Privacy Policy

1. Who we are

BoardGameTracks is a web application that generates AI-directed music atmospheres for board game sessions. It is operated by Gilles Closset. Questions can be sent to [email protected].

2. What data we collect

We collect only what is necessary to provide the service:

• Email address — used to identify your account
• Display name — sourced from your Google or Facebook profile if you sign in via OAuth
• Session data — stored server-side to keep you signed in, including the IP address and browser type you signed in from, which we also use to prevent abuse of invitations
• Usage data — which board games you search for and play, stored to power your favourites list
• Profile photo — one you upload, and the profile photo of a Google or Facebook account you sign in with; see section 8
• Game photos — the one photo you may add to a game you recorded; see section 9
• Game history and friends — the plays you record (including the names and scores you enter for the people at the table), your friends list and the invitations you send, including the email address you invite; see section 7

3. How we use your data

• Authenticate you and maintain your session
• Remember your favourite games
• Generate music appropriate to the games you select
• Monitor service costs and reliability (internal only)

We do not sell your data. We do not use it for advertising.

Legal basis. We use your data to provide the service you signed up for (performance of a contract). We also use some of it to prevent abuse, such as limiting how many emails we send and checking profile and game photos before anyone sees them (our legitimate interest in keeping the service safe).

4. Third-party services

• Google Sign-In — if you use it, Google's privacy policy applies to the authentication step
• Facebook Login — same: Meta's privacy policy applies to the authentication step
• BoardGameGeek — game metadata is fetched by our server from BGG's API, with no personal data sent. Game thumbnails are loaded by your browser directly from BGG's image CDN, so BGG sees your IP address — but no referrer and no account data
• OVHcloud — hosts our servers, our database and our file storage (including profile and game photos), in the European Union
• Cloudflare — every request to the site passes through Cloudflare’s network, which protects it and delivers it quickly; Cloudflare sees your IP address
• Resend — sends our emails (confirming your address, password resets, invitations), so it receives the address and the message
• Google Vertex AI — game and genre data is sent to Google's AI APIs to generate music; no personal identifiers are included. Each profile photo, whether you upload it or it comes from your Google or Facebook account, is also sent to Google’s Gemini model on Vertex AI to check it before anyone can see it (section 8), and so is each game photo (section 9)

5. Data retention and deleting your account

We keep your data for as long as your account exists. You can delete your account yourself at any time from your profile (“Delete my account”); it is deleted straight away. You can also ask us by emailing [email protected], and we will delete it within one month.

If you sign up with an email address and a password but never confirm the address, we email you a reminder after 23 days, and after 30 days we delete the account and free its username.

Deleting your account removes your profile, your settings and game library, your listening history, your friends and invitations, your profile photos and the photos on the games you recorded. It also removes the plays you recorded, including the copies you shared with friends: those disappear from their history too. A play someone else recorded stays in their history, and a name they typed for you on it stays theirs.

Your username is kept for one year, linked to nothing else, so that nobody can sign up under it and pass themselves off as you. A few records that are no longer linked to any account also remain: our log of the emails we sent to your address (kept for about two months, to limit and keep count of how many we send), and any invitation another player sent to your address, which belongs to them.

6. Cookies

We use three cookies, all strictly necessary for the site to work (plus a short-lived security cookie, deleted after a few minutes, while you sign in with Google or Facebook):

• Sign-in — keeps you signed in
• Playback session — links your device to the music session you are playing, for 24 hours
• Invitation — remembers an invitation link you opened while you create your account, for up to 30 days

The app also stores your settings and in-progress tools (such as a turn timer or score sheet) on your own device. There are no tracking or advertising cookies, so we do not ask for consent.

7. Sharing a game with the people you played it with

When you record a play and one of the players is a label you have linked to a friend’s account, that friend is offered a copy of it. Nothing reaches them until they accept: before they do, they see only the game, the date, who recorded it and how many people played — never your notes and never anyone’s scores.

If they accept, they get a read-only copy that joins their own game history and their play counters. That copy includes the other players’ names and scores as you recorded them, and the notes you wrote on that play. This applies to plays you recorded before you linked that label as well as after — linking a label to someone shares the history you already have with them, notes included.

On a play they have accepted, they can see the other people who were at that table. For anyone who has also accepted the same play, they see that person’s username and can send them a friend request; everyone else appears as a name only, with no username and no way to contact them. Hiding a play withdraws this — hide it and you disappear from that list again.

You can remove any play you have received from your history at any time, on your own, and its hours and counts leave with it. The person who recorded it keeps their own copy; removing it from your history never changes theirs.

Everyone in a game can react to it and comment on it: the person who recorded it and everyone who accepted it. Comments and reactions are visible to all of them, whether or not they are friends with each other. Someone who has not accepted the play sees none of it, unless it reaches them through Share history (below). Nobody can edit a comment. A comment or reaction is deleted when its author deletes it, when its author deletes their account, or when the person who recorded the game deletes it.

