The short version: Gold Digger asks for no account, keeps your game on your own device, and sells nothing. It does run two standard advertising measurement tags — Google Analytics and the Meta pixel — which do set cookies and are named below. This page explains the boring details, as operated by Screwcap Games, LLC.
We are a game about markets, not a data broker wearing a game as a disguise. There is a difference, and this page is us proving it.
Your game — progress, wallet, settings, track record, believability score, and whether you own the Vault Pass — lives in your browser's local storage on your device. We don't require an account and we don't upload that state to us. Clear your browser data (or use the in-game reset) and it's gone, including from our sight, because it was never ours.
If you post to a leaderboard, we store the display handle and score you submit— and nothing else. No email, name, or contact detail is required to play or to appear on a board. Please don't put personal information in a handle that the whole internet can read.
We use Plausible, a privacy-first, cookieless analytics tool, to see aggregate traffic — page views, referrers, a rough country. It sets no cookies, does not track you across other sites, and collects no personal data. We use those counts only to learn what's working.
We'd like to know whether people enjoy the game. We would not like to know your shoe size, your location to the metre, or what else is open in your tabs. Plausible respects that boundary; that's why it is our primary measurement tool.
Alongside it we run two advertising measurement tags: Google Analytics 4 and the Meta (Facebook) pixel. Unlike Plausible, these do set cookies and can recognise you across other sitesthat use the same tags. We use them for one purpose: to see whether people who arrive from an advertisement go on to actually play, so we don't keep paying for advertising that doesn't work. They receive page views and in-game milestones (a run started, a call made, a debrief reached) — never your name, email, or payment details, because we don't have those.
If you'd rather not be measured this way, both tags are switched off by any standard tracker blocker, and by your browser's “Do Not Track”/anti-tracking protections. The game works identically with them blocked — nothing here is gated on analytics.
Purchases are handled by Gumroad as merchant of record. Your payment details go to Gumroad, not to us — we only receive a license key and confirmation that a valid, un-refunded purchase exists. See Gumroad's own privacy policy for how it treats that data.
The Game links to outside sources — data providers, books, experts — for learning, and some links are affiliate or sponsored links, marked as such where they appear. These are contextual: chosen by topic, not by profiling you. We don't run a behavioural ad network, and no third party gets to auction a slot against what it thinks it knows about you. External sites have their own privacy practices, which are not ours to control. The Vault Pass removes the ad slots entirely.
We don't sell or rent your data, and we don't run behavioural ad networks or real-time bidding against your profile. The Google and Meta tags in section 3 are measurement — counting whether advertising worked — not a licence for anyone to buy your attention based on who you are. There is no shadowy second business model. This is the whole business model: make a good game, sell a Vault Pass, and occasionally recommend a book we actually rate.
The Game isn't directed at children under 13 and we don't knowingly collect their data. If you believe a child provided information — for instance, in a leaderboard handle — email us and we'll remove it promptly.
You can wipe your local data at any time from your browser or the in-game reset. To remove a leaderboard handle, or to ask what (little) we hold, email us. Depending on where you live you may have rights to access, correct, or delete personal data; since we hold almost none, honoring those is refreshingly quick.
If this policy changes, the “last updated” date changes with it. We'll never quietly expand what we collect and hope you don't notice.
andrew@screwcapholdings.com. See also our Terms and Refund Policy.