Fossil Digger has no accounts and no sign-up. It's kept free by ads shown through Google AdSense, and stores very little else. This page lists all of it.
| What | Why | Tied to you? |
|---|---|---|
| Your answers | Counted so the game knows how rare each answer is. This is the game. | No — stored as a running tally per prompt, with nothing attached identifying who typed it. |
| Your dig result | Depth, the fossil found, and the date, so the game can tell you how you compared. | Only to a random ID your browser makes up. It is not derived from anything about you. |
| Your museum | Only if you ask for a museum code. Your fossils, grit and streak are kept against that code. | To the code, which we cannot trace to a person. |
| Your IP address | Held in memory for a short time to stop one machine hammering the server. | Never written to disk or kept. |
No name, no email address, no password, no payment details, no phone number, no precise location, and no contacts. The game itself sets no tracking cookies of its own; the only cookies come from Google's ads (see Advertising below). Your collection lives in your own browser's local storage; a museum code is the only way a copy reaches our server, and only if you ask for one.
If analytics is enabled, the game uses Plausible, which is cookieless and reports only aggregate figures — page views, country, referrer. It does not build a profile of you or follow you to other sites.
Fossil Digger is kept free by ads served through Google AdSense. Google and its advertising partners use cookies to serve ads based on your visits to this and other websites.
Nothing is ever sold. Data used for advertising is handled by Google AdSense as described in Advertising above.
Answer tallies and daily prompts are kept as long as the game runs — they are the game's content. A museum code and its collection are kept until you delete them.
In the game, open How to play and choose Delete my data. It removes your museum code and its collection, plus your dig history, immediately and permanently.
Answer tallies are not removed, because they are aggregate counts with nothing attached identifying who gave them — there is no record in them that is yours to delete.
Depending on where you live — the UK and EU under the GDPR, California under the CCPA, New Zealand under the Privacy Act 2020, and similar laws elsewhere — you have the right to see what is held about you, correct it, delete it, and object to how it is used.
Because the game holds no identifying information, the delete button above is the practical way to exercise all of these: it removes everything reachable that relates to you. If you want something else, get in touch and we will sort it out.
Fossil Digger is a general-audience game and is not directed at children. It collects no personal information from anyone, and we do not knowingly collect anything from children under 13. There is no sign-up, no messaging, and no way for one player to contact another.
If what the game stores ever changes, this page changes with it, and the date below moves.