1. Who we are and what this covers
IRL Sidequests (“we”, “us”) publishes irlsidequests.com, a free catalog of real-life side quests and the gear they need. The site is operated from Manchester, New Hampshire, USA. This policy covers the website, the emails we send, and the IRL Sidequests plugin for AI assistants.
It does not cover Amazon, Google, your AI assistant provider, or any other site we link to. Each of those has its own privacy policy, and we encourage you to read it.
2. What we collect
Information you give us.
- Email address, if you sign in or subscribe to the weekly digest. We also record when you signed up, which part of the site you signed up from, when you last signed in, and your digest preference.
- Saved and completed quests, if you sign in. Quests you save while signed out stay in your browser and merge into your account when you sign in.
- Anything you include in an email to us.
Information collected automatically.
- Usage analytics. We use Google Analytics 4 to record the pages you view, the page you came from, your device and browser, your approximate location (country and region, which Google derives from your IP address; we never see or store the address itself), and actions on the site such as using the generator, saving a quest, signing up, which sections of a page you scrolled to, and clicks on links to Amazon, including which product. We use Google Analytics for measurement only. Google Signals and advertising features are switched off.
- Server logs. Our content delivery network (Amazon CloudFront) keeps standard access logs: IP address, URL, time, browser user agent and referrer. Our application logs record errors and plugin usage, and may include an email address when a message to that address fails to send.
- Sign-in protection. When you request a sign-in link we keep a short-lived counter keyed by your IP address and email address to limit abuse.
Information stored in your browser is listed under Cookies and browser storage.
We do not collect payment details (purchases happen on Amazon), precise location, contacts, or anything from your device beyond what your browser sends with every request.
3. How we use it
- To run the site and your account: sign you in, keep your saved quests, and send the sign-in links and digests you asked for.
- To understand what works: which quests, guides and gear get read and clicked, so we can write better ones. Those aggregate numbers also feed the automated system that decides what we publish next.
- To keep the site safe: rate limiting, preventing email abuse, and honoring bounces and spam complaints. If your mailbox bounces our email or reports it as spam, we stop sending to that address.
- To respond when you contact us, and to meet our legal obligations.
We do not sell personal data, we do not run ads, and we do not use your data for advertising or profiling.
4. Legal bases (EEA, UK and Switzerland)
Where data protection law requires a legal basis, we process account and email data to perform our agreement with you, and send the weekly digest on your consent, which you can withdraw at any time by unsubscribing. We process analytics and security data on our legitimate interest in understanding and protecting a free site. Anything else we do only with your consent or where the law requires it.
7. The assistant plugin
IRL Sidequests is available as a plugin inside AI assistants such as ChatGPT and Claude. The plugin is read-only and anonymous: there is no login, we keep no conversation history, and the assistant never tells us who you are.
Each request contains only the constraints the assistant passes on (time available, setting, company, mood or topic), your language preference, and sometimes a coarse location such as your city and time zone supplied by the assistant, which is used once to pick a quest and then discarded. We keep an anonymous log of the constraints and the quest or gear type returned, not the location and nothing that identifies you, to see what the plugin is used for and to improve its picks.
The plugin returns quests and gear types from our own catalog and links back to this website. It never sends anything to Amazon or any other third party.
8. How long we keep it
| Data | Kept for |
|---|---|
| Account data (email, saved and completed quests, preferences) | Until you delete your account or ask us to delete it |
| Sign-in links | 15 minutes, single use, stored only as a one-way hash |
| Sign-in rate-limit counters | Up to 2 days |
| Content delivery network access logs | 30 days |
| Email you send us | Up to 90 days in our mail system |
| Google Analytics data | Event-level data 2 months; user-level data up to 14 months, reset on each new visit |
| Plugin usage log | Anonymous; kept for as long as it is useful |
| Bounce and spam-complaint records | Kept so that we never email that address again |
When you delete your account we remove it from our database; any remaining copies in logs age out on the schedules above.
9. Your choices and rights
- Unsubscribe from the digest with the link in every email, or with the switch on your account page. Sign-in emails are only ever sent when you request one.
- Sign out from your account page; this clears the session cookie.
- Delete your account or your data: email hello@irlsidequests.com from the address on the account. We will delete it within 30 days and confirm.
- Access, export or correct your data: email us and we will send what we hold in a readable format, or fix it.
- Block analytics: see Cookies and browser storage.
- Do Not Track and Global Privacy Control: we do not track you across other sites or sell data, so there is nothing for these signals to switch off, and we do not change our behavior in response to them.
If you are in the EEA, UK or Switzerland, you also have the right to restrict or object to processing, to withdraw consent, and to complain to your data protection authority. If you live in California or another US state with a privacy law, you have rights to know, delete and correct your personal information and not to be treated differently for exercising them; we do not “sell” or “share” personal information as those laws define it. We honor all of these requests for everyone, wherever you live. We may ask you to confirm you control the email address before acting on a request.
10. International transfers
We are based in the United States and our servers are there. If you visit from elsewhere, your data is transferred to and processed in the United States, where privacy law may differ from your country’s. For visitors from the EEA, UK and Switzerland, our providers rely on the EU-US Data Privacy Framework and standard contractual clauses for those transfers.
11. Security
All traffic to the site uses HTTPS. There are no passwords to leak: sign-in links are single use, expire after 15 minutes, and are stored only as one-way hashes. Session cookies are HttpOnly. Data lives in access-controlled AWS services that only the site operator can reach. No system is perfectly secure; if you believe your data has been exposed, please email us.
12. Children
The site and its quests are written for adults. We do not knowingly collect personal data from children under 13, or under the age of digital consent where you live. If you believe a child has given us personal data, email us and we will delete it.
13. Changes to this policy
We will update this page when our practices change and update the date at the top. For material changes we will post a notice on the site or email account holders before the change takes effect.
14. Contact
Questions, data requests or problems with the plugin: email hello@irlsidequests.com. Post: IRL Sidequests, Manchester, New Hampshire, USA.
See also the Terms of use and the About page.