Privacy

ather.games is a small independent games site. There are no analytics, no advertising, no tracking pixels, and no third party cookies. Nothing about you is sold or shared. The only cookies here are the ones that keep you signed in, and you only get those if you choose to sign in.

Every game runs without signing in. When you play anonymously, your progress is stored in your own browser and never reaches our server. That includes:

• ather:save:shimmer — your Shimmer save: your character, what you carry, and your progress
• shimmer-voxel (your browser's IndexedDB) — the blocks you have built and dug in your garden and out in the world, and what is in your chests
• ather:mp:name, ather:mp:party, ather:mp:id — your display name, party code, and a random id used so other players in your world can be told apart
• per game settings and high scores, such as manana.best and nolmir.forge.v1

Clearing your browser's site data for ather.games deletes all of it. We cannot recover it, because we never had it.

These are the only cookies this site sets, and every one of them is necessary for something you asked for:

• ather_session — set when you sign in, so you stay signed in. Expires after 30 days. Cannot be read by scripts.
• ather_oauth_state and ather_oauth_next — set for about ten minutes during sign in. One protects the login against request forgery, the other remembers which page to return you to.
• ather_owner — used only by the site owner to reach the map and sprite editors.

There is no consent banner because there is nothing here to consent to. Cookie banners exist for tracking, and this site does not track you.

Signing in is optional. It exists so that a name can be yours, and so friends and shared gardens can work. If you do sign in, Google tells us three things:

• your Google account id, which is how we recognise you next time
• your email address
• your profile picture, if you have one

We store those alongside the username you pick and the friends you add. We do not email you, we do not sell or share any of it, and we do not use it for advertising. Google's own handling of your sign in is covered by Google's privacy policy.

When you are signed in, a copy of your Shimmer save is kept on our server under your account, so it can follow you to another device. The blocks you build in your garden still stay in your browser, unless you join a garden cluster (below).

A garden cluster is something you and signed in friends choose to form, so your gardens sit together. Nothing is shared unless you fold a cluster or sign up to one. While you are in a cluster, our server keeps:

• which cluster you are in and which corner is yours, and the invitations and yeses that are waiting
• your garden's seed and size, so your cluster-mates can see its ground
• a picture of the blocks you have built in your garden, sent from your browser now and then, so your cluster-mates can see it. They can look at it but cannot change it.
• when you were last in the world, so your cluster-mates see your gate station go quiet while you are away. Only the time is kept, never where you were.

Only the other keepers in your cluster can see these. A friend you invite sees the usernames of the keepers already in, and nothing else. Your cluster-mates never see what is in your chests or your bag.

When you take back your corner, your place in the cluster and the picture of your garden are deleted, and the others no longer see them. Deleting your account does the same.

If you post a score to a daily leaderboard, the board stores your display name, your score, and the time, and shows them publicly to anyone who opens that game. Pick a display name you are happy for strangers to see. Boards are kept per day and the older ones fall off.

Like any web server, ours records ordinary request logs, which include IP addresses, so that things can be debugged and abuse can be spotted. These rotate and are discarded within about a week. They are not used to build a profile of you.

This is a family friendly site with no advertising and no profiling, but accounts are not aimed at young children. If your child has signed in and you want the account removed, delete it below or ask and we will.

You can delete your account whenever you want. It removes your account, your username, your friend list, the copy of your Shimmer save, and your place in any garden cluster along with the picture of your garden, all from our server for good. It does not touch the save in your browser, which is yours and which clearing site data will remove.

If what this site stores ever changes, this page changes with it and the date at the top moves.