Connected by Puzzles

Privacy Policy

Last updated 27 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 store a scrambled fingerprint of your connection, made from your IP address and the date, and we use it only to count how many puzzles one connection sends in a 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 keeps no personal data. To count a visit it receives your IP address and what your browser says about itself, which Umami uses to work out the country and to tell one visit from another, and says it does not store. 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. Umami’s script is loaded from our own address, but what it measures, with your IP address and browser details, is passed on to Umami’s own servers, run by Umami Software, which count and store it for us.

Cloudflare, which hosts the site, counts visits too: its Web Analytics script is added to every page at connectedbypuzzles.com. It sets no cookies and stores nothing in your browser. It reports each page view, the referring site and how quickly the page loaded to Cloudflare, which sees your IP address with it, as it does with every request to the site. It is not used for advertising, and it does not follow you to other sites.

Advertising

No advertising runs on this site: no ad network, no advertising cookies and no social media tracking pixels. If that ever changes, this page will name who is involved and what they store before it starts, and where the law requires it, nothing will be stored until you say yes.

Buying a coffee

The tip jar, pinned to the notice board beside the screen where you set up a table, opens a payment page. That page belongs to Stripe, our payment provider, and it opens in a new tab: nothing from Stripe loads on this site, and we never see your card. Stripe tells us only that a payment happened, with its amount and currency and a checkout id, and that is what we keep. Whether you bought a coffee is remembered on your device, in local storage, and nowhere else.

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. To stop one person opening a great many tables at once, the server also keeps your IP address with the table in a scrambled form, made with a secret value so it cannot be turned back into the address, and it goes when the table goes. 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.

Perseverance projects and certificates

A table past 2,000 pieces can end in a certificate, and for that our server keeps a record of it from the first piece. When you start one, it stores the board itself, a random id, the time you started, and your IP address in a scrambled form, made with a secret value so it cannot be turned back into the address. Every fifty pieces you set down, your browser sends a short check, and the server keeps the board as it now stands, a fingerprint of it and the time it arrived. When you finish, you choose the name that goes on the certificate. A certificate is public: anyone with its link can see that name, how many pieces the table held, when it was started and finished, and how many checks the server saw. These records, finished or not, are kept for now with no set end date. To have a certificate or a project removed, write to hello@connectedbypuzzles.com with its link and we will delete it.

What your browser stores

So you can leave a puzzle and come back to it, we save a little information in your browser: the game you are playing on your own, a jigsaw or a game of Jigsaw Solitaire, Jig Rummy, Jigiban or Memory, and the picture you chose for it; a co-op Jigiban level you are building on this device; the small tokens that let you take your seat again at a shared table, and how you arranged your hand at a shared game of Jig Rummy; and your own settings, the lamp and the sound level, and at a shared table whether the chat is open and how loud the voice is. Whether you muted the voice at a table is kept only for that tab. Most of it sits in local storage. A picture you upload yourself is larger, so your browser keeps it in IndexedDB instead. The token an invite link carries moves out of the address bar into storage that belongs to the tab it opens in, and your browser clears it when that tab closes. 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.

The Pieces keeps today’s board and your results (days played, wins and streaks) in local storage on this device in the same way, so a day you started stays where you left it. Clearing this site’s data removes them.

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.