Who else is involved

Besides the services in section 3, three more take part. Supabase runs the database and the sign-in for the game and the historian, keeps the messages sent through the feedback box, and runs the program that passes UCHRONIA’s requests to the historian and keeps its daily counts, and the one that writes and keeps CHRONIA’s notes; the game's copy of its script is delivered by jsDelivr. Google handles the sign-in itself. Anthropic writes the historian’s replies and CHRONIA’s notes, as section 8 describes. These services may store and process information on servers outside your country, including in the United States.

Donations. The donate links in UCHRONIA and citylayoutguessr open my page on Ko-fi. If you give, Ko-fi and the payment service you choose there, Stripe or PayPal, take your payment and your details under their own privacy policies; this site never sees your card or account. Ko-fi shows me the name you give, your email address, and any message you leave, and I use them only to keep track of donations and to thank you.

I do not share, rent, or sell anything the site collects. There are no advertising networks, no tracking pixels, no third-party analytics, and no mailing list. I would disclose information only if the law required me to.

12. How long things are kept

Accounts, profiles, and scores are kept for as long as the game exists, because a leaderboard with a history is the point of it, or until you ask me to delete them. Visit lines are kept as a running count of how the game is used, and the site’s daily visit totals as a running count of how it is read. When an account is deleted, everything tied to it is deleted with it. Feedback messages are kept until I have read them and no longer need them, and in any case no longer than a year. UCHRONIA’s daily counts are deleted after thirty days, and nothing else from the historian is kept at all. CHRONIA’s daily counts are deleted soon after their day ends, and its notes are kept for as long as CHRONIA exists; they hold nothing about anyone who asked for them.

13. Your choices and rights

You can sign out at any time, and you can change your display name from the game’s menu. Beyond that, you may ask me to:

See it. Send you a copy of everything the site holds about you.
Fix it. Correct anything that is wrong.
Delete it. Remove your account, your profile, and every score attached to it.

Write to noahlee519@gmail.com from the email address you signed in with, so I know the request is yours. I will act on it as soon as I read it, and in any case within thirty days. These rights are yours wherever you live; if you are in a place whose law grants them formally, such as the United Kingdom, the European Union, or California, this is how to exercise them, and you also have the right to complain to your local data protection authority.

14. Security

The site is served over HTTPS. The game’s database lets a browser add a visit line but never read one back, lets each person post only their own score, and lets only you change your own profile. No system is perfectly secure; if something went wrong that affected your information, I would tell you.

15. Children

The site is not directed at children under 13, and I do not knowingly keep information about anyone under 13. If you believe a child has signed in, write to me and I will delete the account.

16. Changes to this policy

If what the site collects changes, this policy changes with it and the date at the top moves. There is never a version of this page that is quietly broader than the one you are reading.