Shorthand Privacy Policy

Effective August 25, 2026 · Last updated August 25, 2026

This Privacy Policy describes how Indy Interactive Inc. ("Indy Interactive," "we," "us," or "our") handles information when you use the Shorthand game, whether as the installed app or in a web browser (together, the "Game").

By using the Game you agree to this Policy. If you do not agree, please do not use the Game.

1. Who We Are

Data Controller: Indy Interactive Inc.
Contact: support@joinshorthand.party
Mailing Address: 2093 Philadelphia Pike #9979, Claymont, DE 19703, USA

We aim to answer support and privacy mail within three business days.

If you are in the European Economic Area (EEA), the United Kingdom, or Switzerland, you may contact us about your data protection rights at the address above.

2. What the Game Does

Shorthand is a party game for a group of people in the same room. One player opens a room on the installed app and becomes the host; the others join by entering a short room code in a web browser. Each round, players draw on their own phone and guess at what other people drew.

There is no matchmaking, no public lobby, no friends list, no chat and no way to find a room you were not given the code for.

3. Information We Collect

3.1 What you make during a game

To put a drawing on other people's screens, the Game sends three things through our relay:

• The display name you type when you take a seat. It is shown to the other players in your room. It is not an account, it is not verified, and nothing requires it to be your real name.
• Your drawings, as stroke coordinates rather than as an image file.
• Your guesses and votes, as text.

These are the two categories declared in the app's iOS privacy manifest: Name and Other User Content. Both are declared there, accurately, as not linked to your identity and not used for tracking.

We do not store any of it. See § 5 for what the relay does and does not do with it.

3.2 What is stored on your device

The Game writes two small records on your own device and nothing else. The first is your settings, under the key shorthand.settings.v1. It holds seven values:

The second is a single web address, under the key shorthand.relay.v1. It is the address of the server the Game connects to for an online round, which the Game checks for at startup so that the address can be corrected without you having to install an update. It is written down only so that the Game can still reach the right server the next time you play if it cannot check. It is a server address and nothing about you. There is no identifier in it, and it is the same address for everybody.

Neither record ever leaves your device. Neither is sent to us, neither is backed up to us, and neither contains a name, a drawing or any history. In the app they live in the app's own storage; in a browser they live in that browser's local storage for this site. Deleting the app, or clearing site data for this site, removes them.

The Game keeps no history. Your display name, your drawings and your guesses are not written to your device either. Nothing from a finished round survives it.

3.3 Your photo library

A drawing can be saved as a picture. If you tap save, the app asks your operating system for permission to add a photo, then writes that one image to your photo library. It does this only when you ask, one picture at a time.

The Game does not read your photo library, does not browse it, and does not send anything from it anywhere. The permission text in the app says the same thing: "Shorthand only ever adds a drawing you asked it to save. It does not read your photos."

3.4 Network information

Connecting to anything on the internet means your IP address is visible to the service you connect to. That applies here, and there are two things worth naming about it.

• Cloudflare, which operates the network the relay runs on, processes your IP address in order to route the connection. It does this as our service provider.
• The relay uses your IP address as the key for a rate limit, a short-lived counter that stops one machine opening thousands of rooms and exhausting the service for everybody else. The counter lives in Cloudflare's rate-limiting service, expires on its own, and is not read by us, joined to anything, or written into a record.

We do not store IP addresses. We keep no access logs of any kind.

3.5 How this website is measured

joinshorthand.party uses Cloudflare Web Analytics to count page views, so that we know whether anybody is finding the game. It is worth being precise about it, because it is the one thing on this page that could reasonably be called tracking and it is not:

• It sets no cookies and stores nothing on your device: no cookie, no local storage, nothing. That is also why this site has no cookie banner: there is nothing to ask you to accept.
• It does not identify you and does not attempt to. Cloudflare states that it does not fingerprint individuals by IP address, User Agent string, or any other data. There is no identifier that follows you between visits, and no way for us to tell whether two page views are the same person.
• It cannot follow you to other websites. It measures this site and nothing else.

What it records for a page view is: the country your connection appears to come from, the page path, the site that linked you here, your device type (desktop, mobile, tablet), your browser, your operating system, and page-loading performance measurements. The performance measurements include the position and size of elements on the page. That is page layout, not anything you made.

Nothing you draw or type is measured, and it could not be: the beacon sees the page, and everything you make travels over the relay described in § 5, which is a separate connection it has no sight of.

It runs in a web browser only. The installed app is not a web page and never loads this site, so nobody playing in the app is measured at all.

4. What We Use It For

The main purpose is running the round you are playing. Your name is shown to the people in your room so they know whose drawing they are looking at; your drawing is shown to them so they can guess at it; your guess is shown so the round can be scored.

The second, and the only other one, is counting visits to this website, as described in § 3.5: how many people arrive, roughly where from, and whether the page works on their phone.

We do not use any of it to build a profile, to advertise, to train a model, or to make any decision about you as an individual. Nothing you draw or type is used for anything but the round it was made in.

5. How It Travels, and Who Else Touches It

Phones at the same table do not talk to each other directly. Everything passes through a relay we run on Cloudflare Workers. Three facts about that relay are the substance of this Policy, and each is a property of the code rather than a promise about our intentions:

• It does not read what you send. The relay inspects the first few bytes of each message. That is the envelope, which says which seat it came from and which seat it is for. It rewrites the sender's address so it cannot be forged, and forwards the rest untouched. Nothing in the relay parses a drawing, a name or a guess.
• It does not write anything down. A room lives in memory for as long as somebody is in it. There is no database, no file, no bucket and no persistent storage of any kind behind it. When the last player disconnects, the room and everything that passed through it cease to exist.
• It does not log. The relay produces no log lines about your session, your address, your name or your content.

