Privacy policy

Who runs the site

Spades Court (spadescourt.com) is run by Vladimir Marinov, Bulgaria. Write to [email protected] with any question about your data.

This page explains what the site does with your data, in plain words. It is not legal advice.

The site handles your account and match data because running the site for you is a contract, and your security data because it has a legitimate interest in stopping cheats and abuse.

Your account

An account is a username, an email address and a password. The password is stored as a hash and cannot be read back. The email is used to verify the account and to reset the password; it is never shown to other players and never passed on for marketing.

Optional profile fields: country, sex, an About text and a portrait picture. Your username, rating, match history and everything you fill in are public on your profile. Pictures are reviewed by staff before they are shown.

Your matches

Every rated match is stored in full: the four players, the bids, every card, whether a player left, the result and the rating change. Your profile shows how many rated matches you have left. This is the game record. It stays as long as the site exists, even after you delete your account, because the match record also belongs to the other three players. An unrated match is not stored: no result, no record, no history, only a daily count of how many were played.

Security data

Your IP address and browser details are stored when you register, log in, verify your email, reset your password or connect to the game, and kept for 12 months from last use. They serve security and fair play: duplicate accounts, bans, abuse.

Watching without an account stores no address: the site only counts guest connections per day.

Page counting

Page views are counted with an anonymous hash of address and browser that changes daily; the hash is deleted the next day and no address is kept from it. There is no analytics service, no advertising network and no tracking pixel on the site.

Cookies and browser storage

One cookie, __Host-spades_session, keeps you logged in for 30 days. The site does not work without it. Your browser's local storage keeps your sound settings, your table sorting and whether you have seen the first-click hint. The tab's session storage keeps which match-up lines you stand in, so a refresh keeps your place. Nothing else is set.

Where the data lives

The servers are in Frankfurt (DigitalOcean). Traffic passes through Cloudflare, which proxies the site and holds no account data. Mail goes out through Resend, which sees the address and the text of each mail. Resend is based in the United States and handles the mail under a data processing agreement with the EU's standard contractual clauses.

Encrypted backups are kept in the EU: hourly copies for up to 7 days, one copy a day for 90 days, one copy a month indefinitely. A deleted account remains in the backups until they expire.

Staff

Site staff can see your email address, whether you are banned, and the moderation queue, and can remove a picture or an About text. Every staff action is logged.

Deleting your account

To delete your account, open Account and choose Delete account. The username becomes deleted_ followed by a number; email, password and profile are erased and all sessions are closed. Your match records stay under that anonymised name (see Your matches). For anything else, write to [email protected].

Your rights

You can read, change and delete your data from the Account screen at any time. Deleting your account erases your profile, not the match records (see Your matches). Under the GDPR you can also ask for a copy of everything the site holds about you, ask us to correct or limit how we use it, object to a use of it, or complain to Bulgaria's Commission for Personal Data Protection (cpdp.bg), or to your own country's authority if you live elsewhere in the EU.

Age

The site is for people aged 16 and over.

Changes

This page changes when the site does. The date at the top is the last change.