Privacy policy

Playing without an account

You can play every puzzle without signing in. Your progress, streak and stats are then kept only in your own browser's storage and are never sent to Rounds.

If you join a class, link a device or sign in

Rounds then stores, on its server:

• a random player ID;
• the display name you choose (a nickname is fine);
• your puzzle scores and, for your own use on other devices, the guesses you made;
• which class boards you joined;
• the country you connect from, as a two-letter code, shown as a flag on boards. You can switch this off on the Account page.

Rounds does not store your email address, your IP address, or a password. There are no passwords: a device proves who it is with a long random key kept in your browser.

Signing in with Google or Apple

If you choose to sign in, Rounds sends you to Google or Apple, and they send you back with a signed confirmation of who you are. Rounds asks Google only for your basic profile (name and profile picture) and asks Apple for nothing beyond confirming your account. It does not ask either of them for your email address. Rounds uses your first name, if Google supplies it, as a suggested board name, which you can change, and keeps a one-way scrambled copy of the account ID so it can recognise you next time. Nothing else from the profile is stored.

Rounds does not get access to your mail, contacts, files or anything else in your Google or Apple account.

What other people can see

Once you have a player ID, your display name, scores, streak and country flag (if switched on) appear on the Everyone board, on your country's board and on any class board you join. You can take yourself off the Everyone and country boards on the Account page. Nobody sees your guesses. Names containing offensive words are masked.

Cookies, ads, analytics and other companies

Rounds itself sets no cookies. It can show one small ad, on the front page and the Previous rounds page only, never during a puzzle. The ad is supplied by Google AdSense, and Rounds asks Google not to personalise it. Visitors in the European Union, the wider European Economic Area, the United Kingdom and Switzerland are shown no ads, and none of Google's ad code loads for them. Google may still use cookies in your browser to limit how often an ad repeats, to count ad views and to stop fraud, and it sees your IP address when your browser loads the ad. Google explains this in How Google uses information from sites that use its services.

Rounds is hosted on Cloudflare, which counts visits with Cloudflare Web Analytics (no cookies, and it does not follow you across sites) and checks that visitors are not automated bots. Signing in takes you to Google's or Apple's own page; none of their sign-in code runs on Rounds.

Rounds never sells your information, and nothing Rounds stores about you is passed to advertisers or anyone else.

Deleting your data

Open the Account page in Rounds and choose "Delete my account". That removes your player ID, name, scores, class memberships, linked devices and sign-ins from the server at once. To clear what is stored in your browser, clear this site's data in your browser settings.

You can also email the address below and ask for your data to be deleted or sent to you.

Age

Rounds is written for medical students and other adults. It is not aimed at children under 13.

Contact

Questions about this policy or your data: support@rounds.altair571.app

If this policy changes, the date at the top of this page changes with it.