We do not ask for your real name, phone number, location, or date of birth beyond confirming you meet the minimum age.
Two reasons for everybody: to log you in, and to run the game — drawing the board, counting votes, ranking the ladder, and keeping your record straight from one night to the next.
There's a third that applies only if you ask for it. The nightly digest is one email each morning telling you how your line did the night before — your rank, whether you survived, and whether your streak held. It is opt-in: it starts off, you turn it on yourself on your profile, and turning it off there stops it. Every digest carries an unsubscribe link that works without logging in.
We don't use your address for anything else, we don't send marketing, and we don't track whether you opened a digest or clicked anything in it — open and click tracking are switched off deliberately, partly because we don't want that data and partly because rewriting links would break the sign-in links this address exists to receive.
These are processors acting on our behalf. We do not sell your personal information and we do not share it with advertisers.
When you log in, our authentication provider stores a session token in your browser (cookies and/or local storage) so you stay logged in between visits. That's what it's for and that's all it does. We don't run advertising or cross-site tracking cookies. Clear that storage and you're logged out.
Account data is kept while your account exists.
Lines you post stay with the board they were posted to. When a board is judged, the lines below the cutline are out of the game — they don't carry forward, they can't be voted on again, and they never appear on another night. They do remain visible on that finished board, marked as cut, because that board is the record of what happened that night. Surviving and crowned lines stay too.
Email sysop@whittle.lol to request a copy of your data, or to close your account.
What closing your account does. Your logins are cut, so nobody can sign in as you again — not with the email, not through Discord. Your username is replaced with a placeholder, and the link to your Discord account is removed. What's left is not you: it's a row with no name and no way back to a person.
What it does not do, because you should hear it from us rather than find out. It does not erase the lines you already posted. They stay on the boards that judged them, under the placeholder. We can't pull them out: those boards are how everyone else's streaks and survival records are counted, and removing one person's lines would quietly rewrite other people's history. If you were ever crowned, the crown stays as well.
One more, and it's the one most policies would leave out. The email address you signed up with is held by our login provider, and cutting your logins is what stops it being used — it is not the same as scrubbing it from their records. If that matters to you, say so in the same email and we'll tell you exactly where it stands rather than guess.
Anything other people have shared or screenshotted is outside our control, as it is anywhere.
Depending on where you live you may have further rights over your data — access, correction, erasure, portability, objection. Use the same address. Where we can do the thing, we'll do it; where we can't, we'll tell you why in plain words instead of going quiet.
Whittle is for people aged 16 and over. We don't knowingly collect data from anyone younger; if we find out we have, we close that account the same way as above — logins cut, name replaced — and take out whatever else we can.
If this policy changes materially we'll say so on the site. Questions: sysop@whittle.lol.