Privacy policy

Who is responsible for your data

InkNod is a site for playing nine games online: five Romanian card games (Macao, Seven Cut, Sweep, Liar Liar and War), Texas Hold’em Poker, Backgammon, Tile Rummy and Chess. The site operates at inknod.com.

The data controller, meaning the party that decides why and how your data is processed, is Web Loft SRL, with its registered office at Str. Buzoieni 14, Sector 5, Bucharest, Romania, registered under Tax ID (CUI) 44674942 · Trade Register No. J40/13171/2021.

For any question about your data, write to us at [email protected]. The data protection officer answers at [email protected].

This policy describes what actually happens in the application. If a feature changes, the text here changes too.

What data we collect

We ask for nothing the game does not need. We do not ask for your real name, date of birth, phone number, postal address or payment details; the site has no payments.

When you create an account

• Player name: 3 to 20 characters, only unaccented letters, digits and underscores. It is the name others see you under at the table and on the leaderboard, so it is public.
• Email address: you confirm your account with it, you log in with it, and we send your password reset link to it if you forget your password. It is not public: no other player sees it.
• Password: at least 8 characters. We do not store it. At sign-up it is turned into a cryptographic hash (bcrypt) from which the password cannot be reconstructed. Not even the site’s administrators can see your password.
• Time of address confirmation: until you click the link in the email, the account cannot be used.
• Consent to news by email, only if you give it: at sign-up, from your profile or from the notice on the site. We keep the time and the place you gave it from, so we can prove you asked for the news. You can withdraw it at any time from your profile, and both are then deleted.

When you play without an account

You can also play without an account. If you open a table or sit at one without being logged in, the site instantly creates a guest identity for you:

• A name given by us: “user” followed by six random digits. You do not choose it and it says nothing about you. It is public, like any player name: others see it at the table.
• No email address and no password. We do not ask for them and we do not have them. The name is tied to your browser only through the session cookie.
• What you played: the tables you sat at and the matches, as for any player, and the time of your last activity.

A guest has no leaderboard, profile, photo, friends or notifications, so no data about them either. To stop guest records from being created in bulk, we count how many are created in an hour from the same IP address; the count lasts one hour and is not kept after that.

What relates to your profile

• Profile photo, if you want to add one. It is optional: without it, your initials appear. WEBP, JPEG or PNG files of up to 400 KB are accepted, with sides between 64 and 1024 pixels. Before it leaves your browser, the image is cropped to a small square, so what reaches us is a picture of a few dozen kilobytes, not the full photo from your phone. The file sits on the site’s server, and the account keeps only the path to it.
• Changes you make yourself: changing your player name, email address or password.

What is collected from play

• Tables you open or join: the table’s name, its invite code, the game, the number of seats, the chosen pace (seconds per move, or “no timer”), whether the match is ranked and whether bots are accepted.
• Matches: the seat you sat in, the name displayed at that moment, the place you finished, the score, your rating before and after, plus the difference. This is your match history, which you can see in your profile.
• Match log: what happened in the open on the table (“played 7♣”, “drew 5 cards”). The cards in someone’s hand never reach the log and are never sent to other players.
• Room log and chat messages: who entered the room, who sat down, which bot was added, who was removed, plus what people write to each other at the table (up to 500 characters per message). The author’s name is frozen when written, so a name change does not rewrite old conversations.
• General chat on the tables page: what you write there (up to 240 characters per message), with your name and the time. Anyone who opens the page can read it, including people playing without an account. If you mention someone with @name, that person gets a notification.
• Messages stopped by the filter. Every chat message, at a table or in general chat, goes through an automatic filter that stops offensive words, inappropriate topics, links and HTML code. A stopped message reaches no one, but it is kept, with the reason it was stopped, so moderators can see it. Anyone who repeatedly tries to send such messages, or writes far too often, automatically gets a pause from writing in general chat (5 minutes, then 30, then 24 hours), which a moderator can lift.
• Room presence: whether you are in a table’s room and when you were last seen there. This is how the site knows who is still present and who to give the room to when the host leaves.
• Leaderboard: for each game separately, your current rating, your best rating, how many matches you played, won and lost, and when you last played.

Notifications

• The bell in the header: news about your tables and friends, such as a friend request, an invite, that it is your turn, or that a match has ended. Each one keeps its type, the text you see, the name and photo of the sender, the table concerned and whether you have read it.
• What you want to hear about: the categories you turn on or off from your profile, under “Notifications”.
• Record of notifications sent: the type, a key saying which event it was about and how many devices it went to. It exists so that the same news does not reach you twice and so that a friend who keeps coming and going does not alert you ten times an hour.
• Browser notifications, only if you turn them on (from your profile or from the card that asks you on the tables and friends pages) and allow them in your browser. For each browser where you turned them on, we keep the delivery address given by the browser, the keys used to encrypt messages, the browser type (user-agent), when it last received a notification, how many sends failed in a row and whether it was stopped.

