Connected by Puzzles

Privacy Policy

Last updated 23 September 2026

Connected by Puzzles is a free online jigsaw you play in your browser, at connectedbypuzzles.com. We built it to ask as little of you as possible, and that includes your data. This page explains what little we handle, and what we do not.

The short version

No account, no sign-up

There is nothing to register. You open a table and play. Because there are no accounts, we hold no profile, no login, and no contact details for you unless you choose to write to us.

Your pictures stay on your device

When you choose a photo of your own to build, it is stored only in your browser, on the device you are using. It is never sent to our servers, and in a two-player game it is never sent to the other player either. Only the positions of the puzzle pieces travel between the two of you, never the picture underneath them. A private picture is safe to put on the table.

Puzzles you send us

When you send us a puzzle you built, we store the puzzle itself and, only if you typed one, a display name. To keep the letterbox from being flooded we also keep a scrambled, day-scoped fingerprint of your connection that we cannot turn back into an address and that goes stale the next day. Puzzles we pick appear on the site with the name you gave; the rest are cleaned out now and then.

Analytics

To understand roughly how many people visit and which pages they reach, we use Umami, a privacy-friendly analytics tool. It sets no cookies and does not collect personal data. It records aggregate, anonymous figures such as page views, the country a visit came from, the referring site, and the kind of browser used. None of this identifies you, and it is not combined into a profile or shared for advertising. Alongside it we now run Google Analytics, and it is the reason this page changed. An advertising partner asked for it before they will consider the site, and unlike the tool above it sets cookies, which are named on our cookies page. They let it tell a returning visitor from a new one, so one person is not counted as several. It records the same sort of thing: pages seen, the country a visit came from, the referring site, the kind of device. We have switched its advertising features off, so it is not used to build an advertising profile of you and it does not follow you to other sites. Umami is loaded from our own address and nothing it records leaves it. Google Analytics is loaded from our address too, but where it sends what it measures is decided by Google rather than by us: from Europe it goes straight to a European Google address, a rule Google applies for European data protection, and from elsewhere it comes back through ours.

Advertising

Our advertising partner is Ezoic. Its scripts load on every page. Ads can appear around the game, on the reading pages and beside the menu where you choose a picture or wait for someone, but never on the board while you play. No ad sits over the puzzle, and no ad opens a new window or covers the page. To choose and measure ads, Ezoic and the advertising partners it works with can store cookies on your device, read a device identifier, and use your IP address and what your browser tells them. They show ads chosen for you only if you agree. Where the law requires consent, in the EEA, the UK and Switzerland, Ezoic shows its own notice before any of this happens, and your answer there also decides whether Google Analytics may set its cookies. Ezoic also measures visits for its own reports. How Ezoic handles data is set out in its own privacy policy.

Playing with someone

If you open a shared table and invite another person, the two browsers are connected through a real-time server so the same pieces stay in sync. That server also holds the table itself: where the pieces are, and an optional display name if you type one. It is kept there so either of you can close the tab and come back to the same puzzle, and it is deleted two days after the last piece moves, or shortly after you finish the picture. Nothing from it is kept after that, and none of it is attached to a name or an account. Chat is not part of that. A message passes through the server to the other seat and is never stored: the server keeps only a count of how many were sent, never anything of what they said. Piece movements, and voice if you turn it on, try to travel directly between the two browsers. To find that direct path, your browser asks public STUN servers run by Google and by Cloudflare how it can be reached, which means they see your IP address. Usually the connection is then direct. When a direct path cannot be made, it is relayed through Cloudflare instead, and the pieces and the audio pass through that relay.

What your browser stores

So you can leave a puzzle and come back to it, we save a little information in your browser: the puzzle you are building on your own, a jigsaw or a game of Jigsaw Solitaire, the picture you chose for it, the small tokens that let you take your seat again at a shared table, and your own settings, the lamp and the sound level. Most of it sits in local storage. A picture you upload yourself is larger, so your browser keeps it in IndexedDB instead. A shared table is the one thing that is not stored here. It lives on the server described above, and the token is only the key to your seat at it, not a copy of the pieces. All of this stays on your device, is not used to track you, and you can remove it at any time by clearing this site's data in your browser.

Hosting

The site and its real-time server run on Cloudflare. Like any web host, Cloudflare processes basic technical information such as your IP address to deliver the pages and protect the service from abuse. Setting up a table for two also runs a Cloudflare Turnstile check, a quiet test that you are a person and not a bot. It loads a small script from Cloudflare, it is not advertising, and it does not follow you to other sites. All of this is handled under Cloudflare's own terms and privacy policy.

Children

Connected by Puzzles is a gentle, general-audience site and is not directed at young children. We do not knowingly collect any personal information from anyone, of any age.

Your choices and rights

Because we hold essentially no personal data about you, there is very little to access, correct, or delete. You stay in control of what lives on your device, and you can clear it whenever you like. If you have a question about your privacy, you are welcome to contact us and we will help.

Changes to this policy

If we change how the site handles data, we will update this page and the date at the top. The current version is always the one you are reading here.

Contact

Questions about privacy? Write to hello@connectedbypuzzles.com.