The short version
WordSearchCraft does not ask for your name, your email address, or an account, and it does not run advertising. It uses one analytics service, Microsoft Clarity, and only if you agree to it. Nothing here is tied to an identity, because there is no identity to tie it to.
If you declined, or have not answered yet, no analytics script is loaded at all. That is not a setting that tells Clarity to behave; the file simply never reaches your browser.
What is stored on your device
One item, in your browser’s local storage: your light or dark theme preference, saved under the key wsc-theme. It never leaves your browser and is not sent to any server. Clearing your browser data removes it.
Cookies appear only after you accept the banner. If you do, Microsoft Clarity sets_clck and _clsk, which distinguish one visit from another and hold a session together. There are no advertising cookies on this site, and no other tracker.
Counting visits, without cookies
One measurement runs for everyone, and it is deliberately not behind the banner: Cloudflare Web Analytics, which counts page views and measures how fast pages load. It sets no cookie, stores nothing on your device and does not fingerprint your browser, so there is nothing on your machine to consent to.
It processes your IP address in passing, as any web server must in order to send you a page at all. Cloudflare already does that to deliver this site; the analytics aggregates what passes through rather than collecting anything new, and none of it is tied to you or followed across other sites. The legal basis is legitimate interest in knowing how many people use the site, and you can object by writing to the address at the bottom of this page.
Microsoft Clarity, if you accept
Clarity is an analytics product from Microsoft. It records how pages are used: which links get clicked, how far down a page people read, where a layout confuses people. That includes a playback of the session as movements and clicks on the page.
What it does not get: anything you type into the puzzle builder. The title field, the word entry, the paste box and the word list are marked so their contents are hidden from the recording before it leaves your browser. We did that in the page itself rather than in Clarity's settings, so it cannot be undone by a change of configuration.
Microsoft processes this data as a separate controller under its ownprivacy statement. The legal basis is your consent, and nothing loads before you give it.
Clearing your browser data also resets it, and the banner comes back.
What our server receives
When you download a PDF, your browser sends the puzzle settings you chose: topic, grid size, puzzles per page and answer key style. That request is processed to build the file and is not stored against you.
Like any website, the hosting provider processes standard request data, including your IP address, in order to deliver the page and protect against abuse. We do not build profiles from it.
Fonts
Typefaces are loaded from Google Fonts. That means Google’s servers receive the request for the font files, including your IP address, underGoogle’s privacy policy. We have no other relationship with them on this site today.
Children
Many of these puzzles are made for children, and the site is designed accordingly: it collects no personal information from anyone, of any age. There is no signup, no comment section and no upload.
When this changes
If advertising is added later, this page will be rewritten before it goes live, the date above will change, and the consent controls will be in place at the same time. It will not be updated quietly after the fact, and the banner you already answered will be replaced rather than reused, because consent to analytics is not consent to advertising.
Contact
Questions about this policy go to hello@wordsearchcraft.com.