Privacy policy

Last updated: 2 August 2026

This is the privacy policy for τotal Addressable Universe, the browser game at totaladdressableuniverse.ai. It is written to be read rather than to be survived, and it describes everything, including the parts that are boring.

The short version

The game has no accounts and no server of its own, and everything you do in it stays in your own browser. Visits are counted, but by an analytics service that sets no cookies and identifies nobody — it cannot tell whether you have been here before. The only third party that receives anything capable of identifying you is the advertising network that fills the single banner slot, and in regions where the law requires it, that happens only if you agree to it first. Refusing changes nothing about how the game plays.

The longer version follows, because "the short version" is not a legal basis.

Who is responsible

This site is a hobby project run by one person. There is no company behind it, no staff, no office and no investor, which is part of the joke and also simply true.

Everything in this policy is handled at [email protected], and that address reaches the person responsible directly — questions, data requests, complaints and corrections alike. It is the fastest route to a human, because it is the only one.

What the game stores on your device

The game saves your progress using your browser's local storage. This is storage on your own computer or phone. It is not a cookie, it is never transmitted to us or to anyone else, and there is no copy of it anywhere but on your device.

The save contains only the state of your game: your funding, which producers and upgrades you own, which milestones you have reached, your Almost Singularity upgrades, the state of your probe fleet, and the timestamp the simulation was last advanced to. It contains no name, no email address, no identifier, and nothing that describes you as a person.

This storage is strictly necessary to provide the game you asked for — it is what "your progress is saved" means — so under the ePrivacy rules it does not require your consent. It is disclosed here because you are entitled to know it exists.

You are in complete control of it. Clearing your browser's site data for this domain deletes it permanently and immediately, and there is nothing left anywhere for us to delete on your behalf. You can also copy the save out as a plain text string from the Stats tab and keep it yourself.

What we collect about you

Nothing that identifies you. There is no account system, no login, no email capture, no contact form, no newsletter, no advertising or tracking cookie set by us, no fingerprinting, and no session recording. We do not know who you are, whether you have played before, or how far you got — and nothing in the game is reported anywhere. Your funding, your tiers, your milestones and your probe fleet are yours alone.

Visitor statistics

We do count visits, using Cloudflare Web Analytics. It is worth being precise about what that does and does not mean, because most analytics is not like this.

It sets no cookies and stores nothing on your device — no cookie, no local storage, no client-side state of any kind. It does not fingerprint you, by IP address, user-agent string or anything else. It cannot follow you between sites, and it cannot recognise you returning to this one. Instead of counting people it counts visits: a page view whose referring site is a different one.

What we see is therefore an aggregate: how many pages were viewed, which ones, which sites sent people here, roughly which country and browser they came from, and how quickly the page loaded. Not one row of it is attached to a person, because nothing exists to attach it to.

Because no information is stored on or read from your device, this needs no consent under the ePrivacy rules, and we rely on our legitimate interests in knowing whether anybody is playing (Article 6(1)(f) GDPR). It is switched on at the hosting layer rather than by a script we wrote, and blocking it — most privacy extensions do — changes nothing about the game.

If you would rather we did not count you at all, blocking it is enough, and we would rather say that plainly than pretend the option does not exist.

What the hosting provider sees

The site is served as static files by Cloudflare. Like every web server in existence, theirs records ordinary technical information when your browser requests a page: your IP address, the time of the request, which file was requested, your browser's user-agent string, and the page that referred you.

This happens at the network level before any of our code runs, it is necessary to deliver the page to you at all, and it is also what protects the site from attack and abuse. Cloudflare may set a strictly necessary cookie of its own as part of that protection, distinguishing a browser from a bot; it is not ours, we cannot read it, and it plays no part in advertising or statistics.

We rely on our legitimate interests in delivering and securing the site (Article 6(1)(f) GDPR) for this processing. These logs are held by Cloudflare under their own retention schedule, typically for a short period, and we do not use them to build any profile of you.

