Privacy Policy

LIGHTCONE · thelightcone.space · effective 26 September 2026

LIGHTCONE is a small, independent game. It collects only the data the service needs, sells none of it, and this page lists all of it.

1 · Who is responsible

The data controller is the developer of LIGHTCONE:
Péter Kovács (independent developer, Hungary) · contact: hello@thelightcone.space

2 · What we collect, and why

E-mail address — your account identity. Used to sign you in, to send account e-mails (confirmation, password reset), and — if you leave them enabled — the Mind's letters: a digest (weekly once you have been away for 72 hours, monthly once the account has been silent for 30 days), plus a letter when a crisis or a once-only window opens (an impactor, the fall of the homeworld, an interstellar visitor, an ark at the system edge). Rarely, a note from the developer about the game. Legal basis: performance of contract (providing the game). One click switches these letters off, in the game (⚙︎ CFG) or from any letter's footer. One exception: an impactor on collision course with your homeworld is still reported to a confirmed address.
Password — stored only as a modern salted hash (argon2). We cannot read it.
Gameplay data — your civilization's state: probes, colonies, names you give to stars, settings, event history. This is the game itself. Names you give may appear in shared, public game surfaces (for example the Galactic Record credits a first to "the people of your world's name"); your e-mail address is never shown to anyone.
Technical data — your IP address appears in standard server logs and in short-lived rate-limit counters (to keep bots and abuse out). Legal basis: legitimate interest in running a secure service. Logs rotate; we build no profiles.
Where you came from — if you arrive through an announcement link, that link's own parameters (utm_source, utm_medium, utm_campaign, utm_content, utm_term, fbclid), the address of the external page that linked you, and the page you landed on are kept in your browser. If you then register, they are written once to your account as eight fields and never change again. They record which announcement brought a player. They are not sent back to the platform they came from (except as section 4 describes for paid Meta arrivals), they are not shared with anyone, and they describe nothing you do on other sites. Legal basis: legitimate interest in knowing which announcement works. Ask us and we erase these eight fields, the rest of your account untouched.

3 · Cookies and local storage

LIGHTCONE uses exactly one cookie: fermi_session, which keeps you signed in. It is strictly necessary for the service and therefore requires no consent banner. Your browser's local storage holds interface preferences (which panels you opened, audio settings), which never leave your device, and the arrival parameters described in section 2, which leave it once, at registration.

No third-party analytics, no advertising network, and no third-party cookie of any kind. No script from an advertising or analytics company runs on this site, and nothing is sent back to one — with the single, server-side exception for visitors who arrived from a Meta advertisement, described in section 4. We do record which announcement brought you here, once, as section 2 describes. The server keeps a single anonymous tally: a daily page-view count (date, page name, a number). Each page counts two numbers — one when it loads, one if the visitor stayed a few seconds and then scrolled, tapped, or typed, so we can tell readers from crawlers. No IP address, no user-agent, no identifier, no cookie is attached to either. The beacon is sent without credentials. It cannot describe you, only the crowd. The same tally counts the clicks that leave this site for Discord, Facebook and Patreon: one number per link per day, with nothing attached.

4 · Who else sees your data

If you arrived from a Meta (Facebook or Instagram) advertisement — and only then — our server tells Meta's Conversions API that a registration, and later an address confirmation, happened: the click identifier Meta put in the link you followed, a one-way hash of your e-mail address, and your IP address and browser string at that moment. No script from Meta runs in your browser and no Meta cookie is set; the report goes from our server, once per event, so that the advertisement can be aimed at people who actually play rather than people who merely click. Visitors who did not come from a Meta advertisement are never reported.

Beyond that, nobody, with one technical exception: e-mails are delivered through an SMTP provider, which processes your address for the sole purpose of delivering the message. We do not sell, rent, or share your data with anyone else.

5 · How long we keep it

Your data lives as long as your account does. Unconfirmed accounts are kept like any other; ask and they are deleted. If you ask us to delete your account, we delete your personal data (e-mail, password hash); the shared universe may retain the anonymous traces your civilization left in it. Those traces carry no name.

6 · Your rights

Under the GDPR you may ask us at any time to: access the data we hold about you, correct it, delete it, restrict or object to its processing, or hand it over in a portable form. Write to hello@thelightcone.space and we will answer within 30 days. You may also lodge a complaint with your supervisory authority (in Hungary: NAIH, naih.hu).

7 · Changes

If this policy changes in any way that matters, we will say so in the in-game developer's notes and on this page, with a new effective date.

Plain summary: the e-mail address runs the account and, if the letters are enabled, carries a weekly digest while you are away, plus a letter when a crisis or a once-only window opens. The game state is kept while the account exists. The name of the announcement you arrived through is kept. There is no advertising network here and no profile of you anywhere.