Privacy Policy

Sketchlingo is a free multiplayer drawing game for learning words in seven languages. It is built and run by Hatchable (hatchable.io).

For anything about your data, email hello@sketchlingo.com. A real person reads it.

You do not need an account to play. If you never sign in, we do not have an email address for you, we do not have a name for you, and there is no record of you in our database. Your progress is stored by your own browser.

What your browser stores

These are the exact keys Sketchlingo writes. You can see them yourself in your browser's developer tools under Local Storage and Session Storage.

None of these are cookies, so none of them are sent to our server automatically.

What does leave your browser

When you join a room, the game server needs your nickname, your avatar and your country flag so the other players can see who is drawing and who is guessing. Those three things, plus your chat messages and the strokes you draw, go to the server for as long as the room exists. See Drawings and chat for what happens to them.

Signing in is optional. It exists so your level, words and achievements follow you to another device. There are two ways in, and which ones are switched on depends on the deployment: Google, and a one-time sign-in link sent to your email address.

What we get from the sign-in provider

• Google: your name, your email address and the URL of your Google profile picture. We also store the link between your Sketchlingo account and your Google account so the next sign-in finds you. We do not ask Google for your contacts, your calendar or anything else.
• Email link: your email address, plus a one-time sign-in token stored in our database until you use it or it expires after 24 hours.

What we store on your account

• Profile: display name (up to 18 characters), a two-letter country code, and your avatar. Avatars are numbers picking a colour, eyes and a mouth — not an uploaded photo.
• Drawn avatar (Pro only): if you draw your own avatar in the app, we store that small PNG (under 40 KB) on your account and serve it at /api/avatar/<your id>. Anyone who has that address can load the picture, so treat a drawn avatar as public.
• Game stats: total words guessed, drawings guessed, games played, XP, wins, and how many words you guessed in each language.
• Vocabulary: up to 500 words you guessed right — language, word, English meaning and the time you got it.
• Achievements and streak: which achievements you unlocked and when, your day streak, the last day you played and your streak freezes.
• Billing, only if you buy Pro: a Stripe customer id, a subscription id, the price id you bought, the plan (monthly or annual), the subscription status, when the current period ends, and whether it is set to cancel. We never receive or store your card number.

Bringing your guest progress with you

The first time you sign in on a browser that already has guest progress, the app sends that progress once — words guessed, per-language counts, wins, achievement ids, your saved words and your streak — and merges it into your account. It runs once per account and never lowers a number. After that, the guest copy stays in your browser and the account copy is the one that travels.

This is the part people ask about most, so here it is straight: live game state is held in the memory of one running server process. It is not written to a database, and we do not keep an archive of games.

• Drawings:your strokes are sent to the server and relayed to everyone in the room, up to 6,000 drawing operations per room. They stay in that room's memory.
• Chat: the room keeps its last 60 messages in memory so someone joining late can read back. Nothing older is kept.
• When it goes: when a room has been empty for 90 seconds it is deleted, and the drawings, the chat and the scores go with it. A server restart or a new deployment clears it too.
• Saving a drawing:the “save the drawing” picture is drawn by your own browser and downloaded straight to your device. It is not uploaded anywhere.
• What is written down: if you are signed in, a correct guess adds one to your counters and adds that word to your vocabulary list. The drawing and the chat message are not stored.

Filtering and limits

• In public rooms (Play now and the language Lounges), chat runs through a filter: anything that looks like a link becomes “[link removed]” and words on a built-in banned list are replaced with asterisks. In private custom rooms only the link filter runs — the host has kick and mute instead.
• Player names go through the name filter in every room type. A name that is a banned word becomes “Player”.
• Rate limits, all held in memory: 5 chat messages per 10 seconds, 25 actions per second, one undo per second.
• Creating rooms is capped at 5 per minute per IP address. To count that, the server keeps the IP address of the request and the timestamps in memory for one minute. It is not written to a database and it is not linked to your account.

When a room is saved (rather than being a throwaway quick-play code), we store the room code, its name, its language, its settings — rounds, draw time, max players, word source — who owns it, its member list, and when it was last active.

A custom word list is up to 200 pairs, each a word of up to 40 characters and a meaning of up to 60 characters. Do not put anything private in one: custom words are not secret. Everyone playing in the room sees each word when it comes up, and anyone who knows the room code can join.

