Parents & COPPA
This page is for you, not for your child. It explains in ordinary language what your child gives us, who can see it, how you look at it, how you delete it, and how you reach a human being who will answer.
1. The short version
Your child gives us an email, a made-up nickname, a country and a password we never receive. We store their spelling scores. There are no ads, no trackers, and nothing is ever sold. You can see it all or delete it all, any time.
If you only read one section, make it section 3 (what we hold) and section 6 (why the nickname should not be your child's real name).
2. What Vega Bell is
A competitive spelling bee game. Your child hears a word, spells it, and climbs a leaderboard. That is the whole product.
Vega Bell plays a pronunciation, and the player types the spelling. It is designed for ages 6 and up, and the difficulty adjusts to the player, so a first-grader and a twelfth-grader can both be stretched without either feeling patronised.
It is a game, not a school platform. We do not report to teachers, we do not grade your child, and the optional school year field never changes how hard the words are.
3. What we ask your child for
Four things at sign-up, plus your email and your consent. Then only how they do at spelling.
At sign-up
| What | Why | Public? |
|---|---|---|
| Email address | To sign in and to contact the account holder | No, never |
| Password | To sign in, but see below: we never actually receive it | No |
| Nickname | The name on the leaderboard | Yes |
Country (two letters, e.g. CA) | Country leaderboards | Yes |
| School year, 1–12 | Optional, off by default, never affects difficulty | Only if switched on deliberately |
Because your child is under 13, we also store
- Your email address, as the parent or guardian.
- A record that you agreed, with the date and time.
- A hashed internet address from the moment of consent. A hash is a one-way jumble: we keep the jumble, and it cannot be turned back into the original address. It exists purely so we can prove the consent happened.
While your child plays
- Which words they saw, got right and got wrong; scores; streaks; how long answers took; their difficulty tier.
- A hashed internet address and a device hash, used only to catch cheating and mass fake sign-ups.
Things we never ask for
Real name. Date of birth. Home address. Phone number. Photographs. Voice recordings. Precise location. Contacts. Persistent advertising identifiers. Vega Bell has no field for any of these, so your child cannot accidentally hand them over.
The password point, because it is unusual
Your child's password is scrambled inside their own browser (600,000 rounds of PBKDF2-SHA256) before anything is sent. Only the scrambled result reaches us, and we scramble that again before storing it. We cannot see it, recover it, or tell it to anyone, including to you. The flip side is that nobody at Vega Bell can look it up if it is forgotten, so it is worth writing down somewhere safe at home.
4. How we ask for your permission
If a player says they are under 13, the account will not be created until a parent email is given and consent is explicitly ticked.
At sign-up we ask whether the player is under 13. If the answer is yes, the form requires two more things before an account can exist:
- a parent or guardian's email address, and
- an explicit tick confirming that a parent or guardian has read this page and the Privacy Policy and agrees.
Without both, sign-up fails with a message saying exactly why. We are being straight with you about the limits of this: it is a consent step at the point of sign-up, and a determined child could tick a box on their own. That is why we also (a) collect almost nothing worth misusing, (b) make the nickname the only public free text, and (c) let you delete the whole account in one action the moment you find out. If you believe a child has created an account without you, email privacy@vegabell.com and we will delete it.
[VERIFIABLE PARENTAL CONSENT METHOD: CONFIRM AND DESCRIBE BEFORE LAUNCH]
5. Who can see your child
Other players see five things: nickname, country, score, Orbit and tier. Nothing else, ever.
That is the complete public picture of your child in Vega Bell. Their email is never shown. Your email is never shown. Their word history, answer times, device and internet address are never shown.
The only thing your child types that another human ever sees is the nickname. There is no chat, no messages, no comments, no profile text and no photo upload in the game, so there is no free-text channel through which a stranger could talk to your child, and none through which your child could accidentally publish personal details.
Nicknames are also filtered at sign-up: they must be 3–16 characters of letters, numbers, hyphens and underscores, and a blocklist rejects slurs, sexual terms and impersonation of staff.
6. Please talk to your child about the nickname
The nickname is public worldwide. It should not be your child's real name, school or town. We tell them this at sign-up, but a word from you carries more weight.
The honest limit
We cannot detect that "EmmaWatsonGr4" is a real first name plus a real school year, or that a nickname contains a town. A filter cannot know that. So we say plainly at sign-up: your nickname is public, so do not use your real name. If you spot a nickname that gives too much away, your child can ask us to change it, or you can delete the account and start again with a better one.
Good nicknames: StarSpeller, CometKid, Ada_Rings. Not so good: a full name, a school name, a birth year, a street.
7. What we never do
No advertising to your child, no tracking, no selling, no profiling. These are not features we switched off. They were never built.
- No advertising of any kind, and specifically no behavioural advertising to children.
- No analytics trackers or third-party scripts watching your child play.
- No selling or renting personal information. Not to anyone, at any price.
- No third-party marketing. Nobody gets your email or your child's from us.
- No profiling beyond "which words are the right difficulty next".
- No conditioning play on giving more data. COPPA forbids it and so do we: your child cannot be asked for extra information to unlock more of the game.
