Privacy Policy
Gizmos Inc. is the trading name of Kevin Terry, a sole proprietor in Robbinsville Township, NJ 08691, United States. "We" means Kevin Terry, doing business as Gizmos Inc. This policy covers gizmos-inc.com and our games: WordWeld (wordweld.com), WordWarren (wordwarren.com), WordMortar (wordmortar.com), WordYarns (wordyarns.com) and WordCobble (wordcobble.com). Questions, or to ask us to delete something: [email protected].
The short version
- To play, you give a nickname. That is all we ask of players, of any age. There are no player accounts.
- If you buy a pass, the payment is handled by Stripe; we never see your card. We keep a record of the pass.
- If you tick "Email me when there's a new game or a new feature" (never ticked for you), we keep your email address and the exact words you agreed to, until you unsubscribe.
- We use no advertising, no analytics trackers and no tracking cookies.
- Some games use AI (Anthropic's Claude) to write lines. We send it the words of the game, never your name.
What we collect, and why
When you play
| What | Why | How long |
|---|---|---|
| The nickname you type, your score and how the game went | To run the game, show results, and see how the games are used | Two years, then the nickname is removed and only counts are kept |
| The words you play or type in a game (answers, bluffs, story blanks) | They are the game | Kept with that game's history (as above). WordYarns keeps the answers typed and which were picked, after two years too, not tied to which player wrote them (the table's nicknames sit beside them until they are removed). It does not store a story its narrator wrote, but a free table's story is one of our own kept stories, so with the answers it can be put back together. WordWeld keeps the words of its 60 most recent games. |
| Which link brought you (for example a social post or a friend's share link: "UTM tags") | To learn which ways of finding us work | With the game's history (two years) |
| A random identifier for your device or household, kept in your browser | To recognise your TV and your phone, and to hold your pass | While you use it; the TV home forgets a household unseen for 400 days |
| A hashed network address, when a free pass is used | To allow one free pass per network every 30 days. Your IP address is turned into a one-way code (salted SHA-256, shortened); the address itself is not kept | With the pass record (below) |
| Roughly where you are playing from: city, state or region, and country | So we can see where the games are played. Cloudflare works it out from your IP address; we keep only the place names, never the address | With the game's history (two years), removed with the nickname |
| Your IP address, for a moment | To limit how fast anyone can try things (rate limiting); in memory only, never written down | Until the game restarts |
When you buy a pass
Stripe takes your payment and your email address and sends your receipt; Stripe's privacy policy covers what it holds. We keep: the pass, its kind (3 or 30 days, for one game or for every game), when it was issued, started and ends, the household it belongs to, the link that brought you, Stripe's references for the payment, and what was paid. How long: as long as the pass can be used, and then seven years, for our accounting and tax records.
Your pass code (on your phone and in your receipt) restores your pass on any device. Anyone who has the code can use it, so keep it private. We never show it on a TV.
When you join the mailing list
Only if you tick the box (it is never ticked for you, and it is offered only to buyers, who are adults). We keep your email address, when you agreed, the exact words you saw, and which game you were playing. You can unsubscribe at any time from any email we send, or on each game's unsubscribe page; we keep the record that you agreed and that you left, as proof. We have not sent any marketing email yet. When we do, it will go through a mail service that we will name here first.
When you send a suggestion
The text you write, the nickname you were playing under, the game and the screen you were on. How long: one year.
On the TV home (gizmos-inc.com/tv)
Your TV and your phones, so a TV can be steered by your phone: random identifiers and the names you give them ("Living room"). Secrets are stored only in scrambled (hashed) form. How long: until you remove them, or 400 days after we last see them.
Server logs
Our servers keep technical logs (the address of each request, its time, and errors) to keep the games running and find problems. How long: 90 days. Our own logs do not record your IP address; Cloudflare's do (below).
What we do not do
- We do not sell or rent your information.
- We do not show ads, and we use no advertising or analytics trackers.
- We do not ask players for their age, real name, location, contact details (the rough location above comes from Cloudflare, never from asking) or anything beyond a nickname.
Children
Anyone may play: families play together. Players give only a nickname, which need not be a real name, and we ask nothing else of them. Buying a pass and joining the mailing list are for adults (18 or over) only. If you believe a child has given us an email address or other personal information, tell us at [email protected] and we will delete it.
Who else handles information
| Who | What for | What they see |
|---|---|---|
| Cloudflare | Delivers every page and protects the sites | Every request, including your IP address, under Cloudflare's privacy policy |
| Stripe | Payments, receipts, sales tax (Stripe Tax) | What you give at checkout; the pass details we attach (game, kind, pass code, household identifier, campaign) |
| Anthropic (Claude) | Writes some lines: WordWeld's Foreman, WordMortar's Old Reg, WordCobble's Cobbler, WordYarns' narrator | The words of the game. For WordYarns: the blanks' answers, unattributed, and, if the host uses "Make it about us", the occasion and inside jokes the host types, which can name real people. Never player nicknames. Under Anthropic's commercial terms, it does not use this to train its models. |
| Backblaze (B2) | Our nightly backups | Encrypted files only; Backblaze cannot read them. Kept 35 days. |
| Zoho | Our own email ([email protected]) | Messages you send us |
| Your browser or device | Reading lines aloud | Some games use your device's own voices; on some devices those voices are an online service run by your device's maker |
Fonts are served by our own sites; no font service sees you.
Storage in your browser
We set one kind of cookie: when a phone hosts a game or joins a household's TV, the game (or gizmos-inc.com's TV home) sets a cookie holding that phone's sign-in for the household, so its pass is not lost when a browser clears its storage. It is used for nothing else: no tracking, no advertising, never shared. It lasts about 400 days from the phone's last use. The owner's own admin pages also have one. Each game keeps a few things in your browser's local storage so it works: your nickname, your current game, your device or household identifier, your pass code if you have one, which link brought you, and settings such as sound and theme. Clearing your browser's site data removes them.
Your choices and rights
You can ask us to tell you what we hold about you, to correct it, or to delete it: [email protected]. Because players have no accounts, tell us your nickname, the game, roughly when you played, or your pass code, so we can find it. We answer every such request, wherever you live. We sell passes in the United States only.
Security
Connections are encrypted (HTTPS). Secrets are stored hashed; backups are encrypted before they leave our server. No system is perfectly secure; if something goes wrong that affects you, we will tell you.
Changes
We will post changes here with a new date. If a change is significant, the games will say so.
Last updated: November 1, 2026.