Privacy Policy
Last updated: 16 October 2026
Glowit.io is a live multiplayer trivia platform. This page explains exactly what data is collected, why, who it is shared with, how long it is kept, and what you can do about it. We collect the minimum the game needs to work.
1. Who is responsible for your data
The data controller for the purposes of this policy is Noam Nissan, operator of Glowit.io, Israel. Glowit is not an incorporated company; it is an independent project run by an individual.
For any privacy question, request or complaint, write to privacy@glowit.io. We answer data-rights requests within 30 days.
2. What we collect
Glowit treats two kinds of user very differently, and so does the amount of data involved.
- Hosts (people who build quizzes and run games) sign in with a Google account. From Google we receive an email address, a display name, a profile picture and a user ID. We also store the quizzes you build (questions, answers, images, video links), your chosen language, AI usage counters, and your answer to the 18+ question asked before AI generation, with the date you answered. When you run a game we also record a coarse device class for the host - operating system family and browser family only (for example windows/chrome), never the full browser user-agent string - used to debug game stalls and for aggregate statistics.
- Players (people who join with a room code) need no account and no email. They type a nickname and pick an avatar, and a temporary anonymous ID is created. During the game we store the nickname, the avatar, the answers, the score and the answer times, and the nickname, avatar, answers and score are shown to the host and the other players in that room. You choose the nickname yourself and you do not have to use your real name. The live game room, with the nicknames, is deleted automatically within about three hours after the game. After that we keep a game-statistics record for 180 days without the nickname: score, rank, answer counts and answer timings, plus coarse technical context (a two-letter country code from our network provider Cloudflare, the time-zone offset, the browser language and the device type, for example android/chrome), under an anonymous random player ID.
- Technical data collected automatically: IP address (processed by Google's servers, not separately stored by us), browser and device type, browser language and timezone, the country you are browsing from (derived from the IP address by our CDN provider, Cloudflare; we keep only a two-letter country code such as IL, never the address itself), and the page you arrived from (referrer) together with any UTM parameters.
- Preferences stored only on your own device: language, sound setting, accessibility preferences, your last nickname and avatar, and unsaved quiz drafts. This data stays in your browser and is never sent to us.
- Paid subscriptions: if you bought a paid plan, we store the plan type, the subscription status and billing dates, and your Paddle customer and subscription IDs. You give your payment details directly to Paddle, and they never reach us.
- Messages you send us: if you request an account upgrade, report a problem or email us, we keep the content of that message and your email address.
We do not collect precise location, never access your camera or microphone, and never ask for phone numbers or national ID numbers. Card details never reach us: anyone who buys a subscription gives them directly to Paddle.
3. Why we use your data, and on what legal basis
Under the GDPR every use of personal data needs a lawful basis. Here are ours:
| Purpose | Legal basis |
|---|---|
| Running the live game: room sync, scoring, leaderboard | Performance of a contract (Art. 6(1)(b)) |
| Managing a host account and storing their quizzes | Performance of a contract |
| Generating questions with AI at your request | Performance of a contract |
| Preventing abuse, spam and fraud (App Check, reCAPTCHA, rate limits) | Legitimate interest (Art. 6(1)(f)) in securing the service |
| Usage measurement (Google Analytics, acquisition sources) | Consent (Art. 6(1)(a)) where consent is required; legitimate interest elsewhere, with an opt-out |
| Basic audience measurement with no cookies and no device identifier (self-hosted Umami) | Legitimate interest (Art. 6(1)(f)) in understanding and improving the service |
| Showing the optional rewarded ad you choose to watch | Consent |
| Welcome email and service notices | Performance of a contract |
| Marketing emails and product updates | Consent, withdrawable at any time |
| Keeping the mailing-list consent, sending and opt-out log and the opt-out list (identified only by a coded one-way fingerprint, a keyed hash, of the email address) after you withdraw consent or delete your account | Legitimate interest (Art. 6(1)(f)) in defending against legal claims and in never mailing someone who opted out again |
| Managing a paid subscription: activating the plan, renewals, cancellations and refunds | Performance of a contract |
| Meeting legal obligations and responding to lawful requests | Legal obligation (Art. 6(1)(c)) |
Your data is never sold, rented or handed to a third party for advertising or marketing profiling. Glowit makes no automated decisions that produce legal effects for you or similarly significantly affect you.
5. Cookie-free audience measurement
Alongside the tools described above, we run a basic audience measurement with Umami, an open-source analytics tool installed on a server we own and control in Israel (Oracle Cloud, Jerusalem region). No analytics data from this tool is sent to any third party. Israel is recognised by the European Commission as providing an adequate level of data protection.
The tool sets no cookies and stores no identifier on your device, neither in localStorage nor in sessionStorage.
To count unique visitors it computes a one-way hash of the IP address, the browser signature and a secret value that rotates every day. The hash cannot be reversed and cannot be linked from one day to the next, so it cannot build a profile of you and cannot track you over time.
