Cookie Policy

The short version

This website sets no cookies for visitors.

There is no analytics, no tag manager, no advertising or retargeting pixel, no social media plugin and no third-party font service. The page stores at most one thing in your browser, and only if you use the theme switch: whether you prefer the light or the dark theme. That value is read by the page itself to switch a colour scheme, and it is never sent to us or to anyone else.

That is why you were not asked to accept anything before reading this. There is no consent banner because there is nothing to consent to.

The only cookies anywhere in this product are the two session cookies for our private staff panel, and they are never set for a visitor or a player. They are described in full below, along with everything else.

What this policy covers

The law here is not really about the word “cookie”. Article 5(3) of the ePrivacy Directive covers storing information on your device, or reading information already stored there, by whatever technical means. So this policy is written technology-neutrally: it covers cookies, localStorage, sessionStorage, and anything equivalent.

It covers this website — the LingoHunters marketing pages in English, Spanish and French, and the staff admin panel at /admin.

It does not cover the mobile app. The app is a different piece of software with a different answer: it shows rewarded video ads through Google AdMob, and it asks for your permission before anything can be personalised. Nothing on this page should be read as a statement about the app. For the app, read the Privacy Policy.

Everything this site stores

This is the complete list. There is no fifth row.

What	Where it’s stored	What it’s for	Type	How long
lingohunters-theme	localStorage, in your browser	Remembers whether you chose the light or the dark theme, so the site does not flip back on your next visit	First-party. Not a cookie, and never transmitted — it is read in the browser to set a CSS class	Until you clear your browser’s site data for this site
__Host-lh_admin	A cookie: httpOnly, Secure, SameSite=Lax, path /, no Domain (the __Host- prefix makes the browser enforce all of that)	Keeps a signed-in staff member signed in to the admin panel at /admin	First-party authentication cookie. Set only after a staff member signs in; never set for a visitor or a player	Fifteen minutes — it expires with the sign-in token it carries, and a fresh one replaces it while the staff member keeps using the panel — or sooner: signing out deletes it, and so does the server if the API refuses the session
__Host-lh_admin_refresh	A cookie, with the same attributes as __Host-lh_admin	Renews the fifteen-minute sign-in token above, so a staff member is not signed out while they work	First-party authentication cookie. Set only after a staff member signs in; never set for a visitor or a player	Sixty days from the last time it renewed the session — each renewal replaces it — or sooner: signing out deletes it and ends the session at our API, and so does the server if the API refuses it
word_generation_… and subcategory_generation_…	sessionStorage, in the staff member’s browser	Holds AI-generated draft words or subcategories between the generate and review screens of the admin panel’s content tool, so a reload does not lose unsaved work	First-party, staff only. Draft content, never credentials	Removed when the review is finished or cancelled, after 24 hours, or when the tab is closed — whichever comes first

About the admin cookies

We would rather show you the whole picture than assert an exemption. __Host-lh_admin and __Host-lh_admin_refresh are first-party authentication cookies for a private staff panel. Neither is readable by JavaScript, neither is sent on cross-site requests other than a top-level navigation to this site — so a forged cross-site form post cannot carry them — and they only exist after a member of staff signs in at /admin. The first carries a maximum age taken from the expiry of the sign-in token inside it; the second lasts as long as the session it renews.

Regulators are not unanimous that every login cookie is essential. France’s CNIL and the UK’s rules list authentication outright as exempt; the Article 29 Working Party (the EDPB’s predecessor), in its Opinion 04/2012, treats a persistent login cookie as outside the exemption, because closing the browser does not sign you out and you may not realise that. Ours can last sixty days rather than ending with the browser session, so we describe them plainly here instead of quietly filing them as exempt. If you are a visitor or a player, none of it applies to you — neither cookie is ever set on your device.

Why there is no cookie banner

Two independent reasons. Either would be enough on its own.

