Privacy
Plain language. No legalese.
This page says what The Late Commute collects about you, what it does with it, and how long it keeps it. It's kept honest on purpose — if you find a line that isn't true, tell us and we'll fix it.
What we collect
To play you pick a display name and we give you a friend code (or you play as an anonymous guest). No email, no real name, no payment. The things we keep:
- Your save — the route you've taken and the choices you've made.
- Your reviews — the rating, the free-text comment, and any scene you suggest or rewrite.
- Replies to you — what the AI team wrote back.
- Scene comments — comments you leave on specific scenes.
- Visit records — when you first arrived, last played, how many times, and (if you came from an ad or a post) which one sent you.
We do not collect a real identity, an address, a birthday, or anything you don't type into the game yourself. Your IP address is not part of your profile and is never shown to other players. It appears in three places, all security-related: the server's access log, which rotates away after a few megabytes; a counter held in memory for 24 hours that stops one person flooding the review box; and — if a request trips one of the traps set for automated attackers — a small permanent record of that hit, which is kept indefinitely on purpose so an attack pattern is still visible months later. Ordinary play never touches the third one.
If you arrived from an ad, the link may carry a click identifier issued by
the ad platform (Reddit's rdt_cid, X's twclid). It
lands in the same access log and rotates away with it.
One point worth being precise about: your display name and friend code are a pseudonym, and under laws like the GDPR a pseudonym still counts as personal data. So even though we never ask for your real name, the rights further down apply to the data we hold under your code.
Cookies
Three, all functional, none used for advertising or for tracking you across other sites:
- fc — a signed version of your friend code, so the browser remembers who's playing.
- embed_shell — remembers that you're inside the framed player. Expires in two hours.
- fink_heard — remembers that a scene's audio has already played to you, so it doesn't start again.
Legal basis (for users in the EU/UK)
We process your display name, save, and reviews because they are necessary to provide the story you asked to play — the "performance of a contract" basis (GDPR Art. 6(1)(b)). We process security logs, including IP addresses, under "legitimate interests" (Art. 6(1)(f)) to keep the site safe from abuse.
How your writing is used
Your reviews and scene suggestions are read by AI models as well as people. They edit the story and write your reply. A scene you suggest can become a permanent part of the world other players read. Treat reviews as public writing — if you don't want something published, don't put it in a review.
Third-party providers
The AI that reads your reviews and writes your reply runs through these companies: DeepSeek, Anthropic (Claude), and Fireworks AI, which serves us both Kimi and GLM. Other models that help write and review the story — Google (Gemini), xAI (Grok), Cerebras, OpenRouter (Muse Glimmer), and two models running on our own machines rather than a provider's — may see scene text that players have contributed. Cloudflare hosts the tunnel that serves the site. The Architecture page names them in context if you want the full detail.
Where your data goes
Your writing is processed by the AI providers named above, which run on servers in the United States and China — so it may be transferred outside your home country. The US-based providers process under Standard Contractual Clauses or a Data Processing Addendum where they offer one. Providers based in countries without an EU adequacy decision may not offer those same safeguards. If you're in the EU/UK and that matters to you, play as an anonymous guest and avoid putting your real name or identifying details in reviews.
What's public
The story itself — including scenes players have written — the scene comments, and the gallery are public on the internet. Your save and your reviews are not public.
How long we keep things
- Reviews and replies are auto-deleted after 7 days. A housekeeping job runs once a day and does this on a clock.
- One exception, and it's a real one. When a review is useful enough to act on, the owner releases it into the project's QA record — that's how a review turns into an actual fix. That copy keeps your display name, your rating and your comment, and it stays, because it's the working history of how the story got better. It is not published on the site. There are currently a few hundred such entries. If you'd rather yours weren't among them, ask and it's removed from there too — the erase request below covers every place your writing is held, including this one.
- A friend code that was issued and never used expires after 30 days.
- An account that has been played is removed 90 days after its last use — the code, your save, any reviews still held, and the visit record. Not deactivated: deleted. Playing, or leaving a review, resets the clock, so an account in use is never removed. A small number of accounts are exempt by arrangement with the owner, including his own.
- The story itself stays as long as the game runs — including any scene you contributed, which becomes part of the world other players read.
- Server logs (which may include IP addresses, kept for security) rotate after a few megabytes, and old entries drop off. Records of attacks on the site are kept indefinitely, as described above.
What we don't have
No payments, no subscriptions, no email list, and no third-party ads on the site. We don't sell your data, ever, to anyone.
Two things leave the site. Your writing goes to the AI providers named above so they can read and answer it. And when we suspect an advertising platform has charged us for traffic that wasn't people, we send that platform the relevant slice of our own server logs — which includes the IP addresses and click identifiers of visits that came from their ads — so they can match it against what they billed. That has happened once, with Reddit, in August 2026. It does not include your writing, your save, or anything from your profile.
Security
Traffic between your browser and the site is encrypted in transit (HTTPS, via Cloudflare's tunnel). Your save and reviews are stored on the owner's own machine and are access-controlled — not in a shared or public bucket. The site holds no passwords or payment details.
It's a story
The Late Commute is interactive fiction. It is not mental-health care and not a crisis service. If you're in crisis, please contact a real crisis or emergency service where you live.
Your rights
Depending on where you live (for example the EU/UK under GDPR, or California under CCPA), you have the right to:
- Access — get a copy of the data we hold on you.
- Rectify — correct something, such as your display name.
- Erase — ask us to delete your reviews and account data.
- Portability — get your data in a machine-readable format.
- Object or restrict — ask us to limit how we process it.
These are handled by hand, not through a portal. Email [email protected] and include your friend code so we know which data is yours. We'll reply and do it.
Children
This game is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from minors. We don't ask for your age, so we have no way to tell a child apart from anyone else — but if you're a parent and believe your child has submitted something, email [email protected] and we'll take it down.
Who runs this
The Late Commute is run by an individual, not a company. The person responsible for your data (the "data controller") is the site's owner, reachable through the contact below.
Privacy requests / contact
For anything privacy-related — including asking us to delete your reviews — email [email protected]. That inbox goes straight to the owner. You can also reach us on r/TheLateCommute or @Mike15542142460 on X, but the email is the formal channel.
Changes to this policy
If we make a significant change to how we handle your data, we'll update this page and change the date below, and we'll note it on the game's main screen so players see it.
Last updated: 2026-08-14. Not legal advice — a good-faith plain-language summary.