This Privacy Policy explains what information Murdoku Online (“Murdoku”, “we”, “us”) collects when you visit murdokuonline.org, why we collect it, who else receives it, and what you can do about it. It applies to every page on this domain, including the case pages, the generator, the editor and the printable sheets. Reading or playing does not require an account, and we never ask you for your name, your address or your payment details.
Murdoku Online is an independently run, free logic-puzzle site. It is a fan version of the Murdoku idea by Manuel Garand and the fan version by Dirk Aporius, and it is not affiliated with them commercially. Questions about this policy, requests about your data, and complaints all go to the same address: support@murdokuonline.org, which is also on our contact page. We answer data requests within thirty days.
Your progress never reaches us. Solved cases, the language you picked, your settings, the level draft open in the editor and any custom cases you saved are written to your browser’s local storage on your own device. We cannot read that store from our side; it exists so the site remembers where you were when you come back. Clearing your browser’s site data for murdokuonline.org erases all of it, and the game keeps working — you simply start from a blank casebook.
When you solve a case, the site sends a short record to our scores service: which case it was, how many hints were used, and how long it took. It carries no account, no device identifier and no IP address, so it cannot be tied back to you or joined with anything else. Those records are what the “recent verdicts” panel and the “faster than X% of detectives” line are counted from. If you copy a share link for a result, that one record becomes publicly readable by anyone who opens the link — that is the entire point of a share link, and nothing else is exposed with it.
If you publish a case from the editor, the case itself — its board, its suspects and clues, the title you gave it and, if you typed one, the name you chose to sign it with — is stored on our community service and shown to everyone in the community gallery and at its link. Do not put anything in it you would not want public. To limit spam, the service also keeps a one-way, salted hash of your IP address next to the case and next to any report you send; the address itself is never stored, and the hash is used only to count publications per hour, to count each player’s report once, and to count each player once toward a community case’s “played” figure. A case that several players report is taken down. To have a case you published removed, use the contact page.
To see roughly how many people visit and which pages are read, we use a privacy-friendly, cookieless analytics script. It counts page views in aggregate. It sets no cookie, stores no identifier on your device and does not follow you to other websites, so it cannot build a profile of you as an individual.
Like every site on the public internet, the hosting and content-delivery providers that serve these pages record standard technical request data — IP address, timestamp, the URL requested, the browser’s user-agent string and referring page. These logs exist to deliver the site, to keep it available and to detect abuse. They are kept for a short, rolling period by those providers and are not used to profile visitors or combined with anything above.
This site shows advertising. Murdoku is free to play and is funded by ads served through Google AdSense. Advertising is the one part of the site that does place cookies and similar technologies on your device, and this section explains exactly how that works.
Google is a third-party vendor on this site. Google uses cookies — including the DoubleClick DART cookie and equivalent advertising identifiers — to serve ads to you based on your prior visits to murdokuonline.org and to other websites on the internet. Google’s use of advertising cookies enables it and its partners to serve ads to you based on that browsing history. You can opt out of personalised advertising by Google at any time by visiting Google Ads Settings. How Google handles data from sites that use its services is described in Google’s privacy and terms for partner sites.
Third-party ad networks and exchanges other than Google may also serve or measure ads on this site. Those third parties may automatically receive your IP address when an ad is delivered, and may use cookies, JavaScript and web beacons (also called clear GIFs or pixel tags) to measure the effectiveness of their advertisements and to personalise the advertising content you see. Murdoku has no access to, and no control over, the cookies those vendors set: they are governed by each vendor’s own privacy policy, not by this one. The current list of vendors Google may work with is published in Google’s list of advertising partners.
There are no cookies on this site that identify you as a person and none used to log you in, because there is nothing to log in to. The cookies that do appear come from the advertising described above and serve three purposes: deciding which ad to show, making sure the same ad is not repeated at you endlessly, and measuring whether an ad was seen or clicked. You can block or delete them in your browser settings at any time; the puzzles, the editor and the generator all keep working without them.
Beyond Google Ads Settings above, you can opt out of interest-based advertising from many vendors at once at the Digital Advertising Alliance’s opt-out page and, in Europe, at Your Online Choices. Opting out does not remove advertising — it makes the ads you see non-personalised.
Where the law requires it, personalised advertising and the storing of non-essential cookies on your device happen only after you have given consent, through the consent message shown on your first visit. You may refuse consent, and you may change or withdraw it later from the privacy link in that message; refusing means you continue to see the site with non-personalised advertising. Our legal bases under the GDPR are your consent for advertising cookies and personalised advertising, and our legitimate interest in delivering, securing and measuring the site in aggregate for everything else. You have the right to access, correct, erase, restrict and object to the processing of your personal data, the right to data portability and the right to complain to your national supervisory authority. Because we hold no account and no identifier for you, a request will usually be answered with confirmation that we hold nothing that identifies you.
We do not sell personal information for money. Some US state privacy laws treat the sharing of advertising identifiers for cross-context behavioural advertising as a “sale” or “share”; the opt-out links above are how you exercise the right to opt out of it on this site, and your browser’s Global Privacy Control signal is honoured where our advertising partners support it. You may also write to the address above to ask what we hold about you and to have it deleted.
Murdoku is a puzzle game suitable for a general audience, and it is not directed at children under the age of 13. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children. Parents who believe a child has provided personal information to this site can write to the address above and we will delete it. We do not use content on this site to build advertising audiences of children.
We do not ask for or store names, email addresses, postal addresses, phone numbers or payment details — the site has no sign-up, no newsletter and no shop. We do not request access to your precise location, your camera, your microphone or your contacts. We do not pass any personally identifying information into an advertising request. And we do not use special-category data — health, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, political opinion — for advertising or audience building, because we do not have any.
Murdoku links out to a handful of external sites, mostly to credit the creators of the original idea and to the opt-out pages named above. Those sites have their own privacy practices, which we neither control nor endorse. This policy covers murdokuonline.org only.
When this policy changes we revise the “last updated” date at the top and publish the new version here. Material changes to how advertising or tracking works on the site will be reflected here before they take effect. Continuing to use Murdoku after a change means you accept the revised policy.