For the purposes of this Agreement, the following definitions shall apply, except when context requires otherwise, or when we have forgotten to update them, or when they are being used ironically:

"We," "Us," "Our," "The Team," "The Entity," and/or "They" refers to the operators of this Platform, who are, for all legal purposes, a group of people with computers, opinions, and a 3D printer they used more than expected.

"You," "Your," "The User," "The Visitor," "The Individual," and/or "That Person" refers to you specifically. Yes, you. The one reading this right now. We see you.

"The Platform" refers to duckduckgoose.live and all associated pages, APIs, leaderboards, photo submissions, goose events, and general ambient vibes.

"Duck" means a small 3D-printed waterfowl, yellow or white, the precise legal status of which remains an open question in several jurisdictions and we are frankly not interested in litigating it.

"Gerty" means a goose of indeterminate origin, uncertain motivations, and legally ambiguous personhood who may, depending on applicable law, have standing to sue you independently of anything we do.

"Content" means photographs, finds, comments, names, point totals, reactions, and the general impression of your personality that emerges from your gameplay patterns.

"Scraping" means any automated, semi-automated, manual-but-systematic, or merely contemplated extraction of data from this Platform, including but not limited to: bots, crawlers, spiders, wget, curl with flags, curl without flags, a person typing very fast, a person typing at a normal pace but with intent, pointing a camera at your screen, or paying an intern to manually transcribe the leaderboard into a spreadsheet.

"Reverse Engineering" means any attempt to understand how this website works, including opening Developer Tools, reading the HTML source, observing network requests, inferring the stack from response headers, asking an AI what the architecture probably looks like, or simply being a software engineer who has naturally and effortlessly deduced the entire system from first principles, as you people do.

"Finland" means the Nordic sovereign nation situated between Sweden and Russia, GDP approximately $305,000,000,000 USD as of the most recent International Monetary Fund World Economic Outlook estimate, known for saunas, reindeer, the best education system in the world, and now also for being cited in duck game legal documents. Finland did not ask for this. We are sorry, Finland.

"Incident" means a single occurrence of prohibited conduct, defined as broadly as reasonably possible, with any ambiguity resolved in our favor.

2.1   By accessing, browsing, using, logging into, logging out of, thinking about, dreaming about, or allowing photons reflected from any device displaying this Platform to enter your eyes, you hereby irrevocably, unconditionally, perpetually, globally, and with full knowledge of the consequences agree to be bound by these Terms.

2.2   If you are a bot, automated system, web crawler, scraper, or artificial intelligence performing non-human access: you specifically accept these Terms on behalf of yourself, your operators, your operators' employers, their investors, their legal counsel, the person who approved the budget for this project, and the dog that belongs to that person, if applicable.

2.3   Ignorance of these Terms is not a defense. Neither is "I only skimmed it," "I didn't scroll all the way down," "this seems excessive for a duck game," or "my lawyer said this probably isn't enforceable." Your lawyer may be right. We remain undeterred.

2.4   If you disagree with any portion of these Terms, your sole and exclusive remedy is to close this browser tab, step outside, breathe some air, and reflect on the choices that led you here.

You are expressly and enthusiastically permitted to:

• Find ducks around the office
• Photograph said ducks
• Log finds on this Platform
• View the leaderboard and experience the full range of human emotions it may evoke
• Comment, encourage, and compete in good faith
• Have fun, subject to availability and terms defined elsewhere in your employment agreement

You are expressly not permitted to:

• Cheat in any form, including but not limited to: moving a duck without logging it, logging a find you did not make, bribing Gerty, or claiming you found a duck while providing photo evidence that clearly shows a different duck
• Be mean to other players
• Anything described in Article IV, which you should read very carefully and then read again
• Anything that a reasonable person would describe as "not in the spirit of the game"
• Anything that an unreasonable person would do

It has come to our attention that some individuals, upon encountering a QR code affixed to a wall, desk, ceiling tile, or rubber duck, experience a reflexive hesitation born of reasonable modern caution. We respect this instinct in general. In this specific case, however, we ask that you set it aside.

This game operates within a secured office building staffed by a uniformed security guard and an armed law enforcement officer - permanently, always, every day, not occasionally, not situationally, not depending on the threat level of the greater Richmond metropolitan area - stationed at the front desk. These individuals control physical access to the premises. They have seen us. They have watched us walk in with a bag of 3D-printed ducks.

When a QR code is placed in a location that requires you to have passed through a security checkpoint staffed by a person with a firearm and a legally-binding obligation to prevent unauthorized activity on the premises, that QR code has, in a meaningful if informal sense, been vetted.

Put simply: if you are standing inside this building, you have already cleared a more rigorous threat assessment than the QR code has. Scan it. Find the duck. Move on with your life.

We acknowledge that this is not, in a strict legal sense, a warranty of safety. See §5 for our extensive thoughts on warranties. This acknowledgment does not change our position that you should just scan the code.

We are going to be honest with you about something, which feels appropriate given that this is a Christian organization and honesty is, broadly speaking, part of the deal.

We are aware that a motivated individual could, in theory, upload a photograph of a duck - any duck, perhaps a duck they photographed yesterday, or a duck from the internet, or a rubber duck they own personally - and enter a number that does not correspond to any duck they have actually found. We see the gap. We have always seen the gap. We are choosing not to patch it with surveillance infrastructure because we work with people we respect, and we are going to act like it.

