Privacy Policy

No accounts, no sign-up

Cards with Friends does not have user accounts. There's no sign-up, no password, and no email address collected to play. You choose a display name and an emoji avatar when you join a room, and that's it.

What's stored on your device

We use your browser's local storage (not cookies) to remember a few preferences between visits:

• The display name you chose
• Your chosen emoji avatar
• Whether sound effects are muted
• Where you last dragged your video tile on screen
• A short-lived local backup of your current game's state, used only if our server briefly can't be reached, so a page refresh doesn't lose your progress

None of this leaves your device except the game-state backup, which is a copy of information already visible to everyone in your room. You can clear all of it at any time by clearing your browser's site data.

Video and audio chat

Camera and microphone access is entirely optional and only requested if you turn video chat on. When you do, your video and audio stream directly to the other players in your room peer-to-peer (WebRTC) — it does not pass through or get stored on our servers. Our server's only role is briefly relaying the connection details needed for two browsers to find each other; it never has access to the actual video or audio content, and nothing is recorded.

Room and game data

When you create or join a room, the game state (whose turn it is, what cards are where, scores) is kept in a database so the game can survive a page refresh or a dropped connection. That record is identified only by a random room ID — it does not include your name or any personal information — and it expires automatically 24 hours after creation. Player display names and chat messages are relayed live between players in a room and are not written to that database.

When the last player leaves a room, the live connection state for that room is discarded immediately.

Cookies and advertising

We don't set cookies ourselves. Some pages on this site load Google AdSense to show ads and help keep the game free. Google may use cookies or similar technology on those pages to serve ads based on your visits to this and other sites. You can learn more about how Google uses this data and manage your ad preferences at google.com/settings/ads , and read Google's own policy at How Google uses information from sites that use our services . Ads are never shown inside an active game room.

Error tracking

We use Sentry to catch crashes and bugs. When something breaks, Sentry records technical details — the error message, a stack trace, and basic context like the page and browser involved — so we can fix it. It does not receive your video/audio, and it is used purely for debugging, not analytics or advertising.

No other tracking

We don't run any analytics, tracking pixels, or behavioral profiling beyond what's described above — no Google Analytics, no ad-network tracking scripts inside the app itself, nothing that follows you across other sites.

Children

This site is not directed at children under 13, and we don't knowingly collect information from them.

Changes to this policy

If this policy changes in a meaningful way, the "last updated" date at the top of this page will change too.

Contact

Questions about this policy? Reach out at zachkobrinsky@gmail.com .