Play without measurement

Last reviewed 23 September 2026

Beta v1.1 — Pumpkin Squashing is in beta testing. You may run into bugs or glitches here and there. Thank you for your patience.

A small argument for building children's play on the open web without instrumenting the child.

Placeholder text. Read it against how the site actually behaves before launch, and have counsel look at anything that makes a promise.

The problem

A typical free browser game loads advertising scripts, an analytics package, a consent banner that is difficult to decline, and a handful of third-party fonts. A child cannot read any of that, and a parent handing over a tablet has no practical way to audit it. The result is that the cheapest way to entertain a child for five minutes is also one of the most data-extractive.

The position

Enjoyment does not require measurement. A single-purpose activity site can be built so that after the page loads, nothing else happens on the network. Not reduced tracking — none.

How this site does it

• Almost no third-party requests. Every file that matters — the game, its code, its sound, its art — is served from the site's own origin, with fonts self-hosted or falling back to what the device already has. The one exception, during this beta, is a short decorative video loop on some pages, served from Imgur; see the privacy policy for exactly what that means.
• A content security policy that forbids outbound calls. connect-src 'none' makes silent data collection fail rather than pass unnoticed.
• Local storage instead of cookies. Preferences stay on the device and are never sent with a request.
• Sound and artwork generated in code. Fewer assets means fewer places for a tracking pixel to hide.
• No accounts, no scores kept, no social features. Nothing to link one session to another.

The full account of what that adds up to — and doesn't — is in the privacy policy. How to report a security problem, should one turn up, is on the security page.

What it costs

Honest accounting: no behavioural analytics means no funnel data and no A/B testing. Improvements come from watching people play in person and from what they write in. That is slower. It is also the whole point.

What it is worth

A site that can be handed to a six-year-old without a conversation about what it is collecting. That is a low bar, and most of the web does not clear it.