Privacy

What we keep, and why

Each item names the reason and the legal basis (the rule in the EU’s data protection law, GDPR, that lets us do it).

• Your account. Your email address, username, timezone, reminder time and days, whether reminders and reply emails are on, your streak, the reading level you picked, the level Rate Your Vocab gave you and the words it showed with your answers, an unsubscribe code, and small settings such as which banners you closed. Why: to give you the game you signed up for (contract). We need your email address to log you in; everything else comes from playing.
• What you make. Same reason and basis as your account.
  • Poems you publish in Read & Remix.
  • Words you save, your word lists, how your word garden is arranged and your practice progress.
  • Verb Tower towers: the tenses you chose, the words you got right, the height and the time.
  • For each mini-game, the points of your best round of the day, and the days you finished Avatar Builder, Street Tutor or Read & Remix, which have no score. On a day you play three, that day’s points count twice.
  • Your avatar: the choices you tapped, such as skin tone, hair, hijab or glasses.
  • Street Tutor photos, the text read from them and the explanation, until you delete them. Only you see them.
  • Hot Takes: your vote, opinion and replies, any corrections you sent before we stopped taking them, which opinions you marked “picante”, when we last emailed you about replies, and how many times a day you pressed “check my Portuguese”. The text you checked isn’t kept.
• What you tell us. Answers at the end of a game (how hard it was, whether you’d play again, what to change), star ratings of games, game ideas, the mini-games survey, and messages from the menu’s feedback form. We keep them with your account if you were logged in. Menu messages are also emailed to our inbox with your email address and username, so we can reply. Why: to improve the game. All of this is optional, and the basis is your consent.
• The game log. What happens in the game, such as a word tapped, a quiz answered, a poem published or a game finished with its score. Also the link tag a visit came in on (like ?from=newsletter) and an id for the visit. It is tied to your account if you are logged in. We keep no raw IP address, browser fingerprint or location. Why: to see what works and fix what breaks (our legitimate interest).
• Spam and abuse protection. A one-way scrambled version of your IP address (hashed and salted) when you sign up, ask for a login code, log in with Google, publish as a guest or start a tip. We never store the address itself. Why: to keep the game from being abused (our legitimate interest).
• The mailing list. Your email address, the date, where you signed up from (including the page that linked you), any survey answers and the scrambled IP address. A copy is kept in Notion. Why: to send you what you asked for (your consent).
• Email delivery. When an address bounces or reports spam, we store the address and the reason, and stop writing to it. We keep this after an account is deleted so we don’t write to it again. Why: to send email responsibly (our legitimate interest).
• Tips. The amount, currency, date and status, Stripe’s reference for the payment, the email address you gave Stripe, and the name and note you may add. Why: to take your tip and keep payment records (contract and legal obligation). A tip of €10 or more opens every past game. We match it to the account you were logged in to when you paid, or to an account with the same email address, so you can tip first and sign up after.
• Error reports. When something breaks on a page: what broke, in which browser, and your account’s internal id number (not your email address or name). We don’t record your screen. Why: to fix bugs (our legitimate interest).

Where we rely on our legitimate interest, you can object. See “Your rights”.

What other players see

• Your username, your poems, and your Verb Tower score, height and time on the day’s board.
• Your points on the mini-games leaderboard and the Hot Takes board, with your avatar beside your name if you made one. Tapping your name there shows your place, rounds played, days in a row and points per game.
• In Hot Takes, your opinion with your vote beside it, and your replies, under your username. They stay on that take for good, because past takes stay open. Votes are shown only as totals.

Nobody sees your email address.

Playing without an account

We count visits to the homepage, the game, Rate Your Vocab and the list of past games. If you take Rate Your Vocab logged out, we also keep the level it ends on, with the words and your answers. We don’t store your IP address, so we can’t trace a guest visit to you, unless it ends in a tip, which we can match to the visit.

