The short version: your game stays on your phone, signing in is optional and never stores your email address, we count how many people played, and we never learn who you are.
Your streak, your points, your atlas, the airports you have found and the days you have played are stored in your own browser, on your own device. Clearing your browser data for this site erases them, and unless you have signed in, nobody, including us, can restore them.
You can move that progress to another phone yourself, with the transfer link in the atlas. It is a link you generate and send to yourself. We never see it.
Signing in is optional. The whole game works without it: the day, the streak, the atlas, the pilot name, the crews, the boards. What signing in buys is two things: your pilot stops belonging to a phone and starts belonging to you, so your name, your crews and your progress come back on any phone you sign in on; and you can take your pilot name right away, instead of after your first full day.
Google is contacted at two moments, and at no other. The first time you ever open the game, the sign-in window is shown and your browser fetches Google's sign-in code to draw its button: Google learns that a browser has visited, and nothing else, because nothing about you is sent until you tap that button. After that, the page loads nothing from Google while you play; the code is fetched again only when you open the account window yourself, from the G in the header or from the offer on the screen. If you never tap the button, Google never learns who you are from us.
When you sign in, Google hands us a signed token about you. That token contains your Google account number, your email address, your name and your profile picture. We check the signature, then we use one of those four fields and discard the other three in the same breath. This is what happens to each of them:
| What Google sends | What we do with it |
|---|---|
| Your account number | Turned into a fingerprint with a key that never leaves our server, and stored. The fingerprint cannot be turned back into your account number, and no other site could produce the same one. |
| Your email address | Read, never stored, never logged, never sent anywhere. |
| Your name | Read, never stored. Your pilot name is the one you typed here, and it is unrelated. |
| Your profile picture | Read, never stored. It is never displayed anywhere in the game. |
So an account, on our side, is one row: a fingerprint, the random number your browser generated for this pilot, and two dates. There is no password, because there is nothing to log into but this. We ask Google for the three most basic permissions there are, the ones that carry your name, your email address and the fact that you are signed in, and for nothing else: not your contacts, not your files, not your calendar, not your location.
Once you have an account, one more thing is kept: a copy of your own progress, in exactly the compressed form the transfer link already uses. It holds your streak, your points, the airports you have found and your crew codes. It is written by your phone, it is handed back only to a browser that has just proved your Google account, and our server does not read it: to the server it is a string whose shape is checked and nothing more.
Safari deletes browser storage after seven days without a visit. For a daily game whose whole point is a streak, that would quietly erase a month of play. So a single cookie, named vjfb, holds a compressed copy of your own progress and is sent back to your browser when it asks for it.
It is not a tracking cookie. It contains your game state and nothing else: no identifier, no name, no address. It is attached only to one address on this site, it is not readable by JavaScript, and no copy of it is kept on our side. There is no advertising cookie here, and no third party cookie of any kind.
To know whether the game is worth continuing, we count a small number of anonymous events: the game being opened, a flight being finished, a day being completed, a result being shared, someone coming back the day after, someone signing in. These are counts, not people.
The server that receives them never reads, stores or logs an IP address, sets no identifier, and builds no fingerprint. Two people who did the same thing on the same day are indistinguishable in that data, by construction. It can answer "how many finished today", and it structurally cannot answer "who".
The same applies to the daily world ranking. Your score is filed into a band of scores for the day, and your place is arithmetic on those counts. The table holds how many finished in a band, never which of them.
If you take a pilot name, that name is public: it is the point of a board. What is stored with it is the name you typed, the random number your browser generated, and one score line per day. If you create or join a crew, the same two things are stored for that crew, plus one score line per day. No email address and no IP address is attached to any of it. If you have signed in, the account fingerprint points at that same random number, and that is the only link between the two.
Anyone can report a pilot name they find offensive. A report stores the name and the reporter's random number, so the same person cannot report the same name twice, and nothing else. We read the reports and decide; a report on its own removes nothing.
If you have signed in, open the atlas and tap Disconnect and delete my account. Google will ask you to confirm it is you, because proving the account is the only way we can be sure the right one is being deleted, and then the fingerprint and the stored copy of your progress are deleted on the spot. Your pilot name and your crews are not touched: they never depended on the account.
On the device itself, clear the site data for flightvjf.com in your browser settings. That removes your local progress and the cookie in one step. To leave a crew, tap the cross on its board: your pilot name and your scores are deleted from it, for everyone. To give up a pilot name, write to us. Writing to us works for anything else too.
Flight VJF is a free game, offered as is, with no warranty and no guarantee of availability. The flights are drawn from real public flight data and the anecdotes are written by us; mistakes are possible, and the report link in the game is the fastest way to tell us about one. Pilot names are public and must not be offensive, impersonate somebody, or advertise anything; we remove the ones that are, and a removed name is not returned. Please do not attempt to disrupt the service for other players, and do not try to file scores you did not fly. We can withdraw a name or a score from the boards, which is the whole of what there is to withdraw.
Flight VJF is a small independent project, named after the initials of the three people who make it, published from France. For anything at all, including a deletion request or a question about this page: hello@flightvjf.com.