Privacy

The short version. mackan.eu stores the name you pick, your score, and where the finds were made if you said yes to that. Nothing else. No accounts, no cookies, no ads, no tracking. The trip is deleted automatically after 90 days.

The trip name and which game you picked. What you typed when the trip was created.

The display name you chose. "Captain" or "Back right" or whatever you put. mackan.eu never asks for real names, email addresses or phone numbers.

Your finds. What you tapped, how many points it gave, and when.

Where the find was made, but only if you said yes. See below.

The trip time zone, taken from the phone, so the times come out right.

A random id per phone. It says nothing about the phone or about you. It exists so mackan.eu can tell "your find" from "someone else's", and so a find stuck in the queue can be traced.

No accounts, no passwords, no email, no phone number.

No cookies. Not a single one, not even a necessary one. That is why there is no cookie banner here.

No ads and no ad networks. No data is sold or passed on.

No profiling, no behavioural tracking, no tracking across other sites.

No location in the background. Your position is read only at the moment you tap the button.

Sharing your location is optional in two steps. First whoever created the trip has to turn it on for the trip. Then each phone has to say yes for itself.

Say no and your finds are still recorded, just without a pin on the map. The game works exactly as well.

The position is rounded to about ten metres before it is stored. What is kept is roughly where you were, not exactly.

The position is read once per find and never in between. No route is recorded, and the app does not know where you are when you are not tapping.

The map is shown to everyone in the trip, and to anyone given a shared summary link. It is not shown to anybody else.

Instead of cookies the app uses the phone's own storage (localStorage). It holds:

Which trip you were last in, and which name you picked. That is why you do not have to choose again every time.

A key showing that this particular phone may record finds as you.

Finds that could not be sent yet, for instance while you are driving through a tunnel. They are sent when the network comes back.

All of that stays on your phone and is not sent anywhere else. Clear your browser data and it is gone, and then you pick your name again next time.

90 days. Then the trip is deleted automatically, with everything belonging to it: players, finds, locations.

While the trip is running, the date moves forward whenever someone records a new find. Merely looking at the trip or reading a summary extends nothing.

End the trip and the deletion date is locked. It is then 90 days from the end, and nothing can move it.

The actual date is shown in the trip and on the summary, so you can see exactly when it happens.

Whoever created the trip can, in the trip's own view under "You started this trip":

Export everything held about the trip as a JSON file.

Delete the trip straight away, without waiting for the 90 days. It is then gone at once, for everyone.

There is no bin and no soft delete. Deleted means deleted.

With two exceptions, which should be said plainly. The first: three totals are kept. How many trips have been run, how many people have taken part, and how many vehicles have been spotted. They are added to when a trip is deleted and shown on the start page. They contain no date, no name, no trip code and no location, so there is no way to work backwards to any single trip or person.

The second: one row of five numbers per day. How many trips existed that day, how many of them had at least two players, how many had at least ten finds, and two numbers for how many people have created trips and how many of those created more than one. The row exists to decide whether the product deserves more work or should be shut down, and it is needed because the numbers can otherwise only be counted over the last 90 days. It is five integers and a date, nothing per trip and nothing per household. Keeping a key per household in order to follow returning players over the years would have been the easy way to count, and it is not done: the row is finished the same day and only the numbers remain.

The game is played by children, and that has shaped how it is built.

No participant needs an email address or an account. There are no open social features, no public profiles and no public maps. A trip is visible only to whoever has the code.

The tradition includes a light punch on the shoulder. mackan.eu only counts points.

All traffic goes over HTTPS.

Keys are never stored in the clear, only as hashes. If the database leaked it could not be used to administer anyone's trip.

The trip code gives the right to take part and to see the trip. It does not give the right to change the rules, end the trip or delete it.

The summary link gives read access only. The trip code never appears on the summary, precisely because that page is built to be passed on.

The rules page has four optional questions about how you play. The answers are anonymous in a way worth spelling out: the stored row holds four preset answer options, a language and a timestamp. Nothing else.

There is no IP address, no cookie, no player id and no link to a trip. The questions have fixed options for exactly that reason: a free text box would be an open channel for information nobody asked for, and you cannot compute a share from free text.

The protection against someone answering a hundred times uses the same counter as the rest of the site, and it stores a hash of the address, not the address. So the survey introduces no new personal data at all.

Because the row is already anonymous when written, there is nothing to delete, so it is not covered by the 90 day deletion that applies to trips and finds. Shares are published only once at least 50 people have answered the same question.

The web server logs visits the ordinary way, as every web server does: time, path and IP address. That is used for running and troubleshooting the service, not to follow people, and it is not linked to any trip. The map background tiles are fetched from OpenStreetMap, which then sees that someone requested a map tile.

Write via the contact form. This is run privately, not by a company.

If you send a message, what you write is stored, along with the time and IP address, until the matter is settled. If you enter an email address it is stored, but only so a reply can be sent. The field is optional.