Privacy Policy
Who is responsible for your information
Small-Town Secrets is operated by Small Town Secrets Inc., a corporation incorporated in Ontario, Canada. Small Town Secrets Inc. is the organization responsible for the personal information described in this policy, and is who “we” means throughout it. Questions about your information, or about this policy, go to support@smalltownsecrets.com.
Write to us at Small Town Secrets Inc., 11 Linsmary Court, Markham, Ontario L6E 1L2, Canada.
What we collect
When you join the case list, we store the email address you provide, the page you signed up from, and the time you consented. We use privacy-respecting analytics that do not track you across other sites.
When you play, we store the case work you create and the state the game needs to remember: your Case Notebook, your timeline, the answers you lock in, the tip calls you spend, the suspects you flag and why, the theories you write at the end of each episode, which evidence you have opened, and your detective name and clearance level. It is kept against your account so your desk follows you between devices, and it is not sold, shared, or used to build a profile of you.
Sign-in is handled by Clerk, our authentication provider: your email address, password or passkey, and any two-factor setup live there. If you turn on drop notifications, we store the push subscription your browser issues us; turning them off, revoking the permission in your browser, or deleting your account removes it. Your detective name and points appear on the public leaderboard. Your email address never appears anywhere public.
Cookies
We set three cookies, all first-party, and none of them tracks you across other sites. Neither is used for advertising, and we set no third-party cookies at all: there is no advertising pixel, no social widget and no tracking script anywhere on this site.
The first, sts_early_access, remembers that you entered a valid early access code, so the coming-soon door stays open for you. It holds a one-way hash of the code and lasts thirty days.
The second, sts_src, remembers which link brought you here: a short campaign name such as ig-launch, an optional campaign and creative label if the link carried one, and the date you arrived. That is all it holds. It contains no identifier of any kind, so it cannot be used to recognise you, single you out or follow you: two people who clicked the same link on the same day carry identical cookies. We keep it for ninety days, because the gap between seeing a post and coming back can be weeks. It is set once, on your first visit, and is not overwritten afterwards. If you later create an account, the campaign name is stored against it so we can tell which posts bring people who stay. We use it to count, never to target: it is never shared with anyone, never sold, and never sent to another company.
The third, sts_text_size, remembers that you asked for larger type. It is set only when you choose a size on your account page, and it holds one word: large or larger. Nothing else, and no identifier of any kind. It exists so the page can be drawn at your size straight away instead of appearing small and then jumping. Setting the size back to Default deletes it. We keep it for a year.
Alongside those cookies we keep two plain tallies: how many times each campaign link was followed on a given day, and how many times the share button was pressed. Neither records who, or anything about them: no account, no session, no address, no device. They are counts, so two people who followed the same link on the same day are one number and cannot be told apart in it. Separately, if you choose to answer the four questions we ask on your account page once you have finished the free episode, those answers and anything you write with them are kept with your account, read without your name beside them, and erased when you delete your account. Answering is optional and closing the card records nothing.
Separately, we sometimes ask what you thought of a case: a rating out of five at the end of a season, and a box where you can write a line about it. The rating and anything you write are kept with your account and erased when you delete it, the same as everything above. The one difference is how you send them. There are two buttons under the box: one sends your words to us and stops there, and the other says we may put those words on this site next to your detective name, and only then may we. Nothing appears anywhere until somebody here has read it, we never print a rating or a comment you did not agree to, and you can take that permission back at any time from your account page, which takes the words off the site.
Who else touches it
A small number of services help us run the game, each seeing only what its job requires: Clerk (sign-in), Stripe (payments), Resend (email delivery), Vercel (hosting and cookieless page analytics), Neon (the database), and Cloudflare (file storage for the case art). When something breaks we also receive an error report through Sentry, configured to skip session replay and personal identifiers. None of them may use your data for their own purposes.
The how-to videos on How to Play and How it works are served from our own media domain, and set no cookies.
How we use it
We email you about new episode drops and season news. We do not sell your data. Under Canada’s CASL and the GDPR, we rely on your explicit consent, which you may withdraw at any time: every email carries a one-click unsubscribe link at the bottom, and your mail app’s own unsubscribe button works too. Withdrawing consent stops all marketing mail; purchase receipts and refund confirmations still send, as the law requires.
How we use your case work
We read what players write, and we use it to make the next case better. A season is written blind otherwise: without knowing which evidence people found, which suspects they doubted, or where they got stuck, we would be guessing at whether a story worked.
Four commitments about how we do that:
- We work from the whole audience first. Counts and patterns, such as how many people suspected someone in a given week, come before anyone reads an individual note.
- When we do read what someone wrote, it reaches our writers without your name or email attached, unless you have asked us to look at your account for support.
- We will not publish anything you wrote where other people can see it, or quote you in our own marketing, without asking you first and getting a yes.
- We do not sell it, and we do not hand it to advertisers.
If you delete your account, your case work goes with it and is not read again. Counts we had already worked out, such as how many people answered a question correctly, do not identify you and stay as they are. If you had agreed to let us quote you, that quote comes off the site when your account goes, without you having to ask us twice.
Trying new features
Sometimes we try a new way to work the case before it is finished. We only ever do this with signed-in players.
- The Forensics Lab. Join from your account page to get unfinished features early. We may ask what you think. You can leave, or switch a feature off, at any time from the same page.
- Gradual rollouts. When a feature is nearly ready, we may switch it on for a share of signed-in accounts first. Which accounts is decided by a scrambled code made from your account, not by anything about you, and it stays the same each visit.
- What we measure. We compare groups, not people. The commitments in “How we use your case work” apply.
- Everyone plays the same case. A trial never changes what is scored, how it is scored, or what evidence you can see.
- Visitors who aren’t signed in are never included, and we set no cookie for this.
- Anything you tell us from a Lab page is stored with your account and is deleted with it.
Your rights
You can request access to, correction of, or deletion of your data at any time, and deletion is self-serve: sign in and use Delete my account on your account page. It erases your account, your Case Notebook, your timeline, your locked answers, your tip calls, your scores, your final theory, your push subscriptions, your leaderboard entry, and your sign-in record at Clerk, immediately and permanently. We also delete your customer record at Stripe, which removes your name, email, and stored card there. The one thing we keep is a scrambled fingerprint of your email address, so that a message is never sent to it again.
Stripe retains the transaction records tax and accounting law requires; they record the payments, not your case work. For a copy of your data, a correction, or a deletion you’d rather we performed for you, email support@smalltownsecrets.com - we act within 30 days.
Fiction disclaimer
Small-Town Secrets is a work of fiction. Bellweather, its residents, businesses, and all case materials are invented for entertainment. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, or to actual events, is coincidental.