The only purpose is to understand how many people use Glowit, from which countries, and which pages are genuinely useful, so that we can improve the service. There is no advertising use, no cross-site tracking, and no sale or sharing of the data.
The legal basis under the GDPR is legitimate interest (Art. 6(1)(f)). Because the measurement is first-party, strictly limited and creates no persistent identifier, it runs without a consent banner. In the EU, the UK and Switzerland it does not count players' game screens at all, and everywhere it honours the browser's Global Privacy Control signal. It is entirely separate from Google Analytics, which never runs on players' screens and, as described above, loads only with consent where consent is required.
Raw visit records are kept for up to 13 months. Aggregated statistics, meaning counts only, may be kept for longer.
For full transparency, this is everything recorded on each page view:
- The address of the page viewed
- The site you arrived from (referrer)
- Browser type
- Operating system
- Device type
- Screen size
- Browser language
- Country, derived from the IP address at the moment of the request. The IP address itself is not stored.
If you would rather not be counted, you have two options: turn on the Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control signal in your browser, which we honour; or switch the measurement off with the dedicated toggle in your privacy settings at the bottom of the page.
6. Who we share data with
We do not sell data. We do use infrastructure providers that process data on our behalf and on our instructions. This is the complete list:
- Beyond that, we disclose data only where required by law, court order or a lawful request from a competent authority, or to protect the rights and safety of users.
- If the service is ever sold or transferred, we will announce it on this page in advance and you will be able to delete your account before the transfer.
| Provider | What it receives and why |
|---|---|
| Google Firebase (Auth, Realtime Database, Cloud Functions, Hosting) | The core infrastructure: your account, your quizzes and the live game state. The database is hosted in the European Union (Belgium); some server functions run in the United States. |
| Google Analytics (GA4) | Anonymised usage events and a device identifier, on host and content pages only. It never runs on the join screen or on players' game screens, anywhere in the world. In the EU, the UK and Switzerland it loads only after you consent; elsewhere it runs by default and can be switched off in the privacy settings at the bottom of every page. |
| Google reCAPTCHA Enterprise and App Check | Anti-bot signals from your browser, to block abuse of the service. |
| Google AdSense | Serving the optional rewarded ad. Loads only with advertising consent. |
| Google Gemini API | The prompt text or document you uploaded for question generation. Sent for that generation only. |
| Groq (fallback model provider) | The same text, only when Gemini is unavailable. Groq is a US company. |
| Cloudflare (R2 storage and email routing) | Storage for images you upload to your quizzes, and routing of emails sent to our addresses (including replies to our emails) to our inbox. Replies to the newsletter are also checked automatically (sender, subject and the first 500 characters) for an unsubscribe request; the text is not stored. |
| YouTube (in youtube-nocookie mode) | Only when a question contains a video. In this mode YouTube sets no tracking cookies before playback. |
| Brevo (outbound email) | Your email address and the message itself, for the welcome email and service notices, and for marketing email to people who agreed to receive it. Brevo is a French company and processes the data in the European Union. To confirm that mail arrives, Brevo records whether the email was opened and whether a link in it was clicked. For the newsletter we also note which recipients clicked a link (by the coded fingerprint, never the address) and count how many recipients hosted a game in the 7 days after an email. We use these only as totals and delete the click records after about 30 days. |
| Gmail (backup outbound email) | The same address and the same message, only when Brevo is unavailable. |
| Paddle.com (payments) | Our online reseller and the Merchant of Record for subscriptions. Paddle receives your payment details, name, email address and country directly from you, and processes them as an independent controller under its own privacy policy, for billing, receipts, taxes and fraud prevention. From us it receives your account's email address and the plan you chose. |
7. AI: what happens to your content
When you ask Glowit to generate questions, the text you wrote or the document you uploaded is sent from Glowit's servers to the model provider (Google Gemini, or Groq if Gemini fails) for that generation only.
Do not upload documents containing sensitive personal data, medical details, named student grades, or any confidential material. The service is not designed to process that kind of data.
We keep a minimal record of each generation: how many questions were requested, which model answered, the estimated cost and the date. We do not retain the content of your prompt or uploaded document once the generation is finished.
AI-generated questions, answers and explanations can be wrong. It is your responsibility to check them before using them in a classroom or at an event.
8. International data transfers
Glowit's main database is hosted on Google servers in the European Union. Some processing (server functions, AI generation, analytics) happens in the United States.
For users in the EU, the UK and Switzerland, transfers to the United States rely on our providers' transfer mechanisms: Google LLC is certified under the EU-US Data Privacy Framework, alongside the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses with our providers.
Israel has been recognised by the European Commission as providing an adequate level of data protection, so transfers to Israel require no additional mechanism.
