Privacy Policy

Who is responsible

Muse is run by an individual in a personal capacity, not by a company. That person is also the person in charge of the protection of personal information under Law 25; the contact details are at the end of this page.

What Muse collects

Muse collects the minimum the game needs to work. This is everything that exists, without exception:

• A guest profile. On your first visit, Muse creates an anonymous account — a random identifier, with no name and no email — and keeps it in a cookie so your games follow you from one day to the next.
• Your account, if you sign up: your email address, your password (stored only as a hash, never in clear text) and the username you choose. The leaderboard shows other players your username, points, streak, badge and average number of attempts; your email never appears there.
• Your sign-in identity, if you use Google or Apple: an identifier, the account's email address, the name attached to it if the provider sends it, and the web address of your profile picture, if your Google account has one. Muse displays neither that name nor that picture anywhere. With Apple, the address may be a private relay address (“Hide My Email”); Muse treats it as the account's email.
• Your games: every word you submit, the result, the number of attempts, the points, whether the hint or a free letter was used, and the date. Your statistics, streak, records and badge are derived from them.
• Your daily reminder subscription, if you turn it on: the notification endpoint your browser provides, or the device token Apple provides in the app. This is a device identifier. Muse also records the days on which a reminder was sent to you, so that it never sends two.
• Technical data: the logs of the server that serves the site (IP address, browser type), kept briefly; a sign-in log kept by the authentication service, erased with the account; and error reports that carry no IP address, no cookies and no request headers.
• Usage measurements, anonymous before you sign in and pseudonymous after: about twenty events — a game started, a hint revealed, a game completed, a share, a sign-up, an install — with numbers and outcomes attached, never the word you played, the answer, or your email. Each event also carries the browser and device type, the screen size, the page viewed and the page you came from. Once you sign in, these events are tied to your account identifier, a random code, and to nothing else. The measurement tool stores an identifier in your browser to tell one visit from another. On receipt, PostHog records the IP address and derives a coarse location from it; that address is kept by PostHog unless a setting says otherwise, and Muse applies that setting.
• Your game preferences — sounds, vibrations — stay in your browser or in the app. They are not sent to the server.

What Muse does not collect

No phone number. No location. No contacts, no photos, no payment details — Muse is free and sells nothing. No session recordings, no automatic capture of what you tap in the app. Muse does not track you across other websites or apps, and buys no data from anywhere.

Why

This information is used only to:

• Run the game: remember your games, compute your points and your streak, show you on the leaderboard under your username.
• Recognise you from one visit to the next and from one device to another, if you have an account.
• Send you the daily reminder, only if you asked for it.
• Fix bugs, using the error reports.
• Understand how the game is used, through anonymous or pseudonymous counts.

Muse makes no automated decisions about you and builds no profile.

Who processes data for Muse

Muse relies on service providers that process this information on its behalf. Each one is named here, with what it does and where:

• Supabase — the database, authentication, and the sending of confirmation and password-reset emails. Servers in the United States.
• Vercel — hosting the site and running the game. Servers in the United States.
• PostHog (PostHog Cloud EU) — the usage measurements. Servers in the European Union.
• Sentry — the error reports. Servers in the United States.
• Apple — Sign in with Apple, and the notification service (APNs) for the App Store app.
• Google — Sign in with Google, and the notification service if your browser is Chrome or runs on Android.
• Mozilla — the notification service if your browser is Firefox.

The notification service that receives the subscription is not chosen by Muse: your browser or your operating system designates it. Supabase, Vercel, Sentry and PostHog process this information on Muse's behalf, bound by their data-processing terms, and may not use it for their own purposes. Apple and Google are different: when you sign in with them, they act on their own account, under their own privacy policies.

Outside Quebec

Your information is stored and processed outside Quebec: in the United States (Supabase, Vercel, Sentry, Apple, Google) and in the European Union (PostHog). In choosing these providers, the person responsible weighed the sensitivity of the data — an email, a username, word-game records — the purpose it serves, the protections written into each provider's contract, and the law of the place where it is kept. That assessment is written down and kept by the person responsible. If this does not suit you, you can play as a guest without ever giving your email, or have your account erased at any time.

For how long

• Your account and your games: as long as the account exists. They are erased as soon as you delete your account.
• Your guest profile: until it is upgraded to an account and that account is deleted. Muse does not yet purge inactive guest profiles automatically.
• Your daily reminder subscription: until you turn the reminder off, or the notification service retires it on its own.
• The authentication service's sign-in logs: erased with the account.
• Error reports: kept by Sentry for at most 90 days.
• Usage measurements: kept by PostHog until the person responsible deletes them by hand; they contain neither your email, nor your username, nor any word you played.
• Server logs: kept briefly by Vercel, long enough to diagnose an outage.

How the data is protected

Everything travels over HTTPS. Passwords are hashed by the authentication service and never stored in clear text. Notification subscriptions cannot be read by any code running in a browser — only the server reaches them. Each player can read only their own games. The person responsible looks at the data only to run the game and to answer your requests.

Your rights

Law 25 gives you the right to:

• Know what information Muse holds about you and receive a copy of it.
• Have it corrected. Your username can be changed in Settings; for your email, write to the person responsible.
• Have it erased — see the next section.
• Withdraw your consent at any time: the daily reminder is turned off in Settings, and deleting your account removes everything else.
• Lodge a complaint with the Commission d'accès à l'information du Québec if you believe your rights were not respected.

To exercise these rights, write to the address at the end of this page. You will receive a reply within 30 days.

Deleting your account

In Settings, “Supprimer mon compte” erases your account in two steps: Muse first says what will be destroyed, then asks you to type SUPPRIMER to confirm. Deletion is immediate and irreversible.

What goes: your account and your email, your username (which becomes available again), all your games, your statistics, your streak, your badge, your free letters, your daily reminder subscription, the history of reminders sent, and the sign-in log kept by the authentication service. Nothing is flagged as “deleted” and kept; the rows are removed from the database. An automated test verifies this on every change to the code by counting, after a deletion, what remains in each table: zero.

What does not go: the error reports at Sentry, until their 90 days run out, and the usage measurements at PostHog, until the person responsible deletes them by hand. Neither contains your email or your username.

A guest profile has no email and no name, so Muse cannot recognise you by email. To erase it, sign up from the same browser — the guest profile becomes the account — then delete the account: everything goes with it.

The daily reminder

Muse can send you one notification a day, in the morning, if you have not played yet. It is optional: nothing is sent until you accept your browser's or your phone's permission prompt — shown once, on your first tap on the home screen — or turn the reminder on in Settings. It names Muse, says which words are waiting for you and, where relevant, your streak; it contains nothing else.

You can stop it at any time in Settings; the notification's own “Ne plus recevoir” action takes you there, straight to the switch. Turning the reminder off removes the subscription from the server. There is no promotional email, no text message, and no other notification.

Reporting a username

The leaderboard shows usernames chosen by players. A blocklist refuses some in advance, but no list catches everything. If a username strikes you as hurtful or inappropriate, report it to the address at the end of this page: the person responsible removes it.

Under 14

Muse is offered to a circle of adults and is not intended for children. No account is knowingly created for a person under 14 without the consent of a parent or guardian, as Law 25 requires. If such an account exists, write to the person responsible and it will be erased.

Changes

If Muse changes what it collects or who processes it, this page changes with it and the date at the top is updated. The version published at this address is the one in force.

Contact

The person in charge of the protection of personal information for Muse is Patrick Monnot, who runs the game in a personal capacity. To exercise your rights, ask a question, or report a username, write to that address; you will receive a reply within 30 days.