The sign-in cookie

If you sign in, our sign-in library sets a session cookie. It is a signed token that keeps you signed in for up to 30 days, plus two short-lived helper cookies used during the sign-in round trip. These are essential — without them there is no way to stay signed in — so they are set without a consent banner. Signing out removes them. If you never sign in, the game sets no cookie at all.

Vercel Web Analytics

Every page counts page views through Vercel Web Analytics, which is part of our hosting. It reports to our own domain, does not use cookies, and does not follow you to other websites. We use it to see which pages people open, not who opened them.

The cookie banner appears on every page except the live game screen, where a card in the corner would sit on top of the chat box.

Plausible

Plausible counts page views and where visitors came from. It sets no cookies and does not track you from site to site, so it runs for everyone without a consent gate. The script is served from our own domain and forwarded to plausible.io, so ad blockers do not eat the count. Plausible only loads on builds where it has been switched on; on a build without it, nothing is requested at all.

Microsoft Clarity — only if you accept

Clarity records how pages are used — what you click, where you scroll, where you move the pointer — and turns that into heatmaps and session replays. It sets its own cookies and Microsoft processes the recording. So it is gated twice: it only exists on a build where it has been switched on, and even then it loads only after you press Accept in our cookie banner.

Press Reject, or close the banner with the ✕, and your answer is stored as “no”. Nothing loads, and no Clarity cookie is set. Microsoft handles what it does receive under the Microsoft Privacy Statement.

Changing your answer

Your choice is stored in your browser under sketchlingo:cookie-consent:v1, and the banner stops asking once it is there. To be asked again, delete that entry — or clear site data for sketchlingo.com — and reload. If you accepted and want that undone, email hello@sketchlingo.com and we will ask Microsoft to delete the recordings.

This is the whole list. Nobody else receives anything.

• Guest progress: stays in your browser until you clear it. We have no copy.
• Drawings, chat and scores: deleted 90 seconds after the room empties, and lost on any server restart.
• Rate-limit records: IP addresses used for the room-creation cap are held in memory for one minute and then swept.
• Account data: kept until you ask us to delete it.
• Saved rooms and custom words: kept until you delete the room.
• Payment records: held by Stripe for as long as their own rules and tax law require. We cannot delete those for you.

• Guest: clear site data for sketchlingo.com in your browser settings. That is the whole of it — there is nothing on our side to delete.
• Account: there is no delete button in the app yet. Email hello@sketchlingo.com from the address you signed in with and we will delete your account and everything attached to it.
• Pro: cancel from the billing portal, reachable from your profile page. Cancelling stops the renewal; ask us separately if you also want the account deleted.
• A room: delete it from the Rooms page. That removes its custom word list too.

Sketchlingo is made for a general audience and plenty of the people playing it are learning their first words in a language. We never ask for anyone's age or date of birth, and we do not knowingly collect personal data from children under 13 (or under the age your country sets, up to 16) without a parent's permission. You do not need an account to play, so a child can use the whole game without giving us anything at all.

Public rooms put strangers in a chat together. The filter masks profanity and strips links in those rooms, but no filter catches everything, so we suggest a parent plays along with younger children — or that they use a private room with people they know.

If you think a child has given us personal data, email hello@sketchlingo.com and we will delete it.

We do not sell your personal data, we do not rent it, and we do not share it for advertising. There is no ad network, no advertising pixel and no data broker anywhere in this site. The only money Sketchlingo takes is the Pro subscription.

Depending on where you live, you have the right to see the data we hold about you, correct it, get a copy of it, object to how we use it, and have it deleted. We honour all of those wherever you are, not only where the law forces us to.

Your profile page already shows most of what we hold: your display name, country, avatar, level, stats, saved words and achievements. For anything else — a full copy, a correction or a deletion — email hello@sketchlingo.com. We aim to answer within 30 days.

When what the product does changes, this page changes with it, and the “Last updated” date at the top moves. If a change means we start collecting something new, we will say so on the site rather than quietly editing this page.

Questions, corrections, deletion requests: hello@sketchlingo.com. Sketchlingo is built by Hatchable (hatchable.io).