Privacy & Advertising Policy
Summary: You can play Spy or Not? (spyornot.app) without creating an account. Solo and two-player quiz answers stay in your browser tab or invite link rather than on our servers. Completed solo results may display Adsterra banners, and the public meme article uses Adsterra and Google AdSense where permitted, and you can opt out of personalized advertising at any time.
01 / Quiz answers & gameplay data
What stays in your browser
Solo investigations run inside your browser tab; reloading clears your answers. Two-player “Clear your name” links encode nicknames and seven answer choices inside the URL hash after #, which browsers do not send to the server.
For a group chat case, we store the case title, the questions, and each player’s nickname and seven answers. Anyone with the link can access those answers and the group ranking. The link expires seven days after the case opens. We delete expired cases and their entries the next time someone creates a group case.
A few questions personalize city wording using a rough city estimate provided by Cloudflare from your network connection. Hosting and VPN networks receive neutral wording, browsers sending Global Privacy Control (Sec-GPC: 1) or Do Not Track (DNT: 1) skip city personalization, and the city is never stored, logged, or printed onto shared cards.
02 / Analytics & aggregate counters
Cookie-free traffic & bureau totals
We measure site visits with Cloudflare Web Analytics, which sets no cookies and records aggregate page views, referrers, countries, and device types. We also increment anonymous daily counters (for example, how many verdicts landed on SPY per bureau desk and which share channels were clicked). Those counters never record answers, names, or IP addresses, and they are skipped automatically when your browser sends Global Privacy Control or Do Not Track.
03 / Advertising cookies
How advertising works on Spy or Not
Editorial pages such as our Operation Leather Jacket cultural briefing use Google AdSense (publisher ID ca-pub-4625415905296208, authorized in ads.txt) to display advertisements.
Adsterra supplies the article banner and may supply a separate banner below the evidence on completed solo results. The results banner receives no quiz answers, score, or dossier information from the game. When the banner loads, your browser connects to Adsterra and its advertising partners. They may use cookies and pixels to deliver ads and measure views. Read Adsterra’s cookie policy for details and browser controls.
Third-party vendors, including Google, use cookies to serve ads based on a visitor’s prior visits to this website or other websites. Google’s use of advertising cookies enables it and its partners to serve ads to visitors based on their visit to spyornot.app and/or other sites on the Internet.
Until a Google-certified consent prompt is active for European regulations, we skip both advertising providers for requests originating from the European Economic Area (EEA), the United Kingdom, and Switzerland, as well as browsers sending Global Privacy Control (Sec-GPC: 1) or Do Not Track (DNT: 1).
Visitors may opt out of personalized advertising at any time by visiting Google Ads Settings (My Ad Center), or opt out of a third-party vendor’s use of cookies for personalized advertising by visiting www.aboutads.info. For details on how Google collects and processes data, read How Google uses information from sites or apps that use our services.
04 / Infrastructure & security
Hosting & shared postcards
spyornot.app is delivered over HTTPS by Cloudflare Pages, which processes standard network connection metadata to route traffic and block abuse. Downloading or sharing a stamped postcard shares the fictional dossier archetype you unlocked.