Privacy Policy

You can reach us at support@barlingames.com or through the contact form. Privacy questions and data requests can go to either.

Things you give us

• An account. Registration takes an email address, a username and a password, which is stored hashed and is never readable by us. A profile can optionally hold a display name, short biography, website, phone number, location, gender and an avatar — all optional, all editable, all deletable by you. Sign-in is by email and password only; there is no social or third-party sign-in on this site.
• The contact form. Your name, email address, your message and subject, and optionally a phone number and website. The form also records the IP address and browser user-agent the message was sent from, as spam and abuse protection.
• Issue reports. The same shape as the contact form — name, email, what went wrong, plus IP address and user-agent.
• Newsletter sign-up. Your email address, optionally a name, the IP address you subscribed from and which page you subscribed on. Every newsletter carries a one-click unsubscribe link tied to a token unique to you.
• Comments. Where commenting is available, a comment stores the name and email you supply, the comment text and the IP address it came from.
• Push notifications. If you allow browser notifications, we store the push endpoint and encryption keys your browser issues, your timezone and language, an approximate location derived from your IP, and your notification preferences. Revoking permission in the browser ends this.

Things recorded automatically

Barlin Games counts page views on its own server. A page view record can contain:

• the URL you visited, the page you came from, and how long you stayed;
• your IP address, and a country, region and city derived from it;
• your browser, operating system and device type, and your screen size;
• a session identifier, and — for signed-out visitors — a random guest identifier that is not linked to a name.

Sign-in attempts are logged with the email address used and the originating IP address, and unusual activity raises a security alert record holding the IP address and user-agent. This is how account takeover is detected; it is not used for anything else.

Google Analytics

If you allow the analytics category in the cookie banner, Barlin Games also uses Google Analytics 4 to understand how the site is used: which pages are viewed, which games and articles are opened, what is searched for, and the browser, device and screen size used. Google derives an approximate location from your IP address and does not store the address itself. The analytics cookies (_ga and _ga_*) are set only after you allow that category; until then Google Analytics runs in Consent Mode, sets no cookie and sends only cookie-less pings that carry no identifier. You can withdraw consent at any time from Your Privacy Choices, or block Google Analytics in every site with Google's opt-out browser add-on.

Consent records

When you answer the cookie banner, that answer is recorded so it can be proven later: which categories you allowed, when, from which country and region, on which page, your browser and device, and whether your browser sent a Global Privacy Control or Do Not Track signal. Your IP address in this record is stored hashed, not in the clear.

• To run the site and your account — signing you in, keeping the session alive, remembering your theme, answering your messages.
• To keep it secure — detecting sign-in abuse, blocking spam submissions, protecting forms against cross-site request forgery.
• To understand what people read — which pages are used, at what screen sizes, so the site can be improved. The page-view count is first-party and stays on our server; Google Analytics is added only if you allow the analytics category.
• To show advertising, which is what funds free access — and only with your consent, as described below.
• To prove consent, because a consent record is only useful if it can be produced later.

Analytics and advertising happen only if you allow those categories in the cookie banner. Everything else is what is needed to provide the site you asked for and to keep it safe.

Third-party vendors, including Google, use cookies to serve ads based on your prior visits to this website or to other websites. Google's use of advertising cookies enables it and its partners to serve ads to you based on your visit to Barlin Games and/or other sites on the Internet.

What actually happens depends on the choice you make in the cookie banner, which AdSense receives through Google Consent Mode v2:

• If you allow the advertising category, Google may set advertising cookies (listed in the Cookies Policy) and show ads personalised to your interests, based on your visits to this and other sites.
• If you refuse it, or have not answered yet, ad storage, ad user data and ad personalisation stay denied. Ads may still appear, but they are non-personalised — chosen from the page you are reading rather than from anything about you — and no advertising cookie is written to your browser.

You can opt out of personalised advertising by Google at any time in Google Ads Settings. You can opt out of a wider set of third-party vendors' use of cookies for personalised advertising at www.aboutads.info (Digital Advertising Alliance) or, in Europe, at www.youronlinechoices.eu.

Ads served through AdSense may come from Google's own advertising platforms or from other ad networks and vendors Google works with. Those vendors may also use cookies to serve and measure ads, under their own privacy policies; Google publishes the list of them, with a link to each vendor's policy, on its ad technology providers page. How Google itself uses data from sites that use its services is described at policies.google.com/technologies/partner-sites.

There is no Meta, TikTok, LinkedIn, Snapchat, Pinterest, Reddit, X or Microsoft advertising pixel on this site.

• Hostinger — hosts the site and database, and carries outbound email over SMTP. All stored data described here sits on that infrastructure.
• Google — AdSense for advertising (personalised only if you allow advertising cookies), Google Analytics 4 (only if you allow analytics cookies), and Google Fonts, which serves the typefaces on every page and therefore receives the request, including your IP address, even before you answer the banner.
• YouTube and Vimeo — only if you press play on a trailer. YouTube is embedded through youtube-nocookie.com, so nothing reaches them until you choose to watch.

We may also disclose data where the law requires it.

Other records — contact form messages, issue reports, newsletter subscriptions, push subscriptions, session and visit history, sign-in logs — have no automatic expiry at present. They are kept until they are no longer needed or until you ask us to delete them, and a request is the fastest way to have them removed. We would rather say that plainly than publish a retention period the site does not enforce.

Your account and its profile are kept for as long as the account exists.

The quickest routes:

• Cookie and consent choices — Your Privacy Choices, which also lets you request erasure of your consent record. Erasure requests there are completed automatically after 48 hours.
• Your account — edit or remove your profile details from your account settings.
• Anything else — email support@barlingames.com or use the contact form, and say what you want done.

If you are in the UK, EU or EEA and you think we have handled your data badly, you can complain to your national data protection authority.