Privacy

The short version

404 B.C. collects nothing. There is no account, no analytics, and no server that belongs to us.

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, your bookmarks, or your tabs. The only tabs it touches 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. Nothing is collected, and nothing is sent anywhere.

This website

The games on this site run entirely in your browser. High scores are kept in your browser's local storage and never leave your device. The site is hosted on Vercel, which keeps standard server request logs.

If you tip

The support is a page of ordinary links. Nothing is embedded in it, no payment script runs on this site, and reading the page sends nothing anywhere. Following one of those links takes you to Stripe, which handles the payment and emails you the receipt under its own privacy policy; your card details never touch this site. Nothing comes back here afterwards — a tip is not attached to a name, is not stored against your machine, and changes nothing about the app or your scores.