Advertising

The site carries one passive display advertising slot. When that slot is filled by Google AdSense, the following applies.

Google and its advertising partners may set cookies or read similar identifiers already on your device in order to serve and measure advertising. Depending on your consent, this can include:

Personalised advertising, which uses information about your interests, built from your activity across sites that use Google's advertising services.
Non-personalised advertising, which is based on the general context of the page and your approximate location, but which still uses identifiers for frequency capping, aggregate reporting and fraud prevention.

Google's use of this information is governed by Google's own policies, not by ours. The relevant documents are How Google uses information from sites or apps that use our services and the Google Privacy Policy.

We do not read those cookies, we do not receive any personal data back from Google, and nothing about advertising is ever linked to your saved game.

If you are in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom or Switzerland, you are asked for consent before any advertising cookie is set, through a consent management platform certified by Google under the IAB Transparency and Consent Framework. Advertising identifiers are only used if you agree, and our legal basis for them is your consent (Article 6(1)(a) GDPR) together with the ePrivacy rules on storing information on your device.

You can change your mind at any time. The consent banner can be reopened from the link in the site footer, and withdrawing consent is as easy as giving it. Withdrawal does not affect processing that already happened while consent was in place.

You can also manage advertising personalisation across all of Google's services at Google Ad Settings, and opt out of personalised advertising from many other providers at YourAdChoices or Your Online Choices.

If you refuse, or block ads entirely

Nothing happens. The game does not detect ad blockers, does not check whether the slot was filled, and contains no mechanic, bonus, currency or timer that depends on an advertisement in any way. A player who rejects every cookie and blocks every advert gets exactly the same game as everybody else. This is a deliberate design constraint rather than a courtesy.

International transfers

Google is based in the United States and operates globally, so where advertising cookies are used with your consent, the resulting information may be processed outside your country, including in the United States. Google relies on the European Commission's standard contractual clauses and on its certification under the EU–US Data Privacy Framework for those transfers. Details are in the Google policies linked above.

How long anything is kept

Your save: on your device, until you delete it. We never hold a copy.
Server logs: held by Cloudflare under their retention schedule, typically days to a few weeks.
Visitor statistics: aggregate counts held by Cloudflare. There is no identifier in them, so there is no version of them that is about you.
Advertising identifiers: set and expired by Google under their policies, and revocable by you at any time.

We operate no database and retain no personal data ourselves.

Your rights

If the GDPR or UK GDPR applies to you, you have the right to request access to your personal data, to have it corrected or erased, to restrict or object to its processing, to receive it in a portable format, and to withdraw consent at any time.

We should be honest about what that means here: since we hold no personal data and operate no server, there is normally nothing for us to give you or delete. Our visitor statistics contain no identifier, so we could not find your rows in them even if you asked us to — which is the point of collecting them that way. Requests about advertising data should go to Google, who are the controller for it. We will help you direct anything we cannot answer.

You also have the right to lodge a complaint with your data protection supervisory authority. In the UK that is the Information Commissioner's Office; in the EEA it is the authority in your country of residence.

US state privacy rights

If you live in California or another US state with comprehensive privacy legislation, you have rights to know about, delete, and opt out of the "sale" or "sharing" of personal information for targeted advertising. We do not sell personal information for money. The use of advertising cookies may constitute "sharing" for targeted advertising under some of those laws, and where they apply you are offered a choice about it in the same banner. You can also signal your preference with the Global Privacy Control, which our consent platform honours where required.

Children

This game is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect any information from them. The subject matter is corporate finance jokes; the audience is adults. If you believe a child has provided personal information through this site, contact us and we will act on it.

Changes to this policy

If this policy changes materially, the date at the top changes with it and the current version is always the one published here. There is no mailing list to notify, because we do not have your email address.

Contact

[email protected]

Corrections to a quotation are handled the same way, and are always welcome — see the standard they are held to.