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 creating one is self-service: you type your email address, we send you a one-time sign-in link, and clicking it signs you in. There is no password anywhere in this system — we never ask you to create one, so there is none for us to store or for anyone to steal. If you have an account, we keep a small amount of server-side data to make it work: your email address, 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
- Email address. To create an account, you give us an email address. We use it for exactly two things: to know which saved progress is yours, and to send you a one-time sign-in link when you ask for one. We never use it for marketing, and we never sell or share it.
- No password, ever. There is no password field anywhere in Pinball Genie — not at signup, not to sign in, and there is nothing to "reset" because nothing is ever set. Signing in works by emailing you a single-use link: you request one, we send it, and clicking it signs you in. The link stops working after 15 minutes or the first time it's used, whichever happens first. Because we store no password and nothing derived from one, there is no password database that could ever be stolen or leaked.
- 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. Internally, this is filed under a stable account ID rather than your raw email address — so if you ever change the email address on your account, your progress moves with you instead of being orphaned.
- 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.
Sign-in emails
Because our server cannot send email directly, we use Resend, a
transactional email provider, to deliver sign-in links. Resend receives only what it
needs to deliver that one message — your email address and the link itself — and we
do not upload any mailing list or use Resend for marketing. Sign-in emails are sent
from a dedicated subdomain, send.pinball-genie.com, which is a technical
email-deliverability choice (it keeps a bounced or misdirected signup attempt from
affecting admin@pinball-genie.com's reputation) — it is still us sending
the email, not a third party acting on its own behalf.
To keep this system from being used to spam an address or exhaust our email quota, we cap how many sign-in links can be requested for one email address, from one network, and site-wide, within a short window. Requesting a link for an address that has no account produces exactly the same response as requesting one that does — we never let this form be used to check whether a given email address is registered.
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 request method and URL, the response status, and the browser's user-agent string. The one URL in this system that would otherwise carry a sign-in token (the link you click from your email) has that token's value specifically stripped out and replaced before the line is ever written to disk, so the log shows that a sign-in attempt happened without ever recording the token itself. This log rotates automatically — 10 MiB per file, 10 files kept — so no request is held onto indefinitely.
- Our application server separately logs security-relevant events (sign-in link requests, sign-ins, rate-limiting) with a timestamp and the requesting IP address. This application-level log never includes a sign-in link's token or a cookie value — it records that the event happened, and for a blocked or rate-limited attempt, why — never the credential-equivalent values involved.
We use these logs only for security, debugging, and abuse prevention — never for advertising or analytics.
Data retention
How long each kind of data sticks around:
- Sign-in tokens. A sign-in link is good for 15 minutes from the moment we send it, and works exactly once. Whichever happens first — someone using it, or the 15 minutes running out — ends its usefulness immediately, and the record is cleaned up shortly after.
- Your account and achievement progress. These persist for as long as your account exists — see "Your rights: export and deletion" below for how to end that whenever you choose. We do not delete an account just because it has gone unused for a while.
- A sign-in link you request but never click. Requesting a link does not create an account. All it stores is the one-time link itself, which expires 15 minutes after it is issued and can be used only once. If you never click it, nothing about you is kept — your account is created at the moment you click the link, not when you ask for it. That also means someone typing your address into our sign-in form cannot create an account in your name; only you, from your own inbox, can do that.
- Server logs. Our web server's access log rotates automatically — 10 MiB per file, 10 files kept — so it ages out on its own as new requests come in.
Your achievement progress 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: export and deletion
You can export a copy of your data — your email address and your achievement progress, as JSON — or delete your account outright. Deleting your account removes your account record and your stored achievement progress, and cannot be undone. The guaranteed way to get either one is to email us at admin@pinball-genie.com; we will act on it once we can reasonably confirm you're the account holder. That route works even if you've lost access to the inbox your account is tied to and can't sign in at all — it does not depend on a working sign-in link.
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