Privacy

You sign in with Google or GitHub. We ask them for two things: your name and your email address. We never see your password, and we cannot act on your account with either provider.

A profile: a handle, a display name, and a bio if you write one. These are public — they appear on anything you publish, and anyone can read them. Your email address is stored too, but it is never shown to other people.

Puzzles you publish while signed in: the grid, clues, hints, title, note and look. These are public too, and listed under your name. The clues in a public puzzle may also be offered to other constructors as suggestions when they clue the same answer, shown without your name.

If you publish a puzzle as private, it stays off the front page, out of search and off your public page. But anyone with its link can open it, so treat the link like the puzzle itself: a private puzzle is unlisted, not secret.

Unfinished puzzles you make while signed in, so you can pick them up on another device. Only you can see these. Your browser keeps a copy too, which is cleared when you sign out once everything has reached us.

Bookmarks, your streak and stats, how far you have got in a puzzle, and your solving settings are saved in this browser only. So are puzzles you make, finished or not, while signed out. They are not sent to us and they do not follow you to another device. If you clear your browser data, they are gone and we cannot recover them.

When you sign in, we offer to move puzzles saved in this browser onto your account. They only move if you say so. Unfinished puzzles move by themselves, since nobody but you can see them.

One cookie, which keeps you signed in. There is no analytics, no tracking, and no advertising on this site.

If a page breaks, your browser sends us the error message and the address of the page, so we can fix it. Nothing that identifies you goes with it.

The site runs on Vercel, and accounts, profiles and published puzzles are stored with Supabase. Google and GitHub handle sign-in itself. The typeface is loaded from Fontshare, so your browser asks their servers for it, and like any website they see your IP address when it does. Each of them has its own privacy policy.

An author can add a GIF or a song to their note. GIFs load from GIPHY, so GIPHY sees your IP address when a puzzle with one is on your screen. A song’s player loads from Spotify only when you press play, and Spotify may set its own cookies once it does. Searching for a GIF while making a puzzle sends your search to GIPHY, and searching for a song sends it to Spotify from this site’s server, without anything that identifies you.

If you report a puzzle or a profile, we keep the report, the reason you gave and your account, so we can follow up and spot abuse of the button. The person you reported is never told who it was.

There is a delete button on your profile page. It removes your profile, handle and bio, every puzzle you have published and every unfinished one, straight away, and it cannot be undone. Puzzles saved in your browser are not touched by it — clear your browser data if you want those gone too.

If you would rather we did it for you, email privacy@crosswording.org.

The words that autofill and the word bank suggest come from Spread the Word(list) by Brooke Husic and Enrique Henestroza Anguiano, used under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, together with the Wordnik wordlist (MIT) and SCOWL by Kevin Atkinson. Offensive entries are removed with help from the List of Dirty, Naughty, Obscene, and Otherwise Bad Words (CC BY 4.0). We trimmed, merged, filtered and reordered these lists; the result is free to download under the same CC BY-NC-SA license, with full notices.

Definitions and synonyms in clue suggestions come from Open English WordNet by the Open English WordNet team, used under CC BY 4.0, and the Princeton WordNet it grew from, used under the WordNet License. We shortened and filtered it for clue writing; see the full notices.

The typeface is Satoshi from Fontshare, and the paper texture is from Texturelabs.

If this changes, the date at the top changes with it. Nothing already collected gets used for something new without asking you first.

Email privacy@crosswording.org.