Privacy Policy

Midnight Frequency (https://midnight-frequency.gamestrategists.com)

In one line

This is a single-player puzzle game, not a service that needs an account about you. We never ask you to register and never ask for an e-mail address, phone number, location or anything that identifies who you are. Which chapter you reached, which puzzles you solved and which echoes you have heard live only in your own browser’s localStorage. There is no copy on a server, we cannot read it, and we cannot restore it for you.

Even "submitting an answer" never goes over the network: the solutions to all nine puzzles sit in the game’s own data files, and what you type into the search box is matched on your machine and then discarded. Nine puzzles, thirty clues, eight night recordings, four endings — those figures come from this game’s data files, not from marketing copy.

Where the progress lives

One playthrough is written to a single key, midnight-frequency-save, whose seven fields are exactly what the game needs to pick up where you left off: the current screen, the chapter index, the puzzles solved, the clues held, the ending, the interface language, and the act transition waiting to play.

What gets written is wrapped as { body, sum }, where sum is an FNV-1a digest of body. On load the digest is checked first and every field is then verified individually: puzzle and clue entries are only accepted if those ids exist in the register, the chapter index must fall in range, and if the screen state contradicts the cards in hand it is pulled toward "still playable". A hand-edited save is therefore rejected and starts you fresh rather than half-loading something broken; a bare save from an older version is adopted into the current format without losing progress. That digest exists only to tell whether the file was tampered with — it serves no security purpose and cannot prove who stored it.

The other four keys, and why “Restart” does not clear them

• mf-endings — which echoes this device has heard. One date per ending, taken from the day on your calendar rather than from Coordinated Universal Time: someone who finishes in the small hours should not be written down as "yesterday".
• mf-night-log — which of the eight intercepted night recordings this machine has caught. Registered ids only, as well.
• mf-audio — two values only, on or off, recording your choice about sound.
• arg-intro-midnight-frequency — records nothing but "you have already seen the opening", which decides whether it appears again.

These four are deliberately kept apart from the save file. The “Restart” control on the title screen clears midnight-frequency-save and nothing else: someone going back for the other three endings should not be forced to replay from the prologue, and recordings you already intercepted should not vanish because you started a new run.

Three ways to erase it all

One, “Restart” on the title screen — that clears only this run, keeping the endings and night log. Two, clear site data for this domain in your browser, which takes all five keys with it. Three, open the site in a private mode that does not keep local data, and it is gone when the window closes. Beyond those three there is no second copy anywhere: we hold no backup and have nothing that could restore it for you.

Advertising

The site loads the Google AdSense ad script. Whether an ad appears and which one appears is Google’s decision under its own policy. Ad requests go to pagead2.googlesyndication.com and googleads.g.doubleclick.net, and to the ad-quality endpoints ep1.adtrafficquality.google and ep2.adtrafficquality.google. Google and its ad vendors may use cookies or similar identifiers (for example DSID) to serve, limit and measure ads, and may serve personalised ads based on your browsing history on other sites.

You can turn personalised advertising off in Google ad settings, read the vendor cookie explanations and opt-outs at aboutads.info, or block and clear third-party cookies in your browser. None of these choices affect whether the game can be finished; the ads simply become less relevant. The opening notice on the title screen ends with “I have read the notice above and consent to enter this fictional experience” — that confirms the subject matter, not consent to advertising or to personal-data processing. This page does not put up its own data-consent dialog; the ad choices are the two links above and your browser settings. The hosting and measurement side is described in the next two sections.

The sound, the pictures and the record card are all computed on your side

Not one audio file is downloaded: every sound is synthesised on your machine with Web Audio. A two-second loop of brown noise runs through a low-pass filter as the hiss of an empty channel; the filter opens as the acts advance — 850 Hz in act one, 1150 Hz in act two, 1500 Hz in act three — and for the “Blank Tape” ending it closes back to 480 Hz with the overall gain factor at 0.06, while the other three endings stay around 1200 Hz. The ambience sits at a level of 0.055, roughly -25 dB: the floor of the room, never louder than the text. Correct and wrong answers and the sweep between acts are oscillators and 0.2-second bursts of noise. The audio context is not created until you press “Start”, so it never jumps ahead of the browser’s autoplay policy, and where Web Audio is unsupported every call degrades quietly to a no-op and the game plays on.

Muting means silence, with one exception: the Morse passage is a clue in its own right, and pressing play is already an explicit request from you, so it still sounds.

Every image in the game — the control room on the title screen, the chapter art, the archive photographs — is served from midnight-frequency.gamestrategists.com itself, and the layout uses the system font stack rather than a third-party webfont. The “listening record” card you get at an ending is drawn on your machine as well: a canvas renders a 1200×630 PNG, converts it to a blob and hands it to the browser’s download. The card lists only the names of the four endings and the dates you received them (unheard ones read “not received”), and never any ending text. If you use your system’s share sheet (navigator.share) or copy the link, that text and address leave from your side; this site receives and records nothing.

What the server side sees

Pages are delivered and protected by Cloudflare, which keeps routine request logs (path, timestamp, a digest of the user agent) to keep the service running and to block abuse — that is the hosting platform’s ordinary logging, not a database this site built. Every HTML response also carries the platform’s web-analytics beacon from static.cloudflareinsights.com, which reports aggregate page-view and page-performance metrics to Cloudflare only; in the measurements below that report is the /cdn-cgi/rum request. It sets no cookie, collects no identifying data, and we cannot read its per-visitor detail. Both of these are handled by Cloudflare under its own policy — see the Cloudflare Privacy Policy.

Our own piece of the service does exactly one thing: hand the request to the static file. There is no account, no membership, no comments, no forms and no server-side search backend here, and no server-side storage this site writes to — so apart from those two categories there is no third thing "the server knows" that we could tell you about. The language follows the address: / is Chinese, /en/ is English, and both are real files in the build. Switching language changes the address bar, not a preference switch.

Third parties: measured, not assumed

On 30 October 2026 a real browser opened /, /en/, /privacy and /about here, left each page for seven to ten seconds and recorded every outbound request and every cookie in the browser — five runs in total. What was the same in all five: apart from advertising and Cloudflare’s measurement, the page only sends requests to this site itself — the document, one JS bundle, one CSS file, the one title-screen image, plus the beacon’s own single report.

The advertising side does not get equally far in every run, so it is written separately: pagead2.googlesyndication.com appeared in all five runs, googleads.g.doubleclick.net in four, and ep1 / ep2.adtrafficquality.google and www.google.com in three of them. In those five runs this site itself wrote no cookie at all; the only one seen, test_cookie, belongs to .doubleclick.net — an ad-side probe, likewise not present in every run. The two information pages (/privacy, /about) do not load the ad script: the measurement saw only this site and the beacon there.

Aside from those two, the site runs no Google Analytics or other first-party analytics, loads no Google Fonts and has no social plugins. If another service is ever introduced, this page is corrected before it goes live.

Children and subject matter

The game is about the last broadcasts of a radio station during the 1998 floods, and is written in a suspense-horror register. It is not directed at children under 13 and asks no player of any age for identity details or contact information. Ad serving and personalisation are handled by Google under its own policies; a parent can switch personalised ads off through the two links under “Advertising”.

Whose project this is, and how to reach it

This site is the personal project of an indie developer, alphaBETA DEV (GameStrategists): there is no account system, no file of personal data that could be pulled up, and no switch that could be thrown against one particular person. Questions about this policy, and any request to access, correct or delete, should go to privacy@gamestrategists.com.

When the text of this page changes, the “Last updated” date above changes with it — that date is taken from the day this page’s text was last actually revised in version control, not typed in by hand.