Privacy Policy
Summary
Pinball Genie is a study tool for pinball machines, and it is free to use with no account — browsing machines, goals, shot paths, and the glossary requires no sign-in of any kind. An account exists only to save your achievement progress so it follows you across devices, and accounts are currently issued by us rather than through self-service signup. If you have one, we keep a small amount of server-side data to make it work: a username, a password hash, your achievement progress, and standard web server logs. We do not sell personal data, we do not run any analytics or tracking product, and today we do not serve any third-party advertising. This page explains exactly what we collect and why.
Information we collect
- Account identifier. Today this is a username you choose. We do not currently require an email address to create an account. A future version may add email-based accounts; if it does, we will update this policy before that change ships.
- Password. We store a salted PBKDF2 hash of your password, never the password itself. We cannot recover your original password from what we store.
- Achievement progress. The goals and machines you've studied are saved server-side against your account so your progress is there the next time you sign in, on any device.
- Server logs. Described below.
We do not collect your name, location, contacts, or any device advertising identifier, and we do not ask for payment information.
Cookies and local storage
Session cookie. When you sign in, we set one cookie that identifies your logged-in session. It is HttpOnly (not readable by page scripts), Secure (sent only over HTTPS), and SameSite=Lax, and it expires after 30 days. This cookie exists only to keep you signed in — we set no third-party cookies today.
Local storage. The app also stores a few interface preferences in your browser's local storage on your own device — things like your preferred shot-trail style, whether the ball tracer is on, which machine you last viewed, and whether you've seen the first-time how-to screen. These preferences never leave your device and are not your account progress; account progress is the server-side data described above.
Server logs
Like effectively every website, our servers keep operational logs so we can debug problems and detect abuse:
- Our web server (Caddy) writes an access log for every request — the requesting IP address, the path requested, the response status, and the browser's user-agent string. This log rotates automatically at 10 MiB per file, keeping up to 10 files.
- Our application server logs security-relevant events (sign-ins, sign-in failures, rate-limiting) with a timestamp and the requesting IP address. We never log passwords or cookie values.
We use these logs only for security, debugging, and abuse prevention — never for advertising or analytics.
Where your progress is stored
Your achievement progress is stored server-side, associated with your account, for as long as your account exists. It is not shared with anyone and is not used for anything other than showing your progress back to you.
No sale of personal data
We do not sell, rent, or trade your personal data to anyone, for any purpose, ever.
Children's privacy
Pinball Genie is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 13. If you believe a child under 13 has created an account, contact us at admin@pinball-genie.com and we will delete it.
Advertising
Pinball Genie is a free, ad-supported service. Today, the only advertising we show is a single self-hosted "house" banner that we serve ourselves. No third-party ad network is active, and no third-party advertising cookies are set.
We expect to introduce a third-party advertising network in a later phase. When we do, the following will apply, and we will update the effective date of this policy before it takes effect:
- Third-party vendors, including Google, use cookies to serve ads based on a user's prior visits to this and other websites.
- Google's use of advertising cookies enables it and its partners to serve ads to users based on their visits to this site and/or other sites on the Internet.
- Users may opt out of personalized advertising by visiting Google Ads Settings. Users may also opt out of a number of third-party vendors' use of cookies for personalized advertising by visiting aboutads.info.
- If we add other third-party ad vendors beyond Google, we will name them here.
Your rights and deletion
You can ask us to delete your account and everything tied to it — your account record and your stored achievement progress — at any time by emailing admin@pinball-genie.com, including your username so we can identify the account. We will confirm once it's done.
You do not need to ask us for anything to stop using Pinball Genie: since the study tool itself needs no account, you can simply stop signing in, and clearing your browser's site data removes the display preferences stored on your device.
Changes to this policy
If we change what we collect or how we use it — including turning on a third-party ad network — we will update this page and its effective date before the change takes effect.
Contact
Pinball Genie LLC — admin@pinball-genie.com