9. How long we keep data
We delete data as soon as it is no longer needed for the purpose it was collected for.
| Data | Retention |
|---|---|
| Live game room: player nicknames, avatars, answers, scores | Deleted automatically within about three hours after the game |
| Game statistics without nicknames: score, rank, answer counts and timings, coarse technical context (country code, time-zone offset, browser language, device type), under an anonymous random player ID | 180 days |
| Host account and the quizzes it created | For as long as the account exists, until you delete it |
| Subscription details and billing records | Subscription details are kept for as long as the account exists. Billing records are kept for the period required by tax and accounting law, even after the account is deleted |
| Images and videos you uploaded to questions | Deleted automatically about seven days after no quiz uses them anymore, including after the account is deleted. A file that another user copied into their own quiz (from the public library or a share link) stays for as long as that copy exists |
| Game summary saved by the host | Until the account is deleted |
| Acquisition record (referrer and UTM) | Until the account is deleted |
| Aggregate usage counters (no personal identifiers) | Indefinitely, as aggregate statistics only |
| Google Analytics | Up to 14 months, per the retention setting on the account |
| Raw audience-measurement visit records (Umami) | Up to 13 months; aggregated statistics (counts only) may be kept for longer |
| Technical server logs | Up to 30 days |
| Email correspondence you initiated | Up to two years, or until you ask us to delete it |
| Mailing-list consent, sending and opt-out log (a coded fingerprint of the email address, dates and times, how and in which language you decided, the version of the consent wording, and whether each email was delivered) | Up to 7 years after the last email we sent you or your last mailing decision, whichever is later, to defend against legal claims, also after the account is deleted. The opt-out list itself (the fingerprint, the date and the reason only) is kept with no time limit, so that we never write to you again by mistake. Our mail provider Brevo also keeps the addresses it blocked (unsubscribes through its link, bounces and complaints) |
10. Your rights and how to exercise them
Under the Israeli Privacy Protection Law, the EU and UK GDPR, and US state privacy laws, you have rights over your data:
- To know what data is held about you and receive a copy of it.
- To correct inaccurate or outdated data.
- To have your data and account deleted.
- To receive your data in a structured, machine-readable format and move it to another service.
- To object to processing based on legitimate interest, and to withdraw consent you previously gave.
- To ask for processing to be restricted while a query is resolved.
The two most important rights are available directly in the app, with no request and no waiting: your dashboard has a button to download all of your data as a file, and a button to delete your account and everything associated with it, except the mailing consent, sending and opt-out log described above. Deletion is permanent and cannot be undone. Images and videos you uploaded are removed from storage automatically within about seven days, except files that other users copied into their own quizzes.
11. Children, students and school use
To open a host account on Glowit you must be at least 16, or at least 13 where the law where you live permits it and a parent or legal guardian has approved.
Players are never asked to register, and we do not ask them for an email, a full name or an age. They type a nickname and pick an avatar; during the game the nickname, avatar, answers and score are shown to the host and the other players in the room. The live room, with the nicknames, is deleted automatically within about three hours after the game. What we keep after that, for 180 days, is game statistics without the nickname, under an anonymous random ID (details in the retention table above).
We show no advertising to players and none during a live game, and Google Analytics never runs on the join screen or on players' game screens. The only rewarded ad exists inside the host's question-generation screen, which belongs to an adult account holder.
If you are a teacher or administrator running Glowit in a classroom, you are responsible for making sure the use complies with your school's policy and applicable law, and for telling students to pick a nickname that does not reveal who they are. Do not enter students' full names into questions or as nicknames.
If you become aware that a child has given us personal data, write to privacy@glowit.io and we will delete it immediately.
12. Security
All communication with Glowit is encrypted over HTTPS. Access to data is restricted by database security rules tied to user identity, and every server call is protected by Firebase App Check backed by reCAPTCHA Enterprise. AI provider keys are held as server-side secrets and never reach the browser.
No service is completely secure. If a security incident occurs that is likely to affect your rights, we will notify you and the competent supervisory authority as the law requires, and within 72 hours of becoming aware of it in the EU.
13. Email and marketing
The welcome email and service notices (for example a material change to these terms, or an outage that affects you) are part of the service itself.
Product updates and marketing content are sent only to people who have ticked an explicit opt-in. We do not infer consent from the act of signing up.
You can change that choice at any time from your dashboard, click the unsubscribe link at the bottom of any marketing email, or reply 'unsubscribe' to the email. Unsubscribing takes effect immediately.
Joining the mailing list earns a one-time gift of 50 AI questions. Gift questions expire 3 months after you receive them (the monthly allowance, by contrast, resets every month), and you keep them even if you later unsubscribe.
14. Additional information for US residents
We do not sell personal information and we do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising, as those terms are defined in the California CCPA/CPRA and equivalent state laws.
We honour the browser's Global Privacy Control signal as a valid opt-out request, and we do not discriminate against users who exercise their privacy rights.
15. Changes to this policy
We will update this document as the service changes. Material changes will be published here with a new update date, and where a change genuinely affects you we will also notify you by email or in the app.
Continuing to use the service after a change is published means you accept the updated version.
Contact and complaints
For any privacy question or request:
Noam Nissan, operator of Glowit.io
If you are not satisfied with our response, you can complain to the Israeli Privacy Protection Authority, or to the data protection supervisory authority where you live if you are in the EU or the UK.
