Privacy

This page needs to be short, because the site was built to give it almost nothing to say. Rupestre has no accounts, no ads, no profiling and no third-party trackers. It cannot name you, and it does not try.

The complete inventory: the server that hosts the site sees your requests, the way every server does; an aggregate counter measures which pages are read and how fast they load; one optional cookie remembers a language choice; and everything else — game progress, offline caches, your location if you offer it — stays inside your browser and never leaves it.

Where the site runs

Rupestre runs on Vercel, which serves every page as a file prepared in advance — there is no database and no server code reading anything about you. Like any host, Vercel sees the requests themselves: your IP address, the page asked for, your browser’s description of itself. What becomes of those logs is covered by its own privacy policy, linked above.

One header is read in passing: if your browser announces no language this site speaks, the country Vercel derives from your IP address picks the language you land in. That country code decides the guess and is then dropped — it is never stored, and an explicit choice (a language prefix in the address, or the cookie below) always outranks it.

Performance metrics

The site counts readers with Vercel Web Analytics and measures speed with Vercel Speed Insights. Neither sets a cookie nor stores anything in your browser. A visit is counted against a hash built from the incoming request and discarded within 24 hours — so the counter can tell that a page was read twice, but not that you came back on Thursday, and nothing follows you to other websites.

Each page view records the page, the referring site, a coarse location (country and city, derived from the IP address and kept without it), and the browser and device type — aggregate answers to questions like whether the map is slow on phones, which is the legitimate interest of anyone keeping a site working. What it cannot answer, for anyone, is who was reading.

The one cookie

The site can set exactly one cookie, named NEXT_LOCALE, and most visitors never receive it. It is written only when the language you are reading differs from the one your browser announces — usually because you switched — and it holds a two-letter language code and nothing more.

It is a session cookie, for this site only: it expires when you close your browser, and it is sent to nobody else. Delete it and nothing breaks — the site simply reads your browser’s language again.

What stays in your browser

If you turn on the discovery game, your collection — the sites you have found, the badges you have earned — is saved in your browser’s local storage, under keys that begin with rockart. So are two conveniences: whether you have seen the welcome tour, and which timeline eras you have visited. None of it is transmitted anywhere; there is no server copy. That cuts both ways — clearing the site’s data in your browser erases a collection nobody can restore.

The site also installs as an app and keeps an offline cache — pages you have visited, map tiles, photographs — through your browser’s standard storage. It is a cache, not a record anyone reads, and your browser’s own controls remove all of it.

Your location

The map’s near-me button asks your browser for your position, and your browser asks you first. If you allow it, the coordinates are used on your device to sort sites by distance and centre the map — held in memory, never written to storage, never transmitted. Reload the page and they are gone. The shake-to-discover gesture reads the motion sensor on the same terms: on the device, and only while the game is on.

Who else your browser talks to

Two other services receive requests from your browser, and both are the reason the site can exist. The map’s tiles load from the OpenStreetMap Foundation’s servers, and the photographs load from Wikimedia Commons. Fetching an image tells the server that hosts it your IP address — that is how the web works — and what each foundation keeps is covered by its own policy, linked here.

That is the whole list. No advertising networks, no social-media embeds, no tracking pixels, and no external fonts — the typefaces are served by this site itself.

Why there is no cookie banner

Cookie banners exist to ask permission for storage a site does not need for what you asked of it: advertising identifiers, cross-site tracking, fingerprinting. Rupestre has none of those. The one cookie remembers a choice you made yourself, the game saves exist only because you started the game, and the analytics store nothing in your browser at all. Where there is nothing to consent to, a banner would be furniture — so there is none.

Your rights

This site is run by Călin — the about page says who that is and how to get in touch. Under the EU’s data-protection rules you can ask what a site holds about you, and have it corrected or erased. The honest answer here is that the site cannot look you up: it keeps no accounts and no names, and the aggregate metrics cannot be narrowed to a person. The data nearest to you — your collection, your caches — sits in your own browser, where deleting it is entirely in your hands.

If something still concerns you, say so and it gets looked at — the same promise the rest of the site runs on. And you can always complain to the data-protection authority where you live; that right is yours regardless of anything written here.