Privacy

The short version

Padel Guess has no accounts and asks for no personal data. The only cookies are a technical one for the online match, which only appears if you play one, and the analytics one, which is only switched on if you accept it: rejecting costs you nothing. You can play and read the rulebook without leaving anything of ours in your browser other than your own games.

There is one exception worth reading: what you type into the rulebook assistant leaves the site, because answering requires a language model that is not ours. It is explained below.

What we do not do

• There is no sign-up and no login. We ask for no email, no name and no other detail.
• There are no social media pixels, no advertising and no personalisation cookies.
• Fonts are served from our own server, so your browser does not contact Google to load them.
• We do not sell or share data with anyone, not least because we have none to share.

Analytics

We use Google Analytics 4 to measure how many people come in, which challenges and matches get played and which pages get read. It is the only third-party code loaded on the site’s pages.

• It is off by default. Until you accept in the banner, the script runs in denied mode: it writes no cookies and stores no identifiers in your browser. Google receives only an anonymous, stateless signal it uses to estimate totals.
• If you accept, the _ga and _ga_5GL8EMPLBQ cookies are created and your visit is tied to a random identifier. That identifier carries no name and no email address: we still do not know who you are.
• You can withdraw it whenever you like from “Cookie preferences”, in the footer. Clearing the site’s data in your browser also leaves the cookies out.
• Google handles that data as a processor, under its privacy policy. In Analytics 4 the IP address is not stored: it is used to derive the country and then discarded.
• The reports we see are aggregated. There is no per-visitor record for us to look up.

The detail of each cookie is in the cookie policy.

What stays in your browser

Your challenge games and your conversation with the assistant are saved in your device’s local storage. They are not sent to our server and we cannot read them. The detail of what is stored and for how long is in the cookie policy, and you can clear it from your own browser whenever you like.

The rulebook assistant

This is the only part of the site where something you type travels to a third party.

When you send a question, your message — along with the earlier turns of that same conversation, if there are any — is sent to our server and from there to the DeepSeek API, which is what generates the answer. Without that there is no assistant.

What that means in practice:

• We do not store either the message or the answer. The server processes them and forgets them; the copy that remains is the one in your own browser.
• DeepSeek handles those messages under its own terms. If that matters to you, read their privacy policy.
• Do not type personal data into the chat. It is a tool for asking about padel rules; there is no reason to put a name, a phone number or an email address in there, yours or anyone else’s.

The online match

You do not need an account to play. When you look for a match, the server gives you a random identifier and a guest name generated at random (something like Padelero_4821), which is what your opponent sees unless you choose another one (see below). That identifier, the name and your playing level travel encrypted in the pg_match cookie: we do not keep them in any database. The result of each match is only used to adjust that level.

If you like, you can give yourself a name for the match in the locker room. Your opponent will see it instead of the guest name, so do not use your real name or anything that identifies you. It is stored in your browser (pg:match:nick) and sent to the server each time you look for a match; there it only lives as long as the room does and is not kept beyond the match. It is not sent to analytics either: the only thing counted is whether you have set one or not.

What happens during a match —the score and the shots each player picks— lives in the server’s memory while it is being played and disappears a minute after it ends, or when the service restarts. The result that adjusts your level also waits in memory until you next look for a match.

IP addresses

Like any web server, ours sees the IP address each request comes from.

It is used for two things: the server’s access logs, which help diagnose faults, and limiting how many requests in a row a single connection can make to the assistant and the online match, which is what stops anyone running up the bill or hogging the server. That count lives in memory and is lost when the service restarts: it is not written to any database and not combined with anything.

Player data

The challenges use public professional-tour data (name, nationality, ranking, photograph) obtained from an external padel API. It is data about professional athletes published in the context of their sporting activity. If you are a player and would like us to review something about your data, get in touch.

Your rights

European law grants you rights of access, rectification, erasure, objection, restriction and portability over your personal data.

In practice there is little to exercise here: we keep no data that identifies you, so there is no file of yours for us to show, correct or delete. What exists is cleared from your browser, and analytics is switched off from “Cookie preferences” — which is also how you exercise your right to object. Even so, if you believe we handle something that concerns you, write to us and we will look into it.

Contact

For any privacy matter: padelguess@gmail.com.