Privacy

The short version

404 B.C. collects nothing. There is no account, no analytics in the app, and no server that belongs to us. These web pages count visits — without cookies, and without knowing who you are tomorrow. Details under This website.

What the app does on your Mac

To tell the difference between being connected to Wi-Fi and actually having internet, the app periodically requests two public connectivity-check endpoints that every phone and laptop already uses:

• captive.apple.com/hotspot-detect.html
• www.gstatic.com/generate_204

These requests carry no information about you and exist only to answer yes or no to "is the internet reachable". Nothing about the result is recorded or transmitted anywhere.

The app does not inspect your browsing, your network traffic, or the domains you visit. It needs no accessibility permissions, reads no other applications, and never captures your screen.

What is stored

Your settings, high scores, and outage counts are saved locally in macOS user defaults on your own machine. Deleting the app removes any reason for them to exist; they are never uploaded.

The Chrome extension

The extension answers the same yes-or-no question the same way, using the same two public endpoints listed above. It asks for four things and uses them only for this:

• Access to those two endpoints — to check whether the internet is reachable.
• Alarms — to run that check on a timer.
• Storage — to keep your settings and the current connection state on your own machine.
• An offscreen document — to notice the moment the connection drops, since an extension's background worker sleeps.

It does not request permission to read the pages you visit, and it cannot: it has no access to any site's content, your history, or your bookmarks. The tabs it manages are ones it opens itself: the arcade during an outage, and a one-time welcome page on this site when you first install it. High scores live in the extension's own local storage. The extension contains no analytics and sends no gameplay or account information to us. Opening the welcome page makes an ordinary website request; that page uses the website measurement described below.

This website

The games on this site run in your browser. High scores, sound preferences, reminders to keep the tip prompt quiet, and a tip amount saved while you are offline stay in browser storage. We do not upload that stored history. A browser game ending can report its score and whether it set a record as part of the website measurement below. The site is hosted on Vercel, which keeps standard server request logs.

These web pages use PostHog's cookieless measurement to count page views and selected actions, such as a game chosen or started, a download or store link clicked, and a tip prompt accepted or declined. Events include the page, campaign labels, referring website, and relevant game or tip amount. Analytics does not use cookies or browser storage, create account profiles, record your screen, or collect form contents. PostHog groups visits using a server-side hash of the project, a daily salt, IP address, user agent, and hostname. This is an estimate of same-day visitors, not a persistent account identity. Changing the daily salt does not delete events already collected. Requests go to this website's domain and are relayed to PostHog. The studio's privacy policy also applies to these pages.

Advertising on the web arcade

We are preparing Google ads for the web arcade at blacktop.social/404bc/play. They are not switched on yet. When they are, an ad will appear only after you have finished a run: one unit under the page, two beside the board on wide screens, and sometimes a full-screen ad when you switch games. Never during a game, and never on the win screen. Google and its advertising partners may then use cookies, device information and page context to show and measure ads, with consent where the law requires it. The Mac app and the Chrome extension will never show ads. Your choices, and how this works across our site, are on the Blacktop Social privacy page.

If you tip

The support page uses ordinary links to Stripe; no payment script is embedded here. Following a link takes you to Stripe, which handles payment and receipt information under its own privacy policy. Card details are entered on Stripe, and Stripe makes payment and customer details available to us as the merchant. On the website, a random reference for that page load is added to the checkout link and the click event so a checkout can be reconciled with that click; it is not a persistent visitor ID. We also count visits to the thank-you page, which by themselves do not prove that payment succeeded. A tip does not create an account or change the app, extension, or your scores, and does not subscribe you to promotional email.