1. Remembering how you want the page to look is interface customisation. Regulators have treated a preference you actively chose about the appearance of a page as exempt from consent. Spain’s data protection authority, in its 2024 cookie guide, gives font size and the colour contrast between background and content as examples; France’s CNIL independently lists user-interface personalisation among trackers that need no consent. Both build on WP29 Opinion 04/2012, which recognises user-interface customisation, chosen by an explicit action, as an exempt category — though it adds that a preference kept beyond the browser session should be signposted where it is set. Ours is kept until you clear it, because being asked to pick a theme on every visit is the thing the setting exists to avoid (Spain’s guide says exactly that), and it is used for nothing else. This page, linked from every footer, is that signpost; in the UK, where the rules since February 2026 name adapting how a website appears to your preferences as exempt provided you are told and can object, clicking the toggle again or clearing site data is the objection. A light/dark switch is the same idea: you clicked it, and it changes nothing but how the page looks to you. We offer this as illustrative regulator guidance rather than as authority binding on us.

2. And the value never leaves your device. The EDPB’s Guidelines 2/2023 on the technical scope of Article 5(3), finalised on 7 October 2024, state that using information on a device is not “gaining access to information already stored” as long as that information does not leave the device. Your theme preference is written by the page, read back by the page, and used to toggle a CSS class. It is never included in a request, never logged, and never reaches a server — ours or anyone else’s. On the EDPB’s reading, reading it back is therefore not “gaining access” under Article 5(3). Writing it in the first place still counts as “storing information”, which is why the first reason — that a display preference you chose yourself is exempt from consent — is the one that matters.

What we deliberately do not do

None of the following is present on this website:

• No analytics of any kind. No Google Analytics, no Plausible, no self-hosted alternative. We do not count you.
• No advertising or retargeting pixels. No Meta pixel, no Google Ads tag, no conversion tracking.
• No tag manager, which means there is no mechanism by which a third-party script could be added later without a code change.
• No social media plugins. Share buttons, where they exist, are plain links.
• No session recording and no heatmaps. Nobody is watching your mouse move.
• No fingerprinting. We do not read your fonts, canvas, or hardware to build an identifier.
• No third-party fonts. Our typefaces are self-hosted on our own origin, specifically so that loading this page makes no request to Google Fonts or to anyone else.

You do not have to take our word for any of this. Open your browser’s developer tools, go to the Network tab, and reload this page: every request goes to this site’s own domain. Look under Application (Chrome) or Storage (Firefox, Safari), and you will find no cookies and at most one localStorage key — lingohunters-theme — which appears only once you have used the theme switch.

The mobile app is different

The LingoHunters app shows rewarded video ads through Google AdMob, and that involves advertising technology this website does not have. On iOS the app asks for App Tracking Transparency permission first, and in Europe it shows Google’s consent form on both platforms. If either is declined, the app requests non-personalised ads; on Android outside Europe no prompt is shown today and the opt-out is a device setting.

That is the summary; the detail is in the Privacy Policy, which explains what reaches Google, what happens if you decline, and how to change your mind.

Controlling what’s stored

Every browser lets you clear site data, usually under Settings, then Privacy, then something like “Cookies and site data”. You can clear it for this site alone or for everything. Private or incognito windows discard it automatically when you close them.

If you clear it here, the only thing that happens is that the site forgets your theme choice and goes back to following your system setting. Nothing else is lost, because nothing else is stored. No progress in the game is affected — that lives in your account, not in this browser.

There is nothing to opt out of on this site, because there is nothing tracking you.

If you are in California

We do not sell or share personal information as those terms are defined by the California Consumer Privacy Act, as amended by the CPRA. “Share” in that statute means disclosure for cross-context behavioural advertising, and this website carries no advertising at all.

Because there is no advertising and no analytics here, a Global Privacy Control signal has nothing to act on: there is no sale or sharing for it to switch off. Your rights over the account data we hold are set out in the Privacy Policy.

Changes to this policy

This policy was last updated on 12 September 2026 and takes effect on that date.

If anything is ever added to what this site stores, the table above is updated before the change goes live, and the dates change with it. The table is meant to be exhaustive, so an omission would be a mistake rather than a technicality.

Adding analytics, advertising or any other non-essential storage here would mean asking you first, through a real choice you can decline as easily as accept — not relabelling it as “essential” to avoid asking.

Contact

Questions about this policy, or about anything this site stores in your browser, go to [email protected].

What the game and the app collect, and what rights you have over it, is in the Privacy Policy. The rules for using the service are in the Terms of Service.