Share history. On You, under Share history, you choose who can see your game history. With Players only, only the people who played a game with you see it. With All my friends (the default; we tell you once, when you first have a friend), each of your friends sees the games you are in, including games they did not play, in their Friends activity (“All friends’ games”) and on your profile page: they see the whole game (the players, scores, notes, comments and reactions, and its photo unless a player keeps it to the players, section 9) and can react and comment too. It covers every game you are in, past and future, and stops the moment you switch back. A game never reaches someone this way if any of its players has blocked them or been blocked by them. It never reaches their digest, and a game you are in never lights their Friends tab: only games they played do.

Your setting also decides whether you are named. With All my friends, the default, everyone who can see a game you are in sees your username. With Players only, anyone who was not at the table with you sees you as an anonymous player (“A player”, “Player 2”), with no username, no photo and no link to you, including on your comments and reactions. The people you played with always see your name. Someone who did not play a game and comments or reacts on it always shows their username, whatever their own setting: there are no anonymous comments from outside the table. If they later lose access, the comments they wrote stay visible to the players; they can still delete them.

We send a daily digest email, on by default, at most once a day and only when there is news: new comments and reactions on your games, friend requests and games waiting for you to accept. It names games and usernames, and never includes comment text or any photo. You turn it off on You, under Email. Account emails (confirming your address, resetting your password, changing your email) are always sent.

A copy someone has already accepted stays in their history if you later unlink the label, remove them as a friend, or block them — blocking stops any future plays and any contact, but it does not reach back into a record they already hold. Removing a received play is the lever for that, and it is always theirs.

8. Profile photos

A profile photo is optional — the default is our meeple. If you choose a photo, whether one you uploaded or the one from your Google or Facebook account, it is shown next to your username to every signed-in player you have not blocked (and who has not blocked you): in username search, friend requests, friends lists, friend pages and on plays you record. It is never shown to anyone who is not signed in.

When you sign in with Google or Facebook, we copy that account’s profile photo and offer it in your photo picker. It is not shown to anyone unless you choose it. We copy it again only when it has changed. If you unlink that Google or Facebook account from ours, the copy is deleted.

Before a photo can be used, it is checked automatically by Google’s Gemini model on Vertex AI, which acts for us as a processor. A photo that is refused is not stored. We keep a record of each upload attempt and its outcome, without the image, for 90 days, to limit abuse.

Any signed-in player who can see your photo can report it. We may remove a photo that breaks our rules, after a report or on our own initiative, and the decision may be made by a person or by automated tools. If we remove your photo, we email you the reason and how to contest it. A player who reported it is never named to you.

You can remove a photo you uploaded at any time from your profile, and it is deleted from our storage straight away. You can stop showing any photo at any time by choosing the meeple. Deleting your account (section 5) removes your photos as well.

9. Game photos

The person who recorded a game can add one photo of it. The people who played and accepted that game see it on its card in Friends, in its conversation and in Game History. When a player shares their games with all their friends (the “Share history” setting, the default), those friends can open the game’s conversation and see its photo too, unless a player keeps it to the players. A player whose Share history is “Players only” keeps it to the players automatically, and every player can choose “Keep to players” or “Let friends see it” for that game; nobody can change another player’s choice. Apart from us, when we review a reported photo (below), the photo is never shown to anyone else, or to anyone who is not signed in. Only the person who recorded the game can replace or remove it.

Please photograph the game and ask before including people: a photo of a person is their personal data. Before anyone else can see a photo, it is checked automatically by Google’s Gemini model on Vertex AI, which acts for us as a processor. A photo that is refused is not stored. Location data and other details the camera adds to the file are removed before it is stored. We keep a record of each upload attempt and its outcome, without the image, for 90 days, to limit abuse.

Anyone who can see a game photo, other than the person who recorded the game, can report it, including because it shows someone who did not agree to it. A reported photo stays visible until a person has reviewed it. If we remove it, we email the person who recorded the game the reason and how to contest it; the person who reported it is never named. To report illegal content, or if you are in a photo and do not use BoardGameTracks, email us at [email protected].

A game photo is deleted from our storage when the person who recorded the game removes it, when they delete the game, and when they delete their account (section 5).

10. Your rights

You have the right to access, correct or delete the personal data we hold about you, to receive a copy of it in a portable format, and to object to how we use it. You can delete your account yourself (section 5); for anything else, email us at [email protected] and we will answer within one month.

If you are not satisfied with our answer, you can complain to the French data protection authority, the CNIL (cnil.fr).

11. Changes to this policy

If we make material changes, we will update the date at the top of this page. Continued use of the service after changes constitutes acceptance.