Privacy Policy

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.

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.

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.

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.