Privacy Policy

How the site works

playsomerset.com is a static website. The entire game runs inside your browser: the deck, the rules, the opponents and the scoring are all code that was downloaded with the page. There is no application server, no database and no account system, so there is no place for personal information about you to be stored even if it were collected. There are two exceptions to "no third parties": the analytics tag, and the messaging service that carries a private room. Both are described below.

Playing with other people

A private room is the only part of this site that sends anything anywhere. It is not used at all unless you make a room or open an invite link, and a game against the computer never touches it.

What is sent, while a room is open:

• The display name you type, so the other three people know who is sitting where. Nothing requires it to be your real name.
• A random identifier for your device, made in your browser, which is what lets you return to your own seat if your phone locks or you reload the page. It is not linked to you, to any account, or to anything outside this site.
• The moves in the game: the shuffle seed and the cards played. This is the same public record everybody sitting round a real table can see. Your own hand is never sent to anyone; every player’s screen works it out from the seed.

Those messages travel through Ably, a messaging service, which passes them between the players and does not store them. Nobody at this site receives them, because there is no server here to receive anything. Ably’s own privacy notice is at ably.com/privacy.

A room lives in the browser of whoever created it and nowhere else. It disappears a day after the last time anybody used it, and closing the tab is enough to end it. There is no chat, no way to message another player, and no record of a finished game kept anywhere.

What is stored on your device

These are saved in your browser’s local storage, so that closing the tab does not lose your place:

• Your game in progress, stored as the shuffle seed and the list of moves made so far.
• Your settings: which house rules you picked, how boldly the opponents bid, hints, minimum bid, light or dark theme, and whether you dismissed the prompt to add the game to your home screen.
• Your display name and a random device identifier, if you have ever joined a private room, along with any room you are hosting. These are what put you back in your own seat when you reload, and the room is thrown away a day after it was last used.

This data is never sent to us or to the analytics described below, and it is not personal information and cannot identify you. It stays on your device. You can erase all of it at any time by clearing site data for this site in your browser settings, which will simply reset the game.

Analytics, and the cookies it sets

The site uses Google Analytics 4 to count visits and see which pages people actually read. It is the only third-party service on the pages you read and the only reason any cookie is set here.

What it records is ordinary web analytics:

• which pages were viewed, when, and in what order;
• roughly where in the world the visit came from, and on what kind of device and browser;
• which site or search sent you here, if any;
• a randomly generated identifier, stored in a cookie, so that several page views can be recognised as one visit.

IP addresses are anonymised before being stored, which is the default in Google Analytics 4 and is switched on explicitly here as well. Advertising features, remarketing and Google Signals are not enabled, so nothing collected is used to target advertising or joined to a Google account.

Nothing about your game is measured. No cards, no bids, no scores, no settings and no game history are sent to Google or to anyone else. Analytics sees pages, not play.

If you would rather not be counted, any of these works: turn on your browser’s tracking protection, use a content blocker, or install Google’s own opt-out add-on. The game works exactly the same either way, and nothing here is gated behind being measured.

Server logs and hosting

The site is hosted on Render, which serves the files. Like any web host, Render processes standard technical request data such as IP address, browser user agent and the page requested, in order to deliver the site and protect it from abuse. We do not have access to individual visitor records, do not analyse this data, and do not combine it with anything else. Render acts as our hosting provider and processes this information under its own privacy terms.

Children

Somerset is a card game suitable for all ages and is safe for children to play. The site is not directed at children under 13, collects no personal information from anyone knowingly, and has no accounts and no chat. A private room carries the cards played and a display name to the three people invited to it, and nothing else, and it is reached only by a link somebody was sent. The analytics described above measure pages rather than people.

Your rights

Privacy laws including the GDPR and the CCPA give you rights to access, correct, delete and port personal information held about you, and to opt out of its sale. We hold no account, no contact details and no records that name you, so there is generally nothing to access, correct or port. Nothing has ever been sold or shared, and no personal information is sold within the meaning of the CCPA.

The analytics measurements are held by Google as our processor, under Google’s own terms, and are deleted on their retention schedule. You can stop being measured at any time by the means listed above, and clearing site data for this site removes the analytics cookie along with your saved game. If you want to make a request about anything held here, use the contact link below and it will be answered.

External links

This site links to somersetgame.com, which is the source of the rules and history, and to the site of MediaSavior, which built it. Those sites have their own privacy practices and this policy does not cover them.

Changes

If this policy changes, the effective date at the top will change with it. This page has been rewritten once already, when Google Analytics was added, because it previously said the site set no cookies and that stopped being true. Any future change to what is collected will be written here in the same way, in the commit that makes it.

Contact

This site is operated by MediaSavior. Questions about privacy can be sent through the contact form.