The relay is reachable at shorthand-relay.joinshorthand.workers.dev, and the Game will not connect to any other host.

5.1 Who else receives your information

That is the complete list. Apart from the page counting in § 3.5 there are no analytics providers, and there are no crash reporters, no advertising networks, no AI providers and no data brokers, because the Game contains no such component. We do not sell or share your information, and we never have.

6. What We Do Not Do

Stated plainly, because a list of absences is easier to check than a list of assurances. The Game has:

• no accounts, no sign-in, no passwords and no email collection;
• no analytics or telemetry inside the Game itself, on any platform. The page counting in § 3.5 is a property of this website in a browser, and there is nothing of the kind in the installed app;
• no crash reporting;
• no advertising, no advertising identifiers, and no tracking across apps or websites. The iOS privacy manifest declares NSPrivacyTracking: false with an empty tracking-domain list, and there is no App Tracking Transparency prompt because there is nothing to ask you for;
• no in-app purchases and no subscriptions;
• no cookies anywhere, which is why there is no cookie banner;
• no microphone, camera, contacts, calendar, or location access. The app requests exactly one permission, and only when you tap save: adding a picture to your photo library.

7. Data Retention

We retain nothing, because we store nothing. A room exists in memory while it is being played and is gone when it empties. There is no backup of it, no archive of it and no copy of it to delete later.

The two records described in § 3.2 stay on your device until you remove them.

The website page counts in § 3.5 are held by Cloudflare on our behalf: unsampled for seven days, then aggregated for longer-term storage, and visible to us for the previous six months. They are counts rather than records of people, so there is no row in them that is you.

If you write to us at the support address, we keep that email in our mailbox for as long as we need it to answer you and to keep a record of the issue, and no longer than three years.

8. Your Privacy Rights

Depending on where you live, you may have rights to access, correct, delete, or export your personal information, to object to or restrict its processing, and to be free from discrimination for exercising those rights. Those rights apply here in full. The honest answer to most of them is that there is nothing to act on.

• Access / export. We hold no record of you, so there is no file to send you. The page counts in § 3.5 carry no identifier, so there is nothing in them that could be looked up as yours even in principle.
• Deletion. There is no account to delete. Anything from a past round is already gone. The one thing that persists is the settings record on your own device, which you can remove by deleting the app or clearing this site's data in your browser.
• Correction. Your display name is whatever you type the next time you sit down.
• Sale or sharing. We do not sell personal information and do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising, as those terms are used in California law. We have never done either. There is therefore no opt-out to offer.

Our legal basis under UK and EU GDPR for handling what passes through the relay is performance of a contract. You asked us to show your drawing to the people in your room. For the rate limit in § 3.4 and the page counting in § 3.5, it is our legitimate interest in keeping the service available and knowing whether anyone is using it. Because the page counting stores nothing on your device, it does not require consent under the ePrivacy rules that govern cookies, which is why you are not asked for any.

To exercise any right, or to complain about how we have handled something, write to support@joinshorthand.party. You also have the right to complain to your local data protection authority.

9. Data Security

All connections between the Game and the relay use encrypted WebSockets (wss://), and this website is served over HTTPS. Rooms are addressed by a short code, and a host claims a room with a secret that a later client cannot guess or overwrite.

The strongest security property here is structural rather than technical: there is no store of past games to breach. A system that keeps nothing cannot leak what it kept.

No method of transmission over the internet is completely secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security. In particular, anything you draw or type is shown to the other people in your room. Treat it the way you would treat saying something out loud in that room.

10. International Data Transfers

Cloudflare routes each connection through a server near the person connecting, so your messages may be processed in a country other than your own, including the United States, where we are established. Because nothing is retained, this is a matter of transit rather than of storage. Where transfers out of the EEA or the UK are involved, they rely on Cloudflare's Standard Contractual Clauses.

11. Children's Privacy

The Game is not directed to children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from them. You must be at least 13 years old (or the minimum age of digital consent where you live, if that is higher) to play. The Game carries user-generated drawings and text from other players, which is why it is not offered as a children's title on either store.

If you believe a child under 13 has provided personal information to us, please write to support@joinshorthand.party and we will act on it, although, as § 7 explains, there will not normally be anything left to remove.

12. Reports You Send Us

The Game gives you a way to report a drawing, a guess or a name you object to. Choosing it opens your own email app with a message addressed to us. That message contains what you type into it and whatever your email provider normally attaches to an email you send; it does not attach the drawing, and nothing is sent until you send it yourself. What we then hold is an email, handled as described in § 7.

If the Game hits a problem and cannot draw a page, it offers you a Send report button on the screen it puts up instead. That works the same way: it opens your own email app with a message already written, and nothing is sent until you send it yourself. The message we have written for you contains only the app version and build number, which platform you are playing on, the name of the screen the problem happened on, the time, and the error text the app itself produced. It contains no drawing, no display name, no guess and no room code, and the Game sends nothing about a problem on its own. There is no crash reporting in it at all.

13. This Website

joinshorthand.party serves the Game and these documents. It sets no cookies. Your browser's local storage is used only for the two records in § 3.2.

Every font, image and script the Game itself needs is served from this domain. The one thing loaded from anywhere else is Cloudflare's Web Analytics beacon, which counts page views and is described in full in § 3.5. It is served from static.cloudflareinsights.com, it sets no cookies, and it does not identify you.

14. Changes to This Policy

If we change this Policy we will update the "Last updated" date at the top and post the new version here. Material changes will be announced in the Game before they take effect. Continuing to play after a change means you accept the updated Policy.

15. Contact Us

Indy Interactive Inc.
2093 Philadelphia Pike #9979
Claymont, DE 19703, USA
support@joinshorthand.party

We aim to reply within three business days.