Moderation measures

If an account is suspended or muted by the site’s administrators, the time the measure was taken is kept. At the level of a single table, those removed or muted by the host are also recorded, but only as long as that table exists.

Technical data

• Sessions: for each open session we record its identifier, the account, the IP address, the browser type (user-agent) and the time of the last activity. The session content is encrypted.
• Password reset token, together with the email address: created only when you request a reset and valid for 60 minutes.
• Limits on login attempts: at most five failed attempts per minute, counted by IP address. It is the only barrier between an automated program and players’ accounts.
• Server logs: the web server records incoming requests and the application records errors. We keep them for 14 months, then they are deleted.

When you write to us through the contact form

Your name, email address, subject and message. We use them only to reply to you: they do not go on a mailing list and we do not give them to anyone. The message is kept for at most 12 months from sending, then deleted automatically; you can ask for it to be deleted at any time before that, at the address above.

We do not keep the IP address it was sent from. The form is protected from bots by a limit on the number of submissions, which does not write anything about you anywhere.

Ads

Ads appear on some pages, each with its own label. What happens to your data when you see or click them is in the section on ads.

The cookies we use

The site uses three cookies, all strictly necessary. We have no analytics, advertising or tracking cookies, no Google Analytics, no social media pixels, and we do not profile anyone. No consent is asked for cookies without which the site simply does not work. Two are set for anyone who opens the site (session and CSRF protection), and the third, remember_web_…, only after you log in.

We do have traffic measurement, though, and for that we ask for your consent before it starts. That is why you see the banner on your first visit. Details are in the next section.

You can delete them at any time from your browser settings. If you block them, you will not be able to log in: the site has no way of recognizing you from one page to the next.

What else your browser stores, without cookies

Besides cookies, the page writes a few keys to your browser’s memory (localStorage and sessionStorage). These are also things stored on your device, so we list them here. Apart from the traffic measurement one, all are strictly necessary for what you chose; they track nothing and go nowhere:

Traffic measurement

We want to know which pages get read, so we understand what is worth writing next. For this we use Rybbit, a measurement tool hosted on our servers, at analytics.webloft.ro. It is not Google Analytics and it is not anyone else’s service: the data goes to no one outside this site’s operator.

It does not start until you say yes. The script does not even load in the page before that. It is not switched on and off from settings; it simply does not exist until you click “I agree”. If you choose “Only what’s necessary”, it never loads and nothing is sent.

What is sent once it starts:

• the address of the page you opened, including everything after the question mark, the page title and the page you came from, if you came through a link;
• screen size and browser language;
• when you click a link to another site: the link’s address and text;
• a score saying how likely it is that the visitor is a program and not a person, calculated in the browser from the signs left by automated programs and from the type of graphics card; only the score is sent, not the signs;
• like any request on the internet, your IP address and browser type (user-agent).

From the IP address, the measurement server works out your country, region and approximate city. To count visitors, not just pages, it turns the IP address and browser type into a code, a cryptographic hash from which the address cannot be rebuilt. The code stays the same from one day to the next, as long as you have the same IP address and the same browser. The IP address itself is not kept in the statistics.

The script also puts the code rybbit-visitor-id in your browser’s memory (in localStorage). The version we use does not send it and does not use it for counting, but it is still something stored on your device, and the law is about what is stored, not about the word “cookie”. We delete it when you withdraw your consent.

Measurement does not run on pages whose address carries something about you (the new password page, with your email address and reset code, and email address confirmation) or in the admin panel.

Your name, your email address, the cards in your hand and what you write in chat are not sent. Measurement does not link anything to your account, and if you are not logged in there is nothing to link anyway.

The legal basis is your consent (Art. 6(1)(a) GDPR). Consent can be withdrawn as easily as it is given:

Your choice is read from your browser.

Ads

The site is funded by ads. We place them only on content pages (the home page, the catalog, the rules, the guides, the leaderboard and the table list), never at the game table, on account pages or in the Android app.

Our own ads and directly sold banners

Promotions of the site, labeled “From InkNod”, and banners paid for by other companies, labeled “Advertisements” followed by the name of whoever pays. They are an image or a text, served from our server, without cookies and without anything stored on your device:

• we count, per day, how many times each ad appeared and how many times it was clicked: just numbers, with no IP address, no account and no browser code;
• the click goes through our own address (/r/…), which sends you on and adds one to the count; like any request to the site, it appears in the server logs (see “Technical data”);
• the company that bought the banner receives nothing from us. If you click it, you land on their site, and their rules apply from there.

