The short version: you can use all of Jigwise without an account, and in that mode your puzzle progress lives in your own browser, not on our servers.
Playing without an account
Unfinished puzzles (piece positions, elapsed time, chosen settings) are saved with your browser’s local storage (IndexedDB) so an accidental tab close never costs you progress. That data stays on your device; we cannot read it. Clearing your browser’s site data deletes it. Anonymous play sets no tracking cookies.
If you sign in
Sign-in is passwordless: a code emailed to you, or Google. We store: your email address, an optional display name, your sessions (as secure, httpOnly cookies), and the puzzles you finish — puzzle, piece count, time, completion date. They are visible only to you, in your own logbook. You can ask us to delete your account and everything attached to it at any time.
What we don’t do
No analytics trackers of our own, and no selling of data. The one third party that sets anything on this site is our ad provider, and it is named below.
Ads
Ads help keep Jigwise free for everyone. Every ad space is clearly labelled Advertisement: one band on the front page, one window in the strip at the bottom of the player, and an optional sponsor video you can choose to watch to join two pieces. Ads never cover your pieces and never pop up uninvited.
Our ad provider is Google, through Google AdSense. Two things follow from that, and they are worth stating plainly:
Google and its partners use cookies to serve the ads you see. That includes Google’s advertising cookie, which lets it and its partners show ads based on your visits to this site and other sites. These are not our cookies and we cannot read them.
You can turn personalised advertising off. Go to Google’s Ads Settings and switch it off. The ads keep paying for the site, they just stop being tailored to you. How Google uses the information it collects from sites that run its ads is described in Google’s own policy, and the full list of the vendors it may work with is published in its advertising controls. You can also opt out of third-party advertising cookies more broadly at aboutads.info.
If you are in the UK, the EU or Switzerland you will be asked for your consent before any personalised ad cookie is set, through Google’s own consent message. Your answer is remembered, and you can change it at any time from that message.
Ads are shown to everyone the same way whether or not you have an account. We never hand your email address, your name or your puzzle history to an advertiser.
Infrastructure
The site runs on managed hosting (Vercel), its database on Neon, and images are served from Cloudflare R2. Those providers see the ordinary technical metadata any web host sees (IP addresses in request logs). We keep no additional server-side logs of your activity.
Contact
Privacy questions or deletion requests: hello@jigwise.com. Or use the contact page, which lists every route in one place.