Nothing you make is kept until you ask to log in. Then your poem, your saved words and (if you came from Rate Your Vocab) your level wait for up to seven days, with the email address you gave and the scrambled IP address, while you finish logging in. If you don’t, we delete them.

Emails we send

• Login codes.
• Reminders. They are switched on when you sign up, as the sign-up form says. Choose the days and time, or turn them off, in Settings.
• A Hot Takes email when someone replies to your opinion, or in a thread you’ve replied in, with their username, their reply and the take. Replies that land close together go in one email.
• Mailing-list emails, if you joined.

Every reminder and reply email has an unsubscribe link that works without logging in. Stopping one leaves the others on.

Who else handles it

These companies act on our instructions.

• Supabase stores our database and your Street Tutor photos, in Frankfurt, Germany.
• Vercel serves the site. The servers that run our code are in Frankfurt.
• Amazon Web Services (SES) sends our email, from Stockholm, Sweden. It tells us about bounces and spam reports.
• Sentry gets the error reports described above.
• Stripe takes tips on its own page. We never see your card details.
• Google, only if you press “Continue with Google”. Google tells us your email address and learns that you logged in to Magnetico.
• Google Gemini (AI) reads your Street Tutor photos, to read and explain the text on them. It also reads what you wrote in Hot Takes when you press “check my Portuguese”, with the take and, if you are replying, the opinion you are replying to. It gets no name or email address. Google may keep this, use it to improve its products, and have people look at it, so don’t send anything private.
• YouTube, only if you press play on an Ear Gym clip. Its player then loads, learns which clip you watch and may set cookies, under Google’s privacy policy. Until you press play, nothing of YouTube’s loads, not even the still picture, which comes from us.
• Notion holds a copy of the mailing list.

Several of these companies are based in the United States, so your data may be handled there. Where it is, the transfer is covered by the EU–US Data Privacy Framework or the European Commission’s standard contractual clauses.

On your device

We have no trackers, no ads and no third-party scripts, so there is no cookie banner. The one exception is YouTube in Ear Gym, after you press play. Everything we store is needed for something you asked for. Visiting the homepage stores nothing.

• Cookies (small files your browser keeps): one that keeps you logged in; short-lived ones while you log in, one of which holds the email address you typed for up to an hour so the code screen knows where the code went, and one for the trip to Google and back; and one that links a guest’s poem to the login that will keep it, for up to an hour.
• Browser storage on your device, never sent to us: your progress in Common Thread and Bubble Buds for the day, whether practice plays sounds, and which how-to cards and tips you have seen.
• Browser storage until you close the tab: a poem you are halfway through, and the end of a game you played as a guest while you log in to keep it (the result, words to save, an avatar, a Hot Takes vote and opinion).

How long we keep it

• Your account data: until you delete your account in Settings. That removes your profile, poems, saved words and lists, garden and practice, towers, avatar, mini-game points, Street Tutor photos and explanations, Hot Takes opinions, votes and replies, and your streak.
• What stays after that: the game log, with your account id and name removed so it no longer leads back to you; tip records, for as long as Portuguese tax law requires (ten years); feedback, ratings, ideas and survey answers you sent, with your account unlinked; and a bounce or spam entry if your address is on the list.
• Mailing list: until you ask to leave.
• Street Tutor photos: until you delete them or your account.
• Guest plays waiting to be kept: seven days.
• Error reports: Sentry deletes them after 90 days.

Your rights

You can ask us to show you, correct, delete or send you a copy of your data, to limit how we use it, or to stop using it where we rely on our legitimate interest. Where we rely on your consent, you can withdraw it at any time; that doesn’t affect what we did before. Write to ola@playmagnetico.com. We answer within one month.

You can also complain to Portugal’s data protection authority, the CNPD (Comissão Nacional de Proteção de Dados), or to the one where you live.

Age

Magnetico is for people 16 and over. We don’t knowingly keep data about younger children. If we learn that we do, we delete it.

Changes

If this page changes in a way that matters, we’ll email you before it does. The Terms are the other half of this.