Dropstone Privacy Policy

What Dropstone does not do

• No accounts and no sign-in.
• No advertising and no advertising identifiers.
• No third-party analytics or tracking SDKs.
• No profiling or device fingerprinting.
• No contact with any server but Ostemar Works's own, at dropstone.ostemar.com.

Nothing is sold or shared with anyone. Ostemar Works sees only the play statistics described below, and nothing in them says who you are.

Play statistics

To learn whether people finish a game, which rules they play under and whether they come back, Dropstone sends short records of play. They are written to your device first and sent when the game opens and after each game, so a game played offline is sent later.

What is sent

When the game opens

That it opened.

When a game ends or is abandoned

Solo, pass and play or online; the rules it was played under; how many turns and seconds it took; whether it was finished; which aids were on; and, alone, the score.

If the browser version fails to draw

The error message, and the maker of the graphics chip, such as Qualcomm or ARM.

Every record also says the platform (web, Android, Windows, macOS or Linux), the game's version, whether the screen was last pressed by touch or a mouse, and whether the window is portrait or landscape.

Each record carries an install id: a random number made on your device the first time the game runs. It lets records from the same install be counted together, and it is not connected to your name, your account on any store, or anything else about you.

The server adds the date it received the record, the country it came from, and whether the device is Android, iOS, Windows, macOS, Linux or other. It reads your IP address and browser identification string only to work those out, and does not store either.

What is never sent

• Your player name, or the code of any room you join.
• Your IP address or full browser identification string.
• Where the stones were placed.

Switching it off

Share play stats, on the credits page, is on unless you turn it off. Off, nothing more is recorded or sent, anything waiting to be sent is discarded, and the install id is forgotten, so turning it on again starts as a new install.

The records are kept so that one season of play can be compared with the next. They cannot be traced to you, so there is no way to find or remove the ones that came from your device. Turning sharing off is how you stop them.

Online games

An online game is played in a room on Ostemar Works's server, which passes each move to everyone at the table. To sit down, your device sends the name you chose (up to ten letters), which the other players see at your seat, and a random id for that session so a dropped connection gets its seat back. Pick any name you like; it does not need to be your own.

The room keeps the names and the game while it is played, and is deleted two hours after it last hears from anyone. The server also records that the room was made, filled and ended, with the rules and the kind of device at each seat. Those records do not include names or the room code, and if you have switched play stats off, your seat is counted with its device unknown.

What is stored on your device

So that what you set up survives closing the game, Dropstone saves a few small files. They are written and read only by the game.

• Your settings and the rules you last chose: player count, deal, touching rule, whether the pull is shown, and whether sound is on.
• The player name you chose for online games.
• Your best solo score under each set of rules.
• The install id, and play statistics not yet sent.

Where it is kept

Browser version

Your browser's localStorage for the site hosting the game.

Android

The app's private internal storage, which other apps cannot read.

Desktop

The user data directory: %APPDATA%\dropstone on Windows, and $XDG_DATA_HOME elsewhere, falling back to $HOME/.local/share.

To delete them, uninstall the app or clear its storage on Android, clear the site's data in your browser, or delete the directory above on a desktop.

Distribution and hosting

Dropstone is distributed through stores and hosts such as itch.io and Google Play. Those platforms collect their own data (about downloads, purchases and accounts) under their own privacy policies, independently of the game. The game's server runs on Cloudflare, which keeps its own operational logs under Cloudflare's privacy policy.

Changes to this policy

If Dropstone starts sending anything not described here, this policy will be updated to describe it before that version ships. The effective date above changes with any update.

Contact

Questions about this policy: hello@ostemar.com.