Last updated 29 September 2026
What we collect when you play, why, how long we keep it, and how to make us stop.
This policy explains what personal data The Trivia Guru (“we”, “us”) collects when you play quizzes, create an account or contact us, why we collect it, how long we keep it, and what you can do about it.
We play in a lot of places, and data-protection law differs between them. Rather than give you whichever rights your country happens to require, we give everyone the same set — the strongest of the ones that apply to us anywhere. Everything in Your rights is available to you wherever you live.
Every category of personal data we hold is listed below, with why we hold it, who else sees it, and how long we keep it.
| Data | Why | Who else sees it | Kept for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Email address and password | To create and secure your account, verify your address and let you reset a forgotten password. Passwords are stored only as a bcrypt hash — we never see the password itself. | Our email provider, to deliver account emails | Until you delete your account |
| If you sign in with Google: your email address | To create your account and sign you in. We ask Google for your email address only — not your name, profile picture, contacts or anything else in your Google account — and we never post to or change anything in it. | Nobody. Google knows you used it to sign in to us. | Until you delete your account |
| Username, display name, avatar, country | To identify you in the game and place you on leaderboards. | Publicly visible on leaderboards | Until you delete your account |
| Gameplay — quizzes played, answers, scores, accuracy, streaks, XP, level, badges | To run the quiz, score it, track your progress and rank you. | Scores and rank are publicly visible; your individual answers are not | Until you delete your account |
| Archived gameplay from past seasons | Historical record of past scores. | Nobody | 24 months |
| Messages you send us through the contact form — your name, email and message | To answer you. | Nobody | 24 months |
| Newsletter address, the time you confirmed, and the IP address the request came from | To send the newsletter, and to be able to show that you asked for it. | Our email provider | Until you unsubscribe, then 24 months |
| Failed signup attempts — the email address used, and the IP address | When someone tries to register an address that already has an account, we record it rather than telling them the address is taken. That is what stops our signup form being used to discover who has an account. It also lets us spot someone testing many addresses. | Nobody | 90 days |
| Analytics — device, browser, approximate location and pages visited | To see which quiz categories and regions are popular. Only collected if you accept analytics cookies. | Google LLC, which may process it in the United States and other countries | Held by Google under their retention settings |
| A guest identifier and a country cookie | So you can play and resume a quiz without an account, and see your region’s leaderboard. Necessary for the site to work. | Nobody | Up to 12 months |
| Your IP address and browser details on each request | To deliver the site, work out your country, and rate-limit abuse. Held in memory and in our hosting provider’s request logs, not in your account. | Our hosting provider | Short-lived request logs, typically a few days |
| A bot check on the signup, password-reset, contact and newsletter forms | To stop automated abuse of those forms. Cloudflare Turnstile checks your browser and IP address when you use one of them. | Cloudflare, Inc., which may process it in the United States and other countries | Held by Cloudflare under their retention settings; we keep only the pass/fail result |
These are not requests you have to ask us for — most are buttons in the product.
We treat anyone under 18 as a child. Some places set that line lower; we use the highest one rather than a different age per country.
Accounts are for over-18s only. Some places require a parent or guardian to give verifiable consent before a child’s data is processed at all. We do not operate that yet, so rather than hold a child’s data without it, we ask you to confirm you are 18 or older when you create an account. Under-18s are welcome to play as guests, which creates no account.
We do not verify that confirmation, so an account may still be opened by a child. We do not knowingly hold a child’s data, we do not profile anyone or track them across sites, and we show no targeted advertising to anyone of any age. If you are a parent or guardian and believe your child holds an account, write to our Privacy Team below and we will delete it.
We only process your data where we have a reason that holds up. There are three, and every row in the table above falls under one of them:
We do not process your data for anything you have not been told about on this page.
The table above gives a period for every category. In short:
Deleting your account erases all of the above from our database straight away, regardless of these periods. Our database provider keeps short-lived backups for disaster recovery; copies in them expire on their own within 7 days and are never restored to bring back a deleted account.
Passwords are hashed with bcrypt and never stored or logged in readable form. The site is served over HTTPS only, with a Content-Security-Policy. Session cookies are HTTP-only and cannot be read by scripts.
No system is perfectly secure. If a breach affects your data we will tell you, and notify the relevant regulator, as quickly as the rules where you live require — in the strictest case that is within 72 hours of us becoming aware.
For any question about this policy, to exercise a right, or to complain, contact our Privacy Team:
Privacy Team, The Trivia Guru
privacy@thetriviaguru.com
You can also reach us through our contact page. We aim to respond within 30 days.
If you are not satisfied with our response, you can take it to the data-protection regulator in your own country.
We may update this policy. When we make a material change we will update the date at the top of this page and, where the change affects how we use data you have already given us, tell you in the product before it takes effect.