Why we process data and on what legal basis

Every processing activity has a purpose and a legal basis under Regulation (EU) 2016/679 (GDPR). We do not process data “just in case”.

Only three things rely on consent, and all of them stay off until you say yes: traffic measurement, browser notifications and site news by email. The site does not use optional cookies. The emails we send are the address confirmation and the password reset, both requested by you, and (only if you ticked that you want them) site news: rarely, only about games and new things on the site, each with a link to unsubscribe. You give your consent at sign-up, from your profile or from the notice on the site, and you can withdraw it at any time from your profile.

If we ever process data under a legal obligation, for example at the request of a competent authority, we will do so only within the limits of that obligation.

How long we keep data

The basic rule: as long as you have an account. We do not keep a “dormant” account so we can hold data about you; if you delete it, it is deleted.

• Account, profile, photo, leaderboards: as long as the account exists. When the account is deleted they disappear immediately, and the photo is deleted from disk.
• Tables you hosted: they disappear with the account, along with their seats.
• Sessions: 7 days after your last activity.
• Playing without an account: the guest name and everything tied to it are deleted 30 days after your last activity. One exception: if the guest opened a table where someone else also played, the name stays next to those matches, so they do not vanish from the others’ history. Only the name given by the site remains, with nothing that leads to you.
• Password reset token: 60 minutes.
• Server logs: 14 months.
• Traffic measurement data: 26 months, then deleted.
• Bell notifications: read ones, at most 6 months; unread ones, as long as you have an account. Two kinds go away earlier on their own, because after a while they would no longer be true: “is online” after half an hour, “It’s your turn” after a day. When the account is deleted, all of them are deleted.
• Record of notifications sent: 7 days.
• Consent to news by email: as long as you keep it on. When you withdraw it or delete your account, it is deleted.
• A browser’s notification subscription: as long as you keep notifications on there. It is taken out of use when you stop them from your profile, when you log out in that browser, when the browser’s service says the address is no longer good or after 20 failed sends in a row; 30 days after that it is deleted completely. Your notification choices stay as long as you have an account.

What remains after you delete your account

Two things are not deleted, and it is important that you know why: matches played and messages written in rooms and in general chat. Both are the history of a table where other people also sat. If your rows disappeared, someone else’s match would be left with an empty chair, and a conversation would break off halfway.

What happens instead: the link between those rows and your account is permanently broken. Your player name remains as it was at that moment, as plain text, with no way back to an email address, a password or a photo. What remains, in other words, is exactly what remains of a player after they get up from the table: the name written on the score sheet.

If you want those names to disappear or be replaced too, write to us at [email protected] and we will look at the request; see your rights.

Who else sees the data

We do not sell data to anyone and we do not give it to anyone for advertising. Apart from you and the other players (who see only what is public; see below), data also reaches the following, each for something the site could not work without:

• The hosting provider: OVHcloud (OVH SAS, France). The site’s database and files sit on its servers.
• Cloudflare: traffic to the site passes through the Cloudflare network before reaching the server. Cloudflare sees your IP address and the requests you make, and that is where we get the visitor’s real address from.
• SMTP2GO: the address confirmation email, the password reset email and, if you asked for it, site news go out through it. It receives your email address and the content of those emails. The site uses it through the European entry point mail-eu.smtp2go.com.
• Your browser’s notification service: only if you turned on browser notifications. The notification goes to the service your browser uses: Google (Chrome, Opera, Samsung Internet, Edge on Android), Mozilla (Firefox), Microsoft (Edge on Windows) or Apple (Safari). The content travels encrypted with your browser’s keys, so the service cannot read it; it sees the delivery address and a few technical details of the send: when it goes out, how large it is, how long to keep it and a short tag (for example the table code) by which a new notification replaces the old one.
• The site’s administrators: they have access to the admin panel, where they see accounts, open tables, room conversations, general chat and messages stopped by the filter, and where they can suspend an account, mute someone, close a table or delete a message.

We may also pass data to a public authority, if we have a legal obligation to do so, and only within the limits of that obligation.

What is public on the site

It is worth saying plainly, because it is the difference between what we keep and what anyone can see. Public:

• your player name and profile photo, if you added one;
• your rating, number of matches, wins and losses, on the leaderboard page, but only if you have played at least one match;
• what goes on at an open table: who is sitting there, the cards on the table, the match log and the room conversation. A table’s address is public; that is how you invite a friend to play.

Never public: your email address, password, IP address, sessions and the cards in your hand. Each player’s hand stays on the server; what is sent to the others is a version in which opponents’ cards are missing, not one in which they are merely hidden visually.

