Privacy Policy

What we collect

• Account details: your email address, the player name you choose, and an avatar if you upload one.
• Game activity: the games you play, your bids, scores and results, and your chip balance and purchase history.
• Clubs: membership, roles, invitations, requests, contributions, announcements, chat messages, reports, and uploaded covers and emblems. Club profiles and artwork are visible to players browsing Clubs; chat is for members, and staff can review reported messages.
• What you post: suggestions, votes, chat messages and reports you send.
• Coach: your saved questions, answers and feedback, plus optional learning preferences and remembered topics when you enable personalization.
• Security and fair-play signals: IP address, device and browser details, a first-party browser identifier, and sign-in times. We use these to keep one active session per account and to detect alternate accounts, collusion and abuse. Suspected incidents are recorded for staff review and emailed to our support team. A shared network alone does not establish cheating.
• How the game runs for you: your type of device, operating system and browser, screen size, your approximate location (country and region, never your city or street) and how well live play worked (dropped connections, turns that ran out, load times). We use this to find and fix problems on the devices people actually play on. Technical diagnostics may be processed by the service providers described below. We do not sell this information.
• Payments: if chip purchases are offered, payments are handled by our payment processor. We never see or store your full card number.

How we use it

• To run the Service: sign you in, seat you at tables, keep score and show your stats and history.
• To email you sign-in codes, beta and launch news, and replies about your suggestions or reports. You can opt out of news emails at any time with the unsubscribe link in any news email.
• To keep play fair and safe: detecting cheating, alternate accounts and spam, and enforcing our Terms.
• To review suggestions. We use automated tools, including AI, to screen suggestions for spam, off-topic content and duplicates before they’re posted. A person makes any decision to restrict an account.
• To answer your Coach questions, save conversations and, when enabled, personalize explanations using your learning preferences.
• To improve the game and diagnose errors.

Coach and personalization

Coach sends your question and the latest six completed questions and answers from that conversation to Anthropic to generate a reply. When you enable personalization, your chosen game format, experience and remembered topics can also guide the answer. Coach does not receive your live hand or game history.

Personalization starts off. You can turn it off or clear learning information in Coach. Clearing learning information does not delete conversations. Administrators can review questions, answers and feedback to improve Coach; the Coach report omits player names, but information you type may still identify you.

What we don’t do

• We don’t sell your personal information.
• We don’t use advertising trackers or share your data with advertisers.
• We only use the cookies needed to keep you signed in and the Service working.

Who helps us run the Service

We use service providers to operate and protect Spades Ultimate:

• Amazon Web Services: hosting, storage and game services.
• Neon: database storage.
• Resend: email delivery.
• Anthropic: Coach answers and automated suggestion review.
• Cloudflare Turnstile: the bot check on signup, which processes browser, device and network information.
• Sentry: error diagnostics. Our configuration disables collection of cookies, request headers and bodies, URL query parameters and automatic user information.
• Payment processors: payment handling when purchases are available.

We may also disclose information if the law requires it or to protect players and the Service from fraud or abuse.

How long we keep it

We keep your account information while your account is open. Game history is kept so your lifetime stats stay complete. If you delete your account, we delete or anonymize your personal information, except where we need to keep some of it for legal, security or fraud-prevention reasons.

Coach conversations remain until you delete them or your account is removed. Deleting a conversation removes its text and feedback from our records; a record of the question date remains for usage counting. Learning preferences are managed separately. Security records and fair-play incidents may be kept to investigate abuse and protect the Service. Different record types have different retention periods.

When your account is deleted, your Club membership and authored Club messages are removed. The Club retains earned XP and coins, with your contribution records no longer linked to your account. Artwork still used by a Club stays with that Club without an uploader account link. Replaced artwork, artwork from disbanded Clubs and unused uploads are eligible for cleanup after 24 hours.

Your choices

In Settings → Account & data, you can download your account data, including saved Coach conversations, learning preferences and your own Club records and messages, or request account deletion. Club Leaders must transfer leadership or disband their Club first. Deletion has a seven-day grace period; signing in during that period cancels the request. Accounts still attached to a game are removed after they are no longer attached.

Change messaging and blocking controls in Settings → Privacy. Manage or delete conversations and learning information in Coach.

You can ask to see, correct or delete your information, or close your account, by emailing support@spadesultimate.com. We’ll respond within 30 days.

Age

The Service is for people 18 and older. We don’t knowingly collect information from anyone under 18. If you believe someone under 18 has signed up, contact us and we’ll remove their account.

Security

We protect your information with encryption in transit, hashed sign-in codes and sessions, and limited access. No system is perfectly secure, but we take it seriously and will tell you if a breach affects you.

Changes

If we change this policy, we’ll update the date above, and for significant changes we’ll let you know by email or on the site.

Contact

Questions? Email support@spadesultimate.com.