Rights

Hi!
Let's set some expectations about your rights and ours (also in light of policy, such as the COPPA↗ and GDPR↗).
The first thing to know is that we are not a commercial entity. We are a community-based research project housed at a not-for-profit university. Our goal is to create a platform that brings you joy and helps us make discoveries about a more equitable and just world of computing. We have no interest in making money on this platform; any money we gather (usually through public funding) is used to sustain the platform, not to enrich anyone who works on it (or contributes to it).
Because we are not seeking profit, this also means that we can't make any promises about the reliability, availability, or longevity of this platform. That said, Amy↗ is committed long term to sustaining it, and as a tenured professor, she's got a pretty stable gig.
That brings us to data. Here's what we gather and store in the cloud:
  • Your projects. We store any projects you contribute and your changes to them, unless those projects appear to have personally identifiable information such as phone numbers, email addresses, usernames, tax identifiers, or addresses.
  • Your settings. This includes the languages you choose, your animation preferences, and your tutorial progress. Everything else is stored on your device only.
  • Aggregate activity. We track logins and the pages you visit, but not in a way that can identify you, track you across the site, or track you across other sites. We use Google Analytics in 'consent denied' mode, which only gathers minimal non-identifiable information about page views, without storing cookies, or sending IP address information to Google. We use this aggregate information to help raise funding by reporting how much the platform is being used.
  • Your chat translations. If you ask to read a chat in another language, we translate everyone else's messages, but never your own. Some browsers can do this translating on your device, and when yours can, nothing is sent to us. Otherwise the messages go to an AI translation service (right now that's Claude, made by Anthropic), and the translation is saved with the chat so nobody else in it has to translate the same words again. Only the people in that chat can read it.
We don't store anything else. Our source↗ is public, so anyone can verify this, and report any unintended tracking.
You own your data, not us. That means:
  • You control who can access your projects. They are private by default, but you can share them with individuals, groups, or make them entirely public.
  • You can fully delete any project or your own account at any time.
  • You can get an export of any project or your whole account at any time.
Here's how we will and won't use your data:
  • We won't share your data with anyone, unless explicitly required by law. It's always possible that your data is taken without permission (a 'data breach'). If we discover that this has happened, we will notify you that this has happened using the email you've shared with us.
  • We won't contact you via your email address unless you 1) make an account change that requires us to, 2) you explicitly give us consent to reach out, or 3) in the case of data breach above.
  • We may analyze projects, galleries, and how to content on the platform to understand what everyone is making and how they are making it. We may share these aggregated, anonymized insights in academic publications. We will only do this under the supervision of an institutional review board, as mandated by U.S. federal law.
Finally, a note about speech. Projects are private by default, and sharing one with specific people keeps it private. What follows is exactly who reviews what you share, depending on who can see it.
But making a project public, or including it in a public gallery, is a privilege. This is a platform made for love, affirmation, respect, and dignity. Therefore, we expect that none of your public content will:
  • Incite, encourage, or celebrate violence, harm, or self harm to anyone.
  • Dehumanize individuals or groups based on their race, ethnicity, national origin, caste, sexual orientation, gender, religion, age, ability, or appearance.
  • Reveal private information about other people such as names, contact information, or physical addresses
  • Contain false, misleading, deceptive, or manipulative information
Who reviews what you share depends on who can see it.
  • Shared with no one, or only with people you named. Nobody reviews it. Not us, not anyone.
  • In a gallery with other people in it. That gallery's curators review it, and the chats that go with it. This is true whether or not the gallery is public: the people in it can see your work, so someone there is responsible for it.
  • In a public gallery. Its curators review it, and so do we, because anyone can find it.
  • Public, and not in a gallery. We review it.
Anyone who can see something can ask for it to be reviewed, using the report button on it. We never tell the person who made it who asked.
Reporting a chat message hides it while someone looks. That happens once per message: if it's kept and someone reports it again, it stays visible while it's looked at a second time. You can always see your own words.
A decision says which of the rules above it found were broken, and can carry a note from whoever decided. You'll get both in your notifications.
A gallery curator's decision applies to their gallery. It is not one of the warnings below, and it can never cost you the ability to share publicly.
If we find a project or gallery that violates these rules, we will warn creators before they view it, or block it from being viewed. If you repeatedly violate these rules, you'll lose the privilege of posting publicly.
Here is exactly what happens if public content of yours breaks these rules. A moderator reviews it, it stops being public, and you get a warning in your notifications saying which one it is. Anyone signed in can ask a moderator to look at public content using the report button on it.
After three warnings you can still make projects, still share them with people you choose, and still use everything else here. What you lose is the ability to make anything public.
If you think a warning was a mistake, or it was a long time ago and you'd like to share publicly again, write to hi@wordplay.dev↗ and tell us your username and why. A person will read it.
One more thing about making a project public. Public projects are shared under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license↗. That means anyone can remix your public project — make their own copy of it and change it — and you can remix anyone else's.
Three things come with that license. Remixers have to credit whoever made the original. They have to share their remix under this same license, so it stays open for the next person. And they can't take a public project private to keep it to themselves.
We help with the credit part: when someone remixes a project, we remember where it came from and show a link back to it. Making a project public is how you say yes to all of this, so if you'd rather nobody remixed a project, keep it private.
One last choice, and it is entirely yours. We sometimes write and talk about Wordplay — in research papers, in talks, and in what we show teachers and families. We would love to show what people actually make with it, but we will not show your project unless you say we can.
Every project has a Research setting in its sharing options, and it starts off. Turning it on lets us show that one project as an example, without your name, your username, or anything else that says the account is yours. It is per project, so saying yes to one says nothing about the others.
You can turn it off any time. Turning it off means we stop using your project in anything new, but it can't take back something we already published or presented.