Privacy

Guest sailing stays private and account-free

You can play Pancakes Boat without creating an account. Guest voyage progress, represented boat position and preferences may be stored only in your browser on your device. Opening the optional Sailors panel does not send your local voyage or device location.

Optional sailor accounts

Adults who confirm they are 18 or older may create an optional account. The account service stores a public handle, password hash and salt, adult-assertion time, hashed recovery code, revocable sessions, account status and privacy choices. We do not ask for an email address, real name, date of birth or payment details. Passwords, recovery codes and session tokens are never stored in readable form. One recovery code remains active until it is used, replaced by a successful reset or removed when the account is deleted.

You may add a display name and short bio. Profiles, discovery and leaderboard participation start private or off. If you explicitly publish them, your handle, display name, bio, Lifetime NM and Verified NM may be visible to other players. Your password information, recovery access, blocks, reports and account settings are never public.

Nautical miles and rankings

You may import locally saved nautical miles once as personal legacy progress. Imported miles can increase Lifetime NM but never Verified NM or leaderboard rank. For signed-in sailing, the service may retain bounded checkpoint distance, timing, voyage state and replay-protection identifiers so it can reject duplicates and implausible speed. It does not need or store exact route coordinates, device location or live yacht position for rankings.

Weekly, monthly and all-time boards include only eligible server-validated miles from players who publish their profile and opt in. Board credit is capped at 300 NM per sailor per UTC day, while your personal Verified NM and Lifetime NM retain all accepted miles. Sustained event rates above the game envelope can be held from rankings for review. Server validation reduces casual tampering but does not prove real-world travel or seamanship.

Safety and moderation records

If you block or report a sailor, the service stores the accounts involved, a bounded report reason and time so the block can work and reports can be reviewed. Automatic leaderboard holds and operator corrections keep a minimal action, reason, actor and time record for safety, abuse prevention and consistent appeals. Profile fields reject links and markup so reports do not need to preserve arbitrary web content.

Optional starting point and real terrain

Only when you press Start near me can your browser ask for a location coordinate, which may be precise. You can instead choose a place manually on the bundled World chart without sharing device location. After you confirm either choice, Pancakes Boat uses that area to request a bounded set of real-world elevation tiles through its same-origin terrain proxy, find mapped navigable water and build the local scene. Tile paths reveal an approximate area to Pancakes Boat and the Mapzen Terrain Tiles host on AWS. Coordinate-bearing terrain paths are excluded from our access logs; cookies, authorization, referrer and your network address are not forwarded to the terrain host. The resulting boat position may be saved in local browser voyage data, not your sailor account.

Local map, nearby places and optional weather

The World chart bundles Natural Earth coastlines and place data on Pancakes Boat. Nearby labels and manual coordinates are calculated in the browser. Only when you separately press Use live weather at my boat does the browser send the yacht's current game position, rounded to 0.1 degrees, to Pancakes Boat's weather proxy. The proxy requests MET Norway forecast data without forwarding browser cookies, authorization, referrer or network address. Coordinate request logging is disabled and short-lived cached weather is shared by rounded grid point. Weather requests are not connected to sailor profiles.

Website records and advertising

Like most websites, our host may retain short technical records such as request time, page, browser type and network address for reliability, rate limits and abuse prevention. Account logs omit credentials, tokens, profile text and precise locations. Live-weather coordinate paths and terrain tile paths are excluded from access logs. The game also loads the MagicAds network, which may receive ordinary browser request information under its own service policy. Pancakes Boat does not send MagicAds your account profile, mileage, recovery data or location.

Retention and your control

Account data is kept while your account is active. Sessions expire or are revoked. You can correct profile fields, change visibility, export your account data, block or report another sailor and delete your account from the Sailors panel. Deletion revokes every session and recovery code and removes identifying account and profile fields. Minimal non-identifying integrity, moderation and backup records may remain until their operational retention cycle ends. Clearing browser site data separately removes the local guest voyage from that browser.

We do not sell personal data. Creating an account is not consent to marketing, and this release has no marketing-email list.