Last updated August 19, 2026
PuzzlPeace is operated by White Elm LLC. Questions about anything on this page go to privacy@puzzlpeace.com.
I do not set cookies. There is no account to make. I do not know your name, and nothing here builds a profile of you or follows you to another site.
I do count page views, because running a review site without knowing which reviews get read is writing into a void. The counter is described in full in the next section, and the short version is that it counts visits rather than visitors.
The one thing here attached to a person is the signup form at the bottom of the reviews. If you type your email address into it, I have your email address, because that is the entire point of it. Nothing on this site asks you for anything else, and reading every page here without filling it in leaves me with a number you are part of and nothing that says it was you.
The typefaces are served from this site rather than from a font network, so reading a page here does not quietly call a third party for the lettering.
That is the whole of it for anything I control. The rest of this page is about the services underneath the site, which see things I do not.
Pages here load Vercel Web Analytics, which is about a kilobyte of script and the only JavaScript this site runs. It records that a page was loaded, roughly where in the world from, what kind of device, and which site you arrived from if any.
What it does not do is the part that matters. It sets no cookie and stores no identifier on your device, so there is nothing to read back on your next visit and no way to join today's visit to the last one. That is also why there is no consent banner on this site: there is nothing to consent to storing.
I use it to see which reviews people actually read, which tells me what to build next. I cannot use it to find you, and neither can I sell it, because there is no person in it to sell.
| Service | Why it is here | What it can see |
|---|---|---|
| Vercel | Hosts the site, serves every page, and runs the page counter. | IP address, browser and device string, the page requested, and the time, written to a standard server access log. Through Web Analytics it also counts the page load itself, with an approximate country, device type and referring site, and no cookie or stored identifier. |
| YouTube (Google) | Embeds the build timelapse on reviews that have one, and serves the thumbnail image for each entry on the builds page. | IP address, and which review or build the embed or thumbnail sits on, once you scroll far enough to load it. No tracking cookie unless you press play. |
| Buttondown | Runs the mailing list, receives the signup form directly when you submit it, and holds replies to anything it sends. | The email address you type in, your IP address and the time you signed up, and afterwards which emails you were sent. If you reply to one of those emails, your reply goes to Buttondown rather than to my own mailbox, and it is stored there against your subscription. |
| Namecheap | Forwards mail sent to the address on this page. | Anything you put in an email to me, in transit. |
| Google Workspace | The mailbox that forwarded mail lands in. | Your email address and whatever you wrote, stored until I delete it. |
Every website has a server, and a server writes down who asked it for what. Vercel keeps those access logs on its own schedule and under its own policy. I do not pull reports from them; the page counts I do look at come from the analytics described above, which is a separate thing with far less in it.
A review with a build timelapse embeds it from youtube-nocookie.com. That domain means no tracking cookie is set unless you actually press play. It does not mean the embed is invisible: when you scroll far enough for it to load, Google sees your IP address and which page you were on, whether or not you watch anything.
The embed sits at the bottom of the review, below the score and the whole write up, so a reader who does not scroll that far never loads it at all. That placement is deliberate, and it is the reason there is no video at the top of any review.
Some reviews link to the shop that sells the puzzle. Following one of those links takes you to a company I do not run, and from that point their policy applies, not mine. Where a link is commercial it is marked as such on the review itself, and the disclosures page explains what that means and who I have a relationship with.
I do not track which links get clicked. If an affiliate program ever reports a sale back to me, what I see is a number, not a person.
The signup form posts your address straight to Buttondown, who run the list. It does not pass through this site on the way, and there is no script on the page watching you type it. Buttondown holds your address, the time you signed up and the IP address you signed up from, and afterwards which emails went out to you.
I use it to send you the guide and to tell you when a new review goes up. I do not sell it, I do not swap it, and I do not upload it anywhere to be matched against an advertising audience. Every email has an unsubscribe link, and using it removes you without going through me.
Replying to one of those emails is worth knowing about, because the reply does not land in my own mailbox. It goes to Buttondown, where it is stored against your subscription and where I read it. That is deliberate rather than a shortcut: a reply about a puzzle should not end up buried in the same inbox as everything else, and it means I can actually answer you. If you would rather write to me directly instead, the addresses on this page do not go through Buttondown at all.
Mail to privacy@puzzlpeace.com is forwarded by Namecheap into a Google Workspace mailbox, where I read it and where it stays until I delete it. I use what you send to answer you. I do not add you to anything, and there is nothing here to add you to.
Readers in the EU, the UK and California have a legal right to ask what personal data a site holds on them, to get a copy, and to have it deleted. That right is easy to honor here, because for a reader who has only read, the answer is that I hold nothing. If you have emailed me, what I hold is that email. If you are on the mailing list, what I hold is your address and the record of what was sent to you. Either one gets deleted if you ask.
Write to privacy@puzzlpeace.com and say what you want. You do not need to cite a regulation at me.
This site is not directed at children, and I do not knowingly take an email address from one. If a child has signed up here, write to me and I will delete the record. The page counter holds nothing that could identify a child, or anyone else.
If this policy changes, the date at the top changes with it, and the change is a commit in the site's public history. A policy that quietly rewrites itself is the same problem as a score that quietly changes, and this site does not do either.