Daily Ceteris ← Back to the game

Privacy & your data

Last updated 10 August 2026. Daily Ceteris is run by EconCoaching (Everything Econ), contact contact@econcoaching.com.

The short version: you can play every game here without giving us anything, and that is not going to change. An account is offered for one reason — so a streak survives a cleared browser and follows you to another device — and it asks for an email address and nothing else. We do not use Google Analytics, Facebook pixels, advertising tags, or any third-party tracker. There are no cookies. Nothing about you is sold or shared with anyone.

What stays on your own device

Your guesses, your streak, your badges, the countries you have named on the world map, your XP and rank, and whether you have hard mode on are all stored in your browser’s local storage. If you do not have an account, that is the only copy. Clearing your browser data erases it, and a phone and a laptop are two separate streaks — we cannot see either of them and cannot restore them.

An account exists to fix exactly that, and nothing else. It is described in the next section, it is optional, and every game is fully playable without one.

If you create an account

The whole of what we store

That is the complete list. No name, no date of birth, no location, no phone number, no password. There is no password because there is no password field: you sign in by clicking a link we email you, which expires in 20 minutes and works once. Your IP address is never written to your account record — see the next section for the one place it is touched at all.

Lawful basis: consent (UK GDPR Article 6(1)(a)), given by asking for a sign-in link, and withdrawable at any time by deleting the account. Nothing about an account is required to play, and no feature is withheld from people without one.

The newsletter is a separate, unticked box. Leaving an account does not subscribe you to anything, and subscribing does not require an account. If you tick it, your address joins the Everything Econ mailing list described below; you can untick it on your profile at any time, and every email carries a one-click unsubscribe.

Your IP address

Sign-in emails are a way to bother a stranger, so we limit how many can be sent to one address or from one connection in an hour. That limit is the only thing that touches your IP address. It is stored as a one-way hash — a scrambled fingerprint that cannot be turned back into an address — alongside a timestamp, and the entry is deleted within an hour. It is never written to your account, never joined to your progress, and never used for analytics.

What we record on our own server

When you open the game, finish a puzzle, or tap a link, the page sends a short line to our own server (no third party is involved). Each line contains:

We do not store your IP address, your name, your location, your device model, or your browsing history. The random identifier is not linked to anything that identifies you, and it disappears if you clear your browser data.

We use this only to see whether the game is worth continuing: how many people play, how many come back the next day, how many finish. Lawful basis: legitimate interests (UK GDPR Article 6(1)(f)) in understanding whether a free product is working.

The newsletter

An address you give the newsletter is stored on our server against the date you signed up and the day number you were on. Lawful basis: consent (UK GDPR Article 6(1)(a)), given by submitting the form, and withdrawable at any time. Every email we send will carry a one-click unsubscribe link. We will not pass your address to any other organisation, and we will not use it for anything other than the Daily Ceteris email and occasional news about Everything Econ products.

If we later move the list onto an email delivery service in order to send it, that provider will process your address on our behalf under a data processing agreement, and this page will be updated to name them before any email goes out.

If you are under 18

A lot of our audience is studying A-level or IB Economics, so this matters. You can play every game freely at any age, with no account and no email address. If you are under 13, please do not create an account or submit your email address without a parent or guardian’s permission. If you are a parent and would like an address removed, email us and we will delete it — no questions and no proof required.

Deleting your account and everything in it

You can do this yourself, in two taps, right now

Open your profile, scroll to Your account, and tap Delete my account and data. It asks once more, then deletes immediately: your email address, your random id, your stored progress and every sign-in session are removed from our server there and then. There is no queue, no 30-day window and no need to email anybody.

Deleting the account does not touch the copy in your own browser, so your streak carries on locally afterwards. If you want that gone too, clear your browsing data for this site.

If you would rather we did it, or you can no longer sign in, email contact@econcoaching.com from the address you used, or naming it, and we will delete it within 30 days — usually the same week. You can also ask for a copy of what we hold, ask us to correct it, or object to the analytics described above. Because the play data carries no identifier we can tie to you, we may not be able to find your specific rows in it, but you can erase your own copy by clearing your browser data.

If you are not happy with how we have handled a request, you can complain to the Information Commissioner’s Office at ico.org.uk.

How long we keep things

Play records are kept for 24 months and then deleted.

Accounts are deleted after 24 months of inactivity. If you do not sign in or play for two years, the whole record — email address, random id and progress — is deleted automatically. This is not a promise we keep by remembering to do it: it is a rule in the code that runs on the server as part of ordinary traffic, and it deletes the account without anyone being asked. The clock resets every time you play or sign in.

Sign-in links expire after 20 minutes and can be used once. A signed-in session lasts up to 400 days and is refreshed each time you use it. Newsletter addresses are kept until you unsubscribe or ask us to remove them.

Other sites we link to

The game links out to articles, posters, and the newsletter on econcoaching.com and to related shops. Once you follow one of those links you are on that site and its own privacy terms apply. Where the link carries a tag telling us the visit came from the game, that tag identifies the puzzle, not you.