What FlagDrop keeps, and what it sends

Your choice

Analytics stays off until you allow it

The banner’s Accept and Decline set this same switch, and so does the Privacy panel on your account page. Turn it off at any time: FlagDrop stops sending at once, switches Google Analytics off for the page and deletes its cookies.

On your device

Your progress lives in your browser

FlagDrop saves everything it needs in your browser’s local storage, so the game works with no account and no connection:

Progress

How well you know each flag, your finished games, map stats, achievements and Daily Drop results.

Profile

The home country you picked in the tutorial and, once you sign in, your username and which account the progress on this device belongs to.

Settings

Sound settings, whether you have done the tutorial, and your analytics choice.

Visits

When you last visited, so FlagDrop can offer to refresh flags that faded while you were away; when you last opened your trophy case, so new trophies stand out; and whether it has told you a day streak ended.

Clearing this site’s data in your browser settings deletes all of it from this device.

Cloud save

Sign in, and your account backs up your progress

Until you sign in, your progress stays on your device and nothing is saved in the cloud. If you choose to sign in with Google or an email address, Firebase Authentication, a Google service, gives your account a random ID, and your progress is saved under it to Cloud Firestore (also Google), so it follows you to your other devices. What you played before signing in comes with it.

What is saved under that ID: your progress on each flag, your rank score and number of games, your finished games, achievements and map stats, plus a random username (you can change it) and the home country you picked. Your username and home country can be seen by other signed-in players.

Firebase keeps your email (and, for Google, the name and photo on the account) so you can sign in again. FlagDrop does not add them to your saved progress. Signing out clears your progress from the device; it stays in your account for when you sign in again.

Once a day FlagDrop counts how many players sit in each band of rank scores, to show where you stand. Only those totals are published, never a single player’s score. Guest accounts from earlier versions of FlagDrop, which signed every visitor in anonymously, are deleted after three days without use when they hold no progress.

None of this is needed to play: if the cloud is unavailable, the game carries on with what is stored on your device.

Analytics, with your permission

What Google Analytics sees

FlagDrop uses Google Analytics 4 (through Firebase) to learn how the game is played and what to improve. It is not loaded, and nothing is sent, until you allow it.

Once you allow it, FlagDrop sends:

• Gameplay events: games started, finished or abandoned, each guess (the flag, how close it landed, hints used and time taken), tutorial steps, map picks, shares and challenges, achievements, sign-ins and changes to sound settings.
• Where your visit began: the type of page you landed on, the site that linked you there, and any campaign tags in the link. This tab keeps it in session storage until it closes, so a reload still knows.
• Page speed and errors: how quickly each page loaded, held still and answered your taps, with the part of the page that was slowest, and when something in the game breaks, a short code for the error (never its text) and the kind of page it was on.
• Once you sign in, your account’s random Firebase ID, so your games on different devices join up. Never your name or email.

Google Analytics also records page views, your device and browser type and a rough location worked out from your IP address, and it sets cookies (named _ga) to recognise your browser on later visits.

Other services

What your browser loads from elsewhere

Like any website you visit, each of these sees your IP address and browser details when your browser asks it for something:

flagcdn.com

Flag images.

Google Fonts

The typefaces this site uses (fonts.googleapis.com and fonts.gstatic.com).

GeoJS

The tutorial’s “Where are you from?” step asks get.geojs.io which country your IP address is in, so it can pre-select it. Only a country code comes back, and you can pick another. If GeoJS is slow (over two seconds), blocked or offline, or names a country the step does not list, it uses the region in your browser’s language setting instead (en-GB means the United Kingdom), which stays on your device.

Wikipedia

Flag pages show text and photos from Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons. The photos load from upload.wikimedia.org. Most of the text ships with FlagDrop; when a page has none bundled, your browser fetches it from Wikipedia and Wikidata directly.

Netlify

Hosts the site and serves every page.

A challenge link you share carries the map, the flags you played and your score. Nothing in it identifies you.

Never

What FlagDrop does not do

• No ads, and no advertising trackers.
• No selling your data, and no sharing it for advertising.
• No analytics at all until you say yes.