Last updated 17 August 2026
Vowelsweeper is run by UNSEEN FORMS LIMITED. There is no advertising, no third-party analytics, and no tracking scripts on the page. This notice covers Vowelsweeper and every other site we run under the Perfect Sharp name, because they share one account system.
The data controller is UNSEEN FORMS LIMITED, a company registered in England and Wales (company no. 14395660), registered office: 11 Duchy Road, Harrogate, North Yorkshire, HG1 2EZ. Contact: hi@perfectsharp.games.
There is no cookie banner because playing sets no cookies at all. A cookie is set in exactly one situation: when you deliberately sign in, either to an account or to the admin area. It holds a session reference and nothing else, and it is what keeps you signed in. Visiting, reading and playing never set one.
The game stores a few things in your browser's local storage. These stay on your device and are not sent anywhere except as described below:
Clearing your browser storage erases all of it, including your streak. Unless you have an account, there is no copy on our servers to restore from.
When you play, one row is written recording: the date of the puzzle, when you started and finished, how long you took, how many squares you opened and flagged, how many clues you used, whether you solved it or hit a vowel, the random browser token described above, and the country your connection is in.
We also keep an anonymous count of a small, fixed list of events, such as a page being viewed or a result being shared, together with a broad category for how you arrived, for example "search" or "social". The web address you came from never leaves your device: only that category is sent.
Everything above is anonymous. Leagues are the single place where a player without an account chooses to give us something about themselves, and none of it happens unless you start or join one. If you do, we store the name you pick to play under, which league you are in, when you joined and if you left, and one row per day recording what you scored and how that score was made up.
Other members of that league see the name you chose and your daily scores. Nobody outside the league can see either: reading a league's table requires being in it.
The name you pick cannot be changed afterwards. A name that moves part-way through a week makes that week's table impossible to read, so there is no way to edit it. If you want a different one, leave and ask the league's owner to invite you back. The owner can also remove anybody from their own league. A league's own name is different and can be changed by whoever created it; we keep a record of every name it has had, so that a report made against an older name can still be matched to it. A blocked name cannot be changed at all, or renaming would be a way out of a moderation decision.
If you have no account, your league identity is tied to the random token in your browser. Clearing your browser storage therefore loses your place, and the invite link is the way back in. If you want a league record erased, write to us with the league's join code and the name you played under.
An account is optional and exists to carry a subscription and your history between devices. If you create one we store your email address, a display name if you choose one, which devices you have signed in on, and the days you have finished in each game. One account covers every game we run.
Signing in is by a link emailed to you. We store only a one-way hash of that link's token, never the token itself, so our database cannot be used to sign in as you. Links expire and work once.
Payment is handled by Stripe. We never see or store your card details. What we keep is the customer and subscription reference Stripe gives us, the currency and amount you were charged, and the date your access runs to. If you choose to appear on the supporters page, the display name you pick there is public; nothing else about your account ever is.
Mail to any address at our domains reaches one inbox that a person reads. We keep those messages so we can reply and so we have a record of what was asked, particularly for reports and complaints. Do not send us anything sensitive that we have not asked for.
Without an account there is no persistent identifier held about you on the server. To tell one play from another we compute a one-way fingerprint from your IP address, your browser family, and a secret that we rotate every 90 days. It cannot be reversed into an IP address, it is never shared, and it stops meaning anything once the secret rotates.
Your IP address is used to look up a country and is held only in a lookup cache, which is deleted after 30 days. Your IP address is not stored on the record of your play. Only the two-letter country code is.
For play records and event counts, our lawful basis is legitimate interests: knowing how many people play, how hard a puzzle turned out to be, and roughly where players are, so the games can be run and improved. It is a small, fixed set of measurements, none of which identifies you, and it cannot be used to contact you.
For accounts and payment, the basis is performance of a contract: we cannot give you something you have paid for without knowing who you are. For keeping records of reports and complaints, it is our legal obligation and our legitimate interest in running a service people are safe on.
Event records are deleted after 90 days. The country lookup cache is deleted after 30 days. Play records are kept while the game runs, because they are what the daily comparison and the puzzle statistics are built from. League memberships and scores are kept while the league exists, because they are its history: leaving a league keeps your past scores in it, which is what stops other members' past results changing when somebody departs. Account records are kept while the account exists and for as long afterwards as we need them for tax and accounting, which is six years for anything relating to a payment.
We take a nightly backup of our databases, which is deleted after 30 days. A record you ask us to erase may therefore persist in a backup for up to that long before it ages out.
There are no advertising networks, no analytics providers and no data brokers involved. We use these processors and no others:
You have the right to ask what is held about you, to have it corrected or erased, to object to it being processed, and to receive it in a portable form. If you have an account, ask us using the address it is registered to. If you do not, nothing here identifies you by name, so we will usually need the browser token described above to find anything at all, and once your browser storage is cleared we cannot connect any record to you. Write to hi@perfectsharp.games.
You can also complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk.
If we start storing something new, this page changes in the same release. The date at the top is when it was last changed.