The short version
Catnip Club is a game for all ages, so we keep as little as we can.
- You play as a cat with a cat name. We never ask for your real name, address, school or photo.
- Chat is filtered. Phone numbers, emails and links are blocked, and players under 13 use Safe Chat phrases.
- No ads, no ad trackers, and we never sell or rent anyone’s information.
- Grown-ups can see their child’s account, change settings and ask us to delete it at any time.
Who we are
Catnip Club is an independent online game made by a small team in Israel (“we”, “us”). We decide what information the game keeps and why, and we are responsible for looking after it. You can reach us at hello@catnipclub.app.
What we keep, why, and for how long
| What | Why | How long |
|---|---|---|
| Your cat name and password | To run your account. Passwords are stored only as a one-way scrambled code (a hash), so nobody can read them, including us. | Until the account is deleted. |
| The year you were born | Only the year, never your birthday. It picks the right safety settings: Safe Chat and grown-up approval for players under 13, spending limits for teens. | Until the account is deleted. |
| A grown-up’s email (players under 13 only) | If a young player gives one, we use it to ask that grown-up for permission and to send family notices, such as purchase requests. We never use it for marketing. | Deleted after 14 days if nobody confirms. Otherwise until the grown-up asks us to remove it. |
| Your game | Your cat’s look, items, coins, quests, scores, garden, Cat Pad, friends and clubs, so your town is there when you come back. | Until the account is deleted. |
| Chat messages | So our moderators can check reports. When someone is reported, a copy of the lines involved is kept with the report. | 90 days. Copies attached to a report are kept as long as that safety case needs them. |
| Reports, mutes and blocks | To keep the town kind and to stop the same problem coming back. | As long as they are needed for safety. |
| Invites | If you arrive through a friend's invite link, we note who invited you, so you can become friends and you both get a welcome gift. To stop people inviting themselves, we compare your network with your friend's in memory only, as a scrambled code. We never store it. | With the account. The network check is forgotten within a day. |
| Daily play time | For the daily time limits and bedtimes grown-ups can set, and for fair daily rewards. | Until the account is deleted. |
| Purchases (when the shop opens) | To deliver what was bought and to help with refunds. Card details go straight to the payment company. We never see or store card numbers. | As long as tax and accounting law requires. |
| Technical information | Your IP address and browser details reach our hosting provider when you connect. We use the IP address briefly, in memory, to stop spam and abuse. We don’t store it with your account. | Short-lived server logs, deleted automatically within days. |
| Visit counts | Cloudflare Web Analytics tells us how many people visit and which pages load slowly. It uses no cookies and doesn’t follow you to other websites. | Kept by Cloudflare as anonymous totals. |
Guest cats work the same way as saved cats. They get a made-up name and no password, and we keep their progress so you can save it later.
Why we may use it. We use this information to provide the game you asked to play, to keep players safe, and to meet our legal duties. For players under 13, we rely on a grown-up’s permission for anything beyond basic, Safe Chat play.
What we never do
- Sell, rent or trade anyone’s information.
- Show ads or use advertising trackers, or let advertisers into the game.
- Ask children for their real name, address, school, phone number or photos.
- Send marketing emails to children.
- Sell random boxes or other paid items with random contents.
What the game keeps on your device
The game stores three small things in your browser’s local storage: your sign-in key (so you stay signed in), your settings (sound, motion, name tags), and the server you last picked. It sets no advertising or tracking cookies. Signing out removes your sign-in key. Clearing your browser’s site data removes all three.
Who helps us run the game
These companies process information for us, only to run Catnip Club, under contracts that protect it:
- Cloudflare: hosting, the game server, fast delivery of the game and visit counts. Worldwide network.
- Neon: our database, in Frankfurt, Germany.
- An email delivery service: sends the family emails described above. We’ll name it here when family emails start sending.
- A payment company: handles checkout when the shop opens. We’ll name it here before then.
Some of these services are outside your country, so your information may be handled in the European Union, the United States or elsewhere. Where the law requires it, we rely on standard protections for those transfers. We may share information if the law requires it, or to protect a player who is in danger.
Children and families
Players tell us their birth year before they arrive, and the game is set up for their age. A player under 13:
- chats only with Safe Chat phrases unless a grown-up allows filtered chat;
- can’t buy anything until a grown-up confirms the account, and then only with that grown-up’s approval or allowance;
- can play without giving us any grown-up’s email at all. If they give one, we use it only as described above.
In Family settings (the Parent Portal) a grown-up can see their child’s account and change chat, trading, friend requests, daily minutes and bedtime. They can also approve or decline purchases, pause the account and withdraw permission. A grown-up can ask us at any time to show them what we keep about their child, or to delete it. Write to us from the email address on file.
Your choices and rights
You can ask us to show you what we keep about you, to correct it, to give you a copy, or to delete your account and everything in it. Email hello@catnipclub.app with your cat name. For a child’s account, the grown-up should write from the email on file. We answer within 30 days. We may ask a question first, to make sure the cat is yours.
Depending on where you live, privacy laws may give you more rights, such as objecting to some uses. Those include Europe’s GDPR, the UK’s data protection law, the US COPPA rule and Israel’s Privacy Protection Law. If you’re unhappy with how we handled your information, please tell us first. You can also complain to your local data protection authority.
Keeping it safe
Connections to the game are encrypted. Passwords are hashed. Only the people who run the game can reach the database, and every grown-up decision about purchases is written to an audit log. No system is perfect. If something ever goes wrong with your information, we’ll tell the people affected and the authorities as the law requires.
Changes
When this page changes, we update the date at the top. If the change matters, for example a new kind of information or a new company that helps us, we’ll also say so in the game before it takes effect.
Contact
Questions, requests or worries: hello@catnipclub.app. For anything about a cat in the game, you can also use Report on that cat.