Privacy Policy

Who is responsible

The controller for data processing on this website, within the meaning of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), is:

Compu Global Hyper Meganet UG
Badberg 5
92360 Mühlhausen
Germany
hello@playnook.io

Full company details are in our imprint.

Server log files

When your browser requests a page, our web server records that request. This is the only data collection that happens automatically on this site. Each entry contains:

• your IP address
• the date and time of the request
• the address of the page or file requested
• the amount of data transferred and whether the request succeeded
• the browser and operating system your browser reports
• the page you came from, if your browser sends one

Purpose and legal basis. We use these entries to operate the site securely and to find faults — a page that stops working, or a server under attack, is visible in the log and nowhere else. We also produce anonymous daily totals from them, described below. The legal basis is Article 6(1)(f) GDPR, our legitimate interest in a functioning and secure website and in knowing roughly how it is used.

Retention. Log files are deleted automatically after 14 days. We do not combine them with any other data, and we do not use them to identify individual visitors.

Anonymous usage statistics

Once a night, our server reads the log files described above and reduces them to daily totals. There is no tracking script, no cookie and no pixel involved in this: it happens on our own server, after the fact, from data the web server had already written down.

What the daily totals contain:

• how many visits there were, per day and per hour
• how many came from each country
• which pages and games were opened, and how often
• whether visitors arrived from a search engine, an advertisement, or directly
• how often each Amazon product link was followed, and from which country

What they do not contain: anything about you as a person.Your IP address is used once, to look up the country, and is then discarded — it is never written into these totals. To count “visits” rather than requests, the server derives a short check number from your IP address and browser, counts it, and throws it away; a random value that changes every day is mixed in, so the same visitor on two different days produces two unrelated check numbers. Nothing in the result can be traced back to a person or followed from one day to the next.

Country lookup. The IP-to-country database is a local file on our own server (DB-IP, CC-BY 4.0). Your IP address is not sent anywhere for this.

Retention. The anonymous daily totals are kept for one year and then deleted. The underlying log files are still deleted after 14 days, as described above.

Hosting, and where the server stands

This site runs on a virtual server rented from Hostinger International Ltd.. The server is located in the United States, which means the log data described above is processed outside the European Union.

A transfer to a third country requires safeguards under Chapter V of the GDPR. These are provided by the data processing agreement with our hosting provider, including the standard contractual clauses adopted by the European Commission. You can request a copy of the relevant documentation from us at any time.

Cookies: one of ours, one of Google’s — and only after you choose

This site itself sets a single cookie, pn_consent, which records whether you clicked Accept or Reject in the banner. Storing that choice does not itself require your consent — Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR, our legitimate interest in not asking you twice — and it holds nothing beyond the word “granted” or “denied”. Our cookie policy explains this in more detail, including the local storage the games use.

No analytics. One advertising tag, gated by consent.

We run no web analytics of any kind — no visitor statistics, no heat maps, no session recording. There are no social media buttons and no embedded videos or maps. Fonts and images are served from our own server.

There is one third party, and we would rather name it plainly than bury it. This site loads the Google Ads tag (gtag.js) from googletagmanager.com on every visit, using Google’s Consent Mode v2. Until you accept it in the banner, the tag is set to “denied” and may not store or read a cookie in your browser — it can at most send an anonymous, aggregated signal. Only once you click Accept may it store an identifier and transmit your IP address, the page you are on and the time to Google, whose servers are partly in the United States, so that a visit arriving from one of our adverts can be matched to what happens afterwards.

It measures nothing else about you for us. We do not see your name, we build no profile, and we do not combine it with anything. The legal basis for running it at all is our legitimate interest in knowing whether our own advertising works (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR); the legal basis for the cookie it may set is your consent (Art. 6(1)(a) GDPR), given or withheld in the banner.

Rejecting in the banner, or any ad-blocking or tracking-protection setting in your browser, stops the cookie entirely. Nothing on this site depends on it: every game and every tool works exactly the same either way. Google publishes its own description of the data at policies.google.com/privacy.

The games are self-contained files hosted by us. They do not send anything anywhere while you play.

Amazon product pictures

On some pages — mainly the printable boards — there is a small block of Amazon affiliate links, marked as such. If you buy something after following one, we receive a commission; it does not change what you pay.

The product pictures in that block are loaded from Amazon’s own servers (m.media-amazon.com), because that is the only way the affiliate programme supplies them. That means your IP address reaches Amazon when such a picture loads, along with the page you are on. The pictures are set to load only when they come into view, so if you do not scroll down to the block, nothing is requested and Amazon learns nothing.

Amazon sets no cookie on this site. If you follow one of the links, Amazon sets its own cookies on its own site, under its own privacy policy — the same as if you had typed the address yourself.

Local storage in the games

Some games remember small settings in your browser’s local storage — whether sound is switched on, your best score, how far you got, and whether you have already seen the help screen. Examples of what is stored:

• chess-muted — sound on or off
• inlay-best — your highest score in that game
• crates-progress — which levels you have finished

This information stays on your device. It is never transmitted to us or to anyone else, and it contains nothing that identifies you. You can delete it at any time by clearing your browser’s site data for playnook.io.

The diagram tools

Positions you build in our diagram tools are not stored on any server. The whole position travels in the address bar, which is what makes a link to a diagram work — and what means we never see the diagrams you build unless you send us one yourself.

If you write to us

When you send us an email, we process your address and whatever you write in order to answer you. The legal basis is Article 6(1)(b) GDPR where your message concerns a contract, and otherwise Article 6(1)(f) GDPR, our legitimate interest in responding to enquiries. We keep correspondence for as long as the matter requires and delete it once statutory retention periods have expired.

Your rights

Under the GDPR you have the right to:

• ask what data we hold about you (Article 15)
• have inaccurate data corrected (Article 16)
• have data erased (Article 17)
• have processing restricted (Article 18)
• receive your data in a portable format (Article 20)
• object to processing based on legitimate interests, including the log files described above (Article 21)

Write to hello@playnook.io and we will deal with it. In practice there is rarely anything on our side to hand over: with no accounts and no tracking script, a visit leaves us nothing but a log line that is gone within two weeks, plus a set of anonymous totals that were never tied to you in the first place. What the advertising tag sends to Google is held by Google, and their own tools are the place to ask about it.

Complaints

If you believe we are handling your data unlawfully, you can complain to a data protection supervisory authority. The authority responsible for us is the Bavarian Data Protection Authority (Bayerisches Landesamt für Datenschutzaufsicht), and you may also contact the authority where you live.

Changes to this policy

If we change how the site works — adding a feature that needs cookies, for example — we will update this page before that change goes live.