PRIVACY NEEDLE PLAY · LEARNING RESOURCES
Your game privacy and local progress
Spot the Phishing does not require registration, an email address or real account credentials. When you choose to remember progress, non-sensitive game records stay in this browser. The game also requests public article metadata from Privacy Needle and may cache it. Hosting providers receive ordinary web requests. Analytics and advertising are disabled in this release.
Local game records
When Remember progress is enabled, localStorage can hold the current mission order, completed decisions, selected clues, active time, settings, achievements and personal bests. These are non-sensitive training records stored in the browser, not real messages or account credentials.
Turning Remember progress off removes the saved progress record while the current visit can continue in memory. Private browsing, blocked storage, another browser or another device may make earlier progress unavailable. There is no account-based synchronisation.
Article requests and cached metadata
The game requests public post metadata from privacyneedle.com when opened and checks again every five minutes while visible. An ordinary network request exposes information such as the requesting IP address to the receiving website and hosting infrastructure. Your game decisions are not sent with that article request.
Article titles, descriptions, public links, the last successful refresh time and the previous card selection may be stored locally. This cache lets the reading centre show saved publication articles when a live request fails. An article link opens the publisher’s website, where that website’s own privacy rules apply.
Advertising and your choices
Privacy Needle Play uses Google AdSense display advertising on its public standalone website, including placements around the game. Google and its advertising partners may process your IP address, browser and device information, cookies or similar identifiers to deliver ads, prevent fraud and measure performance. Depending on your location, choices and consent, advertising may be personalised, non-personalised or limited.
Ads are separate from the training messages and decision controls. Your fictional case answers, score and saved game records are not sent by our game code as advertising targeting parameters. Google may independently process ordinary interaction and advertising data. Clearing game progress does not delete advertising cookies or revoke an advertising consent choice.
Use Privacy & cookie settings to reopen an available Google consent message. If no message is available for your visit, you can use Google My Ad Center, your browser cookie controls and Google’s explanation of data use on partner sites. Consent messages and regional ad serving are managed by the publisher through Google Privacy & messaging.
Optional engagement analytics
Publisher GA4 engagement analytics remains disabled in this release. No GA4 measurement ID is configured. AdSense may still collect its own advertising and performance data as described above.
If analytics is enabled in a later release, a visitor opt-in setting is required before engagement events are sent. Permitted event fields are limited to game identifiers, difficulty, case identifiers, score, accuracy and article identifiers. The event code does not send names, email addresses, passwords, session tokens or message contents.
Hosting and ordinary web access
Cloudflare or another hosting provider may process request and security logs when serving this website. Provider handling is separate from locally stored training progress. Browser and network settings can also affect storage and requests.
The public standalone game has no built-in sign-in. A separate private review deployment, if used before launch, may have its host’s access gate.
Clear the saved records
- Open the game’s Settings tab.
- Select Clear local progress and confirm.
- The game removes its saved mission, preferences, achievements, best scores and cached article selection from that browser.
You can also clear site data through the browser’s settings. For publication privacy information or a question about this game, see Privacy Needle’s privacy policy or contact the publisher.