Privacy Policy

Boardgame Buddy records the games you play and who you played them with. This page says exactly what it stores, what leaves our servers, and how to get your data back or delete it.

It is written to be specific rather than broad. Where something is imperfect, it says so.

1. What we store

Your account

Your email address, and — if you sign in with Google — the name and profile picture Google gives us. A display name and avatar you set yourself replace those.

What you log

Plays: the game, the date, who played, scores, your notes, and a two-letter country code (see §3). Your collection and wishlist. Your buddy connections. Reference-guide chapters you write, which are shared with other users when you publish them.

Photos

Photos you attach to a play. We remove the embedded metadata before storing them — the file is decoded and re-encoded on your device, which drops the capture time, the camera details and the GPS coordinate your phone may have written into it.

Optional connections

If you link a BoardGameGeek account, we store the username and an encrypted copy of the password. The encryption key lives only on the server, never in the app. We keep the password because BoardGameGeek has no API for this — the only way to read your collection is to log in as you, and sessions expire.

If you turn on notifications, we store the push address your browser issues, the two keys that let us encrypt a message to it, and a label so you can tell your own devices apart.

2. What we do not store

• No advertising or cross-site tracking identifiers. There are no third-party analytics or advertising scripts in the app at all.
• No contact list, no calendar, no microphone.
• No payment details. If paid features arrive, a payment processor will handle card data and we will not see it.
• No coordinates. See below — this one is deliberate.

3. Location, specifically

The app never asks for your location permission. A play records at most which country it happened in, and that is worked out from your device's timezone setting — no permission, no network call, no third party.

When you import photos from your camera roll, a photo may carry the exact coordinate where it was taken. That coordinate is turned into a country on your device and is never sent to us. The conversion is a lookup in a map of borders that ships inside the app. A GPS tag says where someone's home is; a country code cannot.

4. Who else sees it

We do not sell your data and we do not share it for advertising. These are the companies that necessarily handle it so the app can run:

• Supabase — the database and the photo storage.
• Google Cloud — sign-in. Google sees that you authenticated and the email address on the account.
• Railway — runs the server.
• Cloudflare — serves the site and the images.
• Google Gemini — the two AI features, and only when you use them. See §6.
• BoardGameGeek — only if you link an account, and only to read or update your collection there.
• Retailers — only if you tap a Where to buy link on a game's page. That opens the retailer's own site, under its own privacy policy; nothing about your account travels with the link. Some of those links are affiliate links — see the Terms.

Other people using the app

Your buddies see the plays you log and the photos attached to them. Reference-guide chapters you publish are visible to everyone.

The public website

Our public pages (bgbuddy.app/welcome and the game pages under bgbuddy.app/boardgames) can be read without an account. They show totals only: how many plays have been logged, how many people were active in the last 30 days, how many games are in the catalog, and for each game how often it has been logged and how many collections hold it. A game page also shows that game's most-used scoresheets and rules chapters, with how many guides hold each; who wrote them is not shown. Nothing on these pages names you or shows anything you logged.

A real limit on photo privacy

Play photos are stored at web addresses that are effectively impossible to guess, but they are not access-controlled: anyone who has the link can open the image without signing in. Treat a play photo as something you have shared with your table, not as a private file. Do not attach a photo you would not want forwarded.

5. Usage counts

We record that an app-open happened, and how long the app took to start. Those records carry no account identifier, no IP address and no device identifier — the stored row is the app name, the event name and a timestamp, so it can tell us "the app was opened 400 times yesterday" and can never tell us who opened it.

A tap on a Where to buy link is counted the same way: which retailer, which game, which screen, and when — no account identifier. It tells us whether a retailer is worth listing, never who was shopping.

Separately, the server logs the requests it makes to BoardGameGeek and to Google, so failures can be diagnosed. Those entries can include your BoardGameGeek username, because it is part of the request.

6. The AI features

Two features send data to Google's Gemini API:

• Reference-guide drafting — the game's name and description go to Google to draft a chapter, which you then edit.
• Photo and note import — the photo or the text you are importing is sent to Google to be read into a play record. This means the photo itself leaves our servers.

Neither runs unless you start it. Google processes this as our API customer rather than for its own model training. AI output is often wrong about rules — see the Terms.

7. Getting your data out, and deleting it

Export. Settings has an export that produces a zip of spreadsheet files — your plays, collection, buddies and guides. It deliberately excludes your stored BoardGameGeek password.

Deletion. Settings has a delete-account control. It removes your profile and what hangs off it: scores, collection, wishlist, buddy connections, achievements and push registrations. It also deletes the photos you uploaded and your sign-in itself, so the address you signed up with is free to use again. Guide chapters you published stay, with your name detached, so they do not vanish from other people's guides.

Game nights you shared do not vanish from other people's history. A play you logged with another member in it is their record of that evening as much as yours, so deleting your account passes it to someone who was at the table rather than deleting it out from under them. Your name stays on it, as a player without an account — that is what stops their stats, their win counts and their record against you from silently changing. A play nobody else was at is only yours, and it goes. If you would rather a shared play went too, delete it before you delete your account, or email us.

One gap, stated plainly: deleting a single play removes the record but does not yet delete the photo attached to it, which remains at its unguessable address until you delete your account. Deleting your account now removes every one of them. Until the per-play case is fixed, email us and we will remove an individual photo by hand.

8. Storage on your device

The app keeps your sign-in session, your light/dark choice and some cached game data in your browser's own storage, and an offline copy of the app itself so it opens without a connection. None of that is an advertising cookie and none of it is readable by another site. Clearing your browser's site data removes all of it.

9. How long we keep things

Your logs stay until you delete them or your account. Diagnostic request logs are pruned periodically.

10. Children

The app is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly create accounts for them. If you believe a child has an account, email us and we will remove it.

11. Where your data lives

Our providers operate in the United States and the European Union, so your data may be processed in either. If you are in the EEA or the UK, you can ask for a copy of your data, its correction, or its deletion — the export and delete controls in Settings do the first and the last immediately, and email reaches us for anything else.

12. Changes

If this policy changes in a way that affects what we collect or who receives it, we will say so in the app before the change takes effect rather than quietly moving the date at the top.

13. Contact

Privacy questions, deletion requests and anything this page did not answer: [email protected].