8. How to see everything we hold about your child
Sign in to the account and use "Download my data" in settings, or email us and we will send it to you.
The fast way
- Sign in to your child's account.
- Open Settings.
- Choose Download my data.
You get a file containing the account details (nickname, country, when it was created, whether it is a minor account, optional school year, Orbit, tier, totals) and the run history. It is the GET /api/account/export route in the game, if that is useful to you.
If you cannot get into the account
Email privacy@vegabell.com from the parent email address recorded on the account and tell us the child's nickname. Matching that email is how we check you are the right person before we hand over anything. If the email address has changed, say so and we will find another safe way to verify you. We will not simply refuse.
9. How to delete the account
Settings → Delete my account, type the nickname to confirm. It really deletes, and it cannot be undone.
- Sign in to the account.
- Open Settings.
- Choose Delete my account and type the nickname exactly, to confirm.
When you do this we remove the user record, every sign-in session, the whole word history, every saved run and any half-finished game. This is a real delete from the database, not an account that is hidden and quietly kept.
One thing survives, and we want you to know before you press it: rows in past daily leaderboards remain, but anonymised: the nickname is replaced with "deleted player" and the identifier is scrambled, so historical standings for other children still add up. Nothing in those rows points back to your child.
Prefer us to do it? Email privacy@vegabell.com from the parent email on the account, with the nickname, and ask us to delete it. We will, and we will confirm when it is done.
10. How to withdraw your consent
Tell us to stop, and we stop. In practice that means deleting the account, because the account is the data.
You can withdraw your consent at any time, for any reason, without explaining yourself. Because Vega Bell only holds what an account needs to exist, withdrawing consent means we delete the account and everything attached to it. The two are the same action here.
If you want something narrower instead, tell us. For example, you can switch the optional school year off in settings and leave the rest of the account alone. We will do the smallest thing that gives you what you want.
11. How long we keep it
Until you delete the account. Half-finished games vanish in 30 minutes; sign-ins expire after 30 days.
- Account and game history: kept while the account exists, deleted when you delete it.
- A game in progress: its temporary state is swept away 30 minutes after it goes quiet.
- Sign-in sessions: expire after 30 days.
- Consent record (your email, the timestamp, the hashed IP): kept while the account exists, as the evidence that consent was given, and removed with the account.
12. Who else is involved
Cloudflare hosts the game under contract. Words and audio come from Wiktionary and dictionaryapi.dev, copied to our servers in advance.
- Cloudflare provides our hosting, network and database. They act as our processor: they follow our instructions and may not use the data for their own purposes.
- Cloudflare Turnstile runs a bot check at sign-up so a script cannot create thousands of accounts. It is privacy-preserving and does not track users across websites. It is not an advertising product.
- Wiktionary and dictionaryapi.dev are where the words, definitions and pronunciation audio originally come from. We cache them on our own servers, so while your child plays, their browser is not contacting those services and they learn nothing about your child.
Nobody else receives your child's information. We would only ever disclose it if a law or court genuinely required it, or to protect someone's safety.
13. Your rights under COPPA
You may review what we hold, have it deleted, and refuse to let us collect any more. Using those rights never costs your child access to the parts of the game they can play without it.
The US Children's Online Privacy Protection Act gives parents and guardians three core rights, and they are all real here:
- Review. Ask to see the personal information we have collected from your child (see section 8).
- Delete. Ask us to delete it (see section 9).
- Refuse further collection. Tell us to stop collecting or using your child's information. Since gameplay data is what the game is, this means closing the account.
We do not require a child to disclose more than is reasonably necessary to play, and we never make extra information the price of extra gameplay. If we ever change what we collect from under-13 accounts, we will ask you again before the change applies.
You can also read the FTC's own guidance for parents at ftc.gov.
14. If you are outside the United States
The same protections apply wherever you live, and your local law may add more. We will honour those too.
Vega Bell is played all over the world. COPPA is a US law, but we apply the protections on this page to every child who plays, everywhere.
Your country may set a different age for children's consent (in parts of Europe it is 16 rather than 13) and may give you extra rights such as data portability or the right to complain to a regulator. Those rights are set out in the Privacy Policy. If your local law gives you a right this page does not mention, you still have it. Ask, and we will honour it.
15. Parents: how to contact us
Email privacy@vegabell.com from the parent address on the account. A person reads it and replies.
Parent and guardian contact
- Email privacy@vegabell.com
What to put in your email
- Your child's nickname in the game.
- What you would like: see the data, delete the account, change a nickname, or something else.
- Send it from the parent email recorded on the account if you can. That is how we check it is really you.
Never send us a password. We could not use it, and we do not want it.
We aim to reply within [RESPONSE TIME: e.g. 30 DAYS]. If your message is urgent (a nickname that exposes your child, or an account you did not agree to), say "URGENT" in the subject line and we will prioritise it.
Changes to this page work the same way as the Privacy Policy: the "Last updated" date always tells you when it changed, and if we ever change what we collect from a child under 13, we will contact you and ask again before it takes effect.