Privacy

• Public city and venue pages do not require an account.
• Search uses one strictly necessary cookie to enforce the weekly Guest allowance. It is not used for advertising or cross-site tracking.
• Account passwords, verification codes and reset codes stay with Clerk and are never stored by SlotCafes.
• Listing activity is stored only as daily totals, not as a history of individual visitors.

Account and consent data. If you register, we store your verified email address, display name, account status, 21-or-older attestation, and the dates you accepted the Privacy Policy and Terms. We also store the Clerk user identifier needed to connect your signed-in session to your SlotCafes account.

Search allowance data. On the search page, we issue a random, HTTP-only cookie and store only its SHA-256 digest, the applicable Chicago calendar week, a use count and a digest of your most recent normalized place and radius. Signed-in use is counted against your local account ID. The allowance ledger does not store your raw cookie, search text, IP address or browser fingerprint.

Business profile data. If you apply to manage a listing, we store your selected establishment, relationship to it, business contact details and a short verification note. Approved owners can add profile fields, amenities, photos with alt text, and events or promotions. New photos and events stay private until an administrator approves them.

Listing activity totals. For Featured listings, we count profile views, Featured-card appearances, directions clicks and website clicks by establishment and day. These are activity counts, not unique people, and no visitor identity or raw activity event is stored.

Server request logs. Like any website, SlotCafes runs behind a hosting provider that records each request: the URL, the time, the response, your IP address and your browser's user-agent string. These logs exist to keep the site running and to investigate abuse and errors. We do not use them to build a profile of you.

Your search terms. A ZIP code, town or address you type appears in the page URL, so it is present in those same server logs. Please do not type anything into the search box that you would not want written to a log.

Your location, only if you offer it. The “use my location” control asks your browser for coordinates and your browser asks you first. If you agree, the coordinates are placed in the page URL to run the search. We do not store them, and declining simply means you type a place instead.

• No advertising cookies. We do not use the search-allowance cookie for advertising, cross-site tracking or audience profiling.
• No analytics or advertising. No measurement service, tag manager, pixel, session recorder or advertising network is loaded.
• No passwords or codes. Clerk handles passwords, sessions, verification codes and password-reset codes. SlotCafes does not create, store or log them.
• No payment data. Nothing is for sale on this site today.

Our hosting provider serves every page and keeps the request logs described above.

Clerk provides registration, verified-email sign-in, password reset and session handling. Clerk generates authentication codes; when self-delivery is enabled, Brevo delivers the generated message for SlotCafes.

Brevo delivers transactional authentication and operational email. It receives the recipient, subject and message needed for delivery.

Our database and storage providers hold account, membership and aggregate listing data, plus private owner media. Our hosting and storage are provided through Vercel, and application records are stored in Neon Postgres.

The US Census Bureau geocoder. ZIP codes and Illinois municipality names are resolved from a table we host ourselves and never leave our servers. A free-form street address that we cannot resolve locally is sent from our server to the Census Bureau's public geocoding service to be turned into coordinates. Your IP address is not forwarded — the request comes from us, not from your browser.

The Illinois Gaming Board. We download public reports from the IGB on a schedule. That traffic is ours; browsing SlotCafes sends nothing to the IGB.

Gaming data: SlotCafes publishes a rolling five years of official monthly reporting. Older months are pruned from the live database. The original source files stay archived with their checksums so any published figure remains traceable to the file it came from.

Search allowance records: removed after 90 days. Daily listing-activity totals are kept for 13 months so Featured owners can view the current month and the prior 12 completed months.

Account and owner data: kept while your account or approved business relationship is active. You can delete your account from the account page. Pending or rejected owner media is deleted with the account; approved listing content may remain as establishment data.

Request logs: retained by our hosting provider on its own schedule, and used only for operating and securing the site.

Video gaming machines in Illinois are restricted to players 21 and over. SlotCafes is intended for adults and is not directed to children.

You can export your SlotCafes account data or delete your account from the account page. The export includes your local profile, consent, memberships, owner content metadata and the aggregate activity totals available to your approved establishments.

You can clear the Guest search cookie in your browser. Doing so starts a new anonymous allowance record on your next search; SlotCafes does not try to reconnect it with the prior cookie. For request-log questions, write to us and we will work with our hosting provider.

Questions about this policy: privacy@slotcafes.fun.

See also our terms of use and data sources.