Your rights

The GDPR gives you the rights below. You can exercise them by writing to us at [email protected], from the address you used for your account. We reply within one month of receiving the request at most; if the request is complicated, we will tell you and the deadline can be extended by two more months. Exercising these rights is free.

If you played without an account, we have no address for you: tell us the guest name you played under and, as best you can, when. That is the only link between you and that data.

• Right of access: you can find out whether we process your data, what it is, and get a copy of it.
• Right to rectification: you can ask for wrong data to be corrected or incomplete data to be completed. You can change your player name and email address yourself, from your profile.
• Right to erasure (“right to be forgotten”): you can ask for your data to be deleted. You can delete your account yourself, at any time; see how to delete your account. What remains after deletion is explained under how long we keep data.
• Right to restriction of processing: in the cases provided by law (for example while we verify whether a piece of data is correct), you can ask us to keep the data without using it further.
• Right to object: you can object to processing based on our legitimate interest, giving reasons related to your situation. We will stop, unless we have compelling grounds that override them.
• Right to data portability: you can receive the data you gave us in a structured, commonly used and machine-readable format, and you can ask for it to be sent to another controller, where technically possible.
• Right to withdraw your consent: for things done on that basis (see the legal bases). Traffic measurement can be stopped with one click, in its section; browser notifications, from your profile, under “Turn off on this device”, or from your browser settings; news by email, from your profile. You do not need to write to us, and withdrawal does not affect what was lawfully done before.
• Right not to be subject to an automated decision: we do not make automated decisions with legal effects on you and we do not profile you.
• Right to file a complaint: see below.

Complaint to the supervisory authority

If you feel we are infringing your rights, you can write to us first, at [email protected]; most of the time that is the fastest route. But you can always, without going through us, file a complaint with the Romanian Data Protection Authority (ANSPDCP), B-dul G-ral. Gheorghe Magheru 28–30, Sector 1, 010336 Bucharest, Romania, or through the website dataprotection.ro. You also have the right to go to court.

How to delete your account

You can delete your account yourself, without asking our permission and without writing to us. The path is from your profile, under “Delete account”.

So it cannot happen by accident and so a stolen session is not enough, deletion requires two things: your current password and your exact player name. After you confirm, the account is deleted on the spot. It is not a request that goes into a queue, and there is no “trash bin” to recover it from.

Deleted immediately: your account, email address, password hash, profile photo (and its file on disk), leaderboards, seats at tables, the tables you hosted, bell notifications, notification subscriptions and your notification choices. What remains, with no link to you, is explained under how long we keep data.

If you can no longer log in (you forgot your password and no longer have access to your email address), write to us at [email protected] and we will handle the deletion request in writing.

If you played without an account, there is no account to delete. When you leave or the session expires, the guest name no longer belongs to anyone, and everything tied to it is deleted on its own, within the period stated under how long we keep data.

How we keep data safe

• All traffic is encrypted, over HTTPS. Cookies are marked Secure, and the site tells browsers not to use the unencrypted version (HSTS).
• Passwords are stored as bcrypt hashes, never in plain text.
• Session content is encrypted, and the session cookie cannot be read from JavaScript.
• At most five failed login attempts per minute from the same IP address.
• Without confirming the email address you cannot log in, so no one can open an account on someone else’s address.
• Changing your email address, changing your password and deleting your account all require your current password.
• The cards in each player’s hand stay on the server. The client receives a version of the match with other players’ cards missing, not one where they are sent and hidden.

No measure is an absolute guarantee. If a security breach occurs that puts your rights at risk, we will notify you and the authority, within the deadlines set by the GDPR.

Minimum age

The minimum age to play on InkNod, with or without an account, is 16. That is the age Art. 8 of the GDPR requires for a child’s consent to online services, and Romania did not lower it through Law no. 190/2018, as other states have done, down to 13.

The site does not ask for your date of birth at sign-up and does not verify age. We would rather say so than claim a check we do not do. If you learn that a child under 16 has created an account, write to us at [email protected] and we will delete it.

Changes to this policy

The policy can change, most often because the site changes. The valid version is always the one here, and the date of the last update is written at the beginning and end of the page. If the change is a significant one that alters what we do with your data, we will let you know by email or through a message on the site before it takes effect.

Contact

For any question about your data, to exercise your rights or to raise a concern:

• Data controllerWeb Loft SRL
• AddressStr. Buzoieni 14, Sector 5, Bucharest, Romania
• Email[email protected]
• Data protection[email protected]

See also the GDPR page, which says the same thing briefly and step by step, and the Terms and conditions.