Privacy

Meld is a deck of cards for playing with people you know. It has no accounts, no analytics, no ads, no tracking, and nothing to buy, so most of a privacy policy’s usual work does not apply. What is left is below, plainly.

The short version

• We don’t know who you are. There is no sign-up, no email, no account. You choose a display name; that is the whole of it.
• On your Wi‑Fi, your game never reaches us. Tables on one network talk phone-to-phone. Nothing is sent to Meld.
• Online tables pass through our server, and are forgotten. Your display name and your game moves are relayed so the table can run. It all lives in the server’s memory only, and is destroyed when the table ends.
• Your history stays on your phone. Groups, ledgers, hand history and stats are stored only on your device.
• Play money only. Chips have no cash value. Nothing is bought, won or sold — and neither is your data.

Playing on one Wi‑Fi (a table in the room)

Game traffic travels directly between the phones at the table, over your own network. It is not encrypted in transit — a deliberate design for traffic that never leaves the room: anyone positioned to read it is already standing in your living room on your Wi‑Fi. Nothing about these tables is ever sent to Meld’s servers, so there is nothing for us to keep.

Playing at an online table

An online table runs on Meld’s server (Fly.io, currently in Ashburn, Virginia), so the same friends can play from anywhere. For that to work:

• What is transmitted: your chosen display name, your game actions (bets and folds — Meld has no chat), and an anonymous technical identity your device generates (a random key pair; it contains nothing about you and exists so the table can give you your own seat back after a dropped connection). All of it travels encrypted (wss/https).
• What the server keeps, and for how long: the table lives in the server’s memory only. There is no database — nothing is ever written to disk. A table everyone has left is destroyed after 5 minutes (if it never dealt a hand, or was explicitly ended) or 30 minutes (a night in progress — long enough to survive a commute or a phone call). Ending the night destroys it on the 5‑minute clock. A server restart forgets everything instantly.
• Hand snapshots and history are kept only while the table exists, and are deleted with it. Each hand’s state and the night’s running snapshot live in that same in-memory table — they are destroyed when it is reaped (the 5‑minute clock above for a table that never dealt or was ended; 30 minutes for a night in progress) and are never written to disk. The hand history saved on your own phone is separate (see “What stays on your device”) and is never sent to us.
• Your network address: like every web server, ours sees the address your connection comes from. Meld uses it for exactly one thing — telling the players at your table whether everyone arrived from the same network (a transparency signal on the felt) — holds it in memory for the life of the connection, and stores it nowhere.
• Our host, Fly.io, maintains ordinary infrastructure logs of connections to its edge, under its own privacy policy, as any hosting provider does.

What stays on your device

Friend groups, the running ledger, hand history, your stats, your settings and your display name are stored only on the device you use. There is no sync and no cloud copy. Export (groups, identity) produces a file you hold — a backup, not sync. Deleting the app deletes all of it.

What Meld does not do

• No analytics or telemetry of any kind — the app contains no such code.
• No advertising, and no advertising identifiers.
• No tracking across apps or sites.
• No selling, sharing or monetising of data — there is nothing collected to sell.
• No real-money play: chips have no cash value, and there are no purchases, prizes or cash-outs.

Other people at your table

Meld is a social game, and the people at your table see what a table sees: your display name, your chips, your actions, and — if you choose to watch a table — that you are watching. The transparency features report table facts to the table (a player leaving the app mid-hand, seats arriving from the same network). None of this leaves the table.

Children

Meld simulates gambling (with play money) and is rated accordingly in the app stores. It is not directed at children.

Changes

If Meld ever starts keeping something this page says it does not — for example, if online tables gain persistence so a night can survive a server restart — this policy changes first, with the date at the top.

Contact

Questions: hello@meld.cards