Privacy and cookies

Who we are

Cosy Little Empire (the game at cosylittleempire.com, including The Cosyford Gazette) is made by Magic Zebra Limited (company number 17298687, registered in England and Wales; registered office: Belmont Suite, Paragon Business Park, Chorley New Road, Bolton, Lancashire, BL6 6HG). We are the "controller" of any personal data described here. You can reach us at hello@magiczebra.co.uk.

What is kept on your device

Your town (your money, your businesses, what you look like, your settings) is saved in your browser's local storage, on your own phone, tablet or computer. It never leaves your device. It's there because you asked to play the game, so it doesn't need your consent. Clearing your browser's data for this site deletes it, and we can't get it back for you.

So that the game can be installed as an app and played offline, your browser also keeps a copy of the game's files.

We don't use cookies: no advertising cookies, no tracking cookies and no analytics cookies.

Counting how the game is played

We use PostHog to count how the game is played, so we can see what's fun, what's confusing and what's broken. When you play or read the Gazette, your browser sends PostHog short notes about what happens: which pages you look at, things like "started the game" or "switched on a turbine", when something goes wrong in the game (an error report), and general details such as the type of device and browser, screen size, language and roughly which country you're in.

PostHog is set up so that nothing is stored on your device: the game gets a new, random ID every time it loads, so we can't link one visit to another, and we never know who you are. Session recording (replaying what someone does on screen) is switched off.

Like any website, PostHog receives your IP address when your browser talks to it. It is used to work out a rough location (the country) and is not used to identify you.

Our reason for this (our "lawful basis") is our legitimate interest in making the game work well and be enjoyable, in a way that has very little effect on your privacy. We keep this information for no longer than we need it, and for no more than two years.

Who else is involved

PostHog, Inc. processes the analytics for us, under a data processing agreement. Our PostHog data is hosted in the European Union. PostHog is a US company, so where anyone at PostHog can access the data from outside the UK, that transfer is protected by the safeguards in their agreement (the UK's international data transfer addendum to the EU standard contractual clauses).

Our website host serves the game's files and, like any web server, may briefly keep technical logs (such as IP addresses) to keep the site running and secure.

We don't sell or share your information with anyone else, and we don't use it for advertising.

Children

Cosy Little Empire is made to be suitable for children. Because there's nothing to sign up for and nothing to type in about yourself, we don't knowingly collect personal information from anyone, children included. We've designed the game with privacy switched on from the start, in the spirit of the UK Information Commissioner's Children's Code: no profiles, no adverts, no nudges to share, and no tracking between visits.

Your rights

Under UK data protection law you have the right to ask what information we hold about you, to have it corrected or deleted, to object to how we use it, and more. Because we don't know who anyone is, we usually can't find information about a particular person, but if you have a question or a request, email us at hello@magiczebra.co.uk and we'll help however we can.

If you're not happy with how we've handled your information, you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office (ico.org.uk), although we'd love the chance to put it right first.

Changes

If we change how we handle information, we'll update this page and the date at the top.