Privacy

pingpad measures how the game is used, to find out where people get stuck and to make it better. It does so without accounts, without cookies and without any third-party analytics service. Nothing is measured on this site's pages: measurement starts when the game opens.

Usage analytics

Turning usage analytics off on this browser:

• stops the game from sending its events from this browser,
• deletes the visitor id described below, and no new one is created.

It does not stop the connection server from counting connections, as described below. The setting is kept in this browser only: turn it off on each device you play with, your phone included, since the paddle is a page of its own.

What is measured

The game sends short events, each made of a name, a few words from fixed lists, and numbers:

• Visits: a screen or a paddle opening, and how many days ago this browser first played.
• Getting started: each step of connecting and calibrating a phone, how long it took, and what stopped it when it failed, such as motion access refused.
• Devices and browsers: whether a device is an iPhone, an Android phone, another phone or a computer, the browser's family (Safari, Chrome, Firefox, Samsung Internet, an app's built-in browser, a TV or another), how many images a second the screen draws and its graphics setting, how often a phone reports its motion, the delay between a phone and the screen and how their connection travels (on the same network, over the internet or through a relay), and errors, by kind only.
• Games: the mode played, scores and match results, roughly how many matches the screen has played, pauses, players changing places, and per player and per game the number of swings, hits, misses and balls out, and how early or late the swings were. These help tune the computer opponent and the timing of a stroke.
• Achievements: each badge unlocked, by its name only, which tells how far players get.

Every event also carries the site's address, the country, which Cloudflare works out from the connection without keeping the address, and the kind of device. Events about a game describe the players by their place at the table, player 1 or player 2, never by who they are, and nothing links a phone to a match.

Visitor id

To tell new visitors from returning ones, the game keeps a random id in this browser. It is made up on the device, means nothing outside pingpad's statistics, is never shown to the other devices of a game, and is never shared with anyone else. It lasts 13 months from its creation, a fixed period that playing again does not extend, and is then replaced by a new one. Where the browser does not let sites keep data, no visitor id is sent at all.

What pingpad never stores

• your IP address,
• the full description your browser gives of itself, with its version and your system's: only its family, from the list above,
• the codes in the link and the QR code that connect the phones to the screen,
• anything you type, a name or an account: there are none.

Nothing tracks you across other sites, and the data is never combined with anything else.

The connection server

The phones and the screen find each other through pingpad's own connection server. For every connection, whether usage analytics are on or off, it counts when it opens and closes, how long it lasted, how many phones joined a screen, and connections that failed. These counts carry no visitor id and no identifier of any kind, along with the site's address, the country and the kind of device.

Google's and Cloudflare's STUN servers

To send the game straight to each other, the screen and each phone need to know their public IP address, the address the internet sees them at. Each device asks a STUN server, which answers with it: Cloudflare's, stun.cloudflare.com, when the connection server gives the device access to the relay below, and Google's, stun.l.google.com, otherwise. The devices then trade these addresses through the connection server to find a direct route between them.

Google or Cloudflare therefore sees the public IP address of every device that joins a game, the screen and each phone, whether usage analytics are on or off. Neither sees anything of the game itself: the swings, the scores and everything else the devices send each other never pass through these servers. Each handles these requests under its own privacy policy.

Cloudflare's relay

Some networks, mobile ones in particular, block a direct route between two devices. So that they can still play, the connection server gives each device access to a relay run by Cloudflare, valid for an hour, and a device that cannot reach the other directly sends the game through it.

The relay sees the public IP address of every device given access to it, since each one reserves a route through it before knowing whether it needs one, and how much a device that goes through it sends, but not what: the game is encrypted from one device to the other. When the relay is not available, two devices without a direct route cannot play together.

Where the data goes

The connection server runs on Cloudflare, which also stores the events and counts above on pingpad's behalf, and deletes them after 3 months. They serve pingpad's statistics only, and are neither sold nor shared.

Settings

The game also keeps a few settings in this browser, such as sound and graphics, and counts the matches played on this screen. On a phone, it keeps the player's profile: their emoji, the badges they unlocked and their records, which the phone sends only to the screen it plays with. Turning usage analytics off leaves them as they are; Reset achievements, in the phone's menu, erases the badges and records and keeps the emoji.

Who publishes pingpad

pingpad is made and published by Christophe Rosset, an individual developer. For any question about this page or your data, get in touch through that page.