Privacy

What we do not collect

We do not ask for your name, your email address, or any other detail about you, because nothing on this site needs one. There are no accounts, no profiles, no saved lists, and no way to sign in. Searching the dictionary, reading a hint, or opening an answer requires no identity of any kind.

We do not sell data. What the analytics described below counts is pages, not people, and that is not for sale either.

What your browser stores

The word finder remembers the last set of letters you searched, so the rack is still there when you come back. That is stored by your browser, on your own device, under the key wordton.rack. It never reaches us. Clearing your browser storage removes it, and so does the clear button beside the field.

Nothing else is stored on your device by the site itself. There is one cookie, a session cookie for the private admin page where the daily hints are written, and it is only ever set for whoever is logged in there. A visitor never receives it.

What the server sees

Like every website, Wordton is served by a web server, and that server keeps ordinary request logs: the page requested, the time, the browser and operating system it reported, and the IP address the request came from. These are the technical records that let a site be run at all, used for keeping it up and finding faults. They are not linked to a person, because we have nothing to link them to.

The word finder sends what you type to our own server so it can search the dictionary and send the matching words back. That request is not stored beyond the ordinary log described above, and it goes nowhere else.

Other companies

Two: Google and Ahrefs, both for the measurement the next section describes in full. The fonts are hosted by us rather than loaded from a font service. There are no social widgets, no embedded videos, no comment system, and no advertising network. Apart from those two measurement requests, loading a Wordton page does not make your browser talk to anyone but us.

Advertising and analytics

Analytics is in use. Advertising is not. Wordton counts how many people read which pages, which is how anyone knows which ones are worth keeping. Two services do that counting, and both receive the address of the page you opened, the page that sent you here if there was one, and the browser you are using.

Google Analytics also receives your screen size and an approximate location it works out from your IP address and says it does not store, and it sets cookies whose names begin _ga on your device so a second page counts as the same visit rather than a new one.

Ahrefs Web Analytics receives the page title, your screen size and your browser language, and it notes when a link is clicked or a form is submitted. It sets no cookies and stores nothing on your device at all: the script it delivers touches neither cookies nor browser storage, which we checked by reading it rather than by taking their word for it.

Neither is ever sent what you type. The finder puts your letters in the address bar, so installing either service the ordinary way would hand every rack you search to a company that has no business with it. Both are installed with their automatic page views switched off and told to report the address with the query removed, the address bar is cleared once the finder has read it, and the one link on the site that carries a rack is held back from the click tracking. Your searches stay between you and our own server, exactly as the section above says.

Nothing here identifies you to us. There are still no accounts, so there is nothing a visit could be attached to. If you would rather not be counted at all, Google publishes an opt-out add-on that switches its part off on every site, and any tracker blocker will stop both scripts loading. Nothing on Wordton behaves differently when they are blocked.

Advertising is how a free site like this eventually pays for itself, so we expect that to arrive too. When it does, this page will be updated before it goes live, naming the provider and what they receive, the way it was for analytics. We would rather tell you plainly than reserve the right in advance and leave you guessing which parts of this page are true.

Children

Wordton is suitable for children and has a page written for parents, but it asks nothing of anyone, of any age: no name, no email, no account. The analytics above counts page views and has no idea who anybody is.

Questions

If something here is unclear or you think the site is doing something this page does not describe, write to contact@wordton.com and we will either fix the site or fix the page.