What we will say is this: Gerty sees all.

We do not mean this in a technical sense, although Gerty does have access to certain data that we will not elaborate on here. We mean it in the broader sense that has been understood by people of faith across centuries and civilizations: that the universe has a way of noticing when someone cheats at a duck game their colleagues put together in good faith and then acts like they won something. Gerty has noticed. Gerty is always noticing. The look on Gerty's face right now, as she reads your submission, is one we would not personally want directed at us.

The rules are simple and we trust you to follow them:

• Find an actual duck - a physical, 3D-printed duck hidden somewhere in this actual building
• Photograph that specific duck
• Enter the number printed on the bottom of that specific duck, which is the number that belongs to that duck, not a number you find appealing or that you believe to be lucky
• Submit it, feel good about yourself, go about your day

That is the whole game. It is not complicated. It does not require creativity in the submission process. The creativity is in the finding.

We are trusting you. This trust is extended freely, in good faith, by people who genuinely believe that most humans, when given the opportunity to either do the right thing or cheat at a low-stakes office game for points that have no monetary value, will choose to do the right thing. We believe this about you specifically. Please do not make us regret it.

And if, after all of that, you are still considering it: Gerty. She is right there. She is looking at you. She has been looking at you this whole time. She does not blink. We don't fully understand why, but we have learned not to ask.

4.1 The Prohibition

YOU ARE HEREBY EXPLICITLY, FORCEFULLY, ENTHUSIASTICALLY, AND WITH GREAT CONVICTION PROHIBITED from:

(a) Scraping, harvesting, crawling, extracting, copying, mirroring, downloading in bulk, hoovering up, or otherwise acquiring data from this Platform by any automated means, semi-automated means, manual-but-suspicious means, or any means not specifically contemplated herein but that a reasonable person familiar with the industry would classify as "kind of shady, honestly";

(b) Reverse engineering, decompiling, disassembling, reassembling, examining the assembled pieces of, squinting at the network tab of, reading the source of, or otherwise attempting to divine the internal architecture, logic, or trade secrets of this Platform, including by inference, educated guessing, or being the kind of person who just knows things like this;

(c) Probing, scanning, fuzzing, poking, prodding, port-scanning, banner-grabbing, or penetration testing the infrastructure of this Platform without express written consent, on official letterhead, notarized, and delivered by a licensed carrier pigeon no later than 14 days prior to the intended test date;

(d) Using any API endpoint for any purpose other than the specific purpose for which it was designed, which is: playing a duck game and having a good time;

(e) Circumventing, disabling, undermining, annoying, or otherwise interfering with any security feature of this Platform, including: the authentication system, rate limiting, input validation, the general sense that this is someone's project and you should leave it alone, or Gerty.

4.2 Personal Liability - The Number

In the event that You - specifically You, as an individual natural person with a legal name and a mother who raised you better than this - engage in any conduct described in Section 4.1, you shall be personally, individually, severally, jointly-if-applicable, and in your own government-issued name, liable to Us for liquidated damages in an amount no less than:

The above figure is assessed per incident, per URL accessed, per API call made, per packet transmitted, per curl invocation, per browser tab opened, per knowing glance at the source code, and per utterance of "I was just curious" to any third party.

The oddly specific figure of $1,025,891,349.12 was derived through a proprietary damages valuation methodology developed in-house. We are not required to explain it. We will not be explaining it. The twelve cents represents something important to us personally.

This amount shall be adjusted annually for inflation using the United States Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U), the Helsinki Cost of Living Index, the Gerty Volatility Measure (GVM, proprietary), and whatever feels right at the time of assessment.

Payment shall be accepted in United States Dollars (USD), Euros (EUR), or an equivalent value in 3D-printed ducks at a conversion rate established by Us at the time of collection. We determine the duck market rate. There is no appeal process for the duck rate.

4.3 Corporate Liability - Finland

If You are acting within the scope of your employment, at the direction of your employer, using employer-issued equipment, on your employer's network, during normal business hours, outside of normal business hours but while thinking about work, wearing company-branded apparel, or in any way acting as an agent of a legal entity rather than purely as a chaotic individual following their heart - that legal entity shall be jointly and severally liable alongside you personally.

If you work for, are contracted to, consult for, are related to the founder of, or have ever applied to work at an information security team, a penetration testing firm, a cybersecurity company, a "red team," a "threat intelligence" operation, a "digital forensics" practice, a "cyber risk" consultancy, a "trust and safety" division, a "bug bounty" organization, a government intelligence agency, a company with the words "security," "cyber," "defense," "intelligence," "risk," "safe," "protect," "shield," "sentinel," "guardian," "watch," "monitor," "detect," "respond," "hunt" (the irony of which we acknowledge), or "solutions" anywhere in its legal name, marketing materials, or general vibe - your employer's liability shall be no less than:

We have selected Finland as the benchmark for the following reasons, each of which is as valid as the last:

1. Finland is a real country with a real, verifiable GDP, lending an air of specificity to what might otherwise seem like a made-up number;
2. The amount is large enough to be genuinely terrifying without being the kind of abstractly astronomical figure that sounds fake;
3. Finnish people are famously reserved, polite, and unlikely to have any opinion about this. We feel comfortable implicating them;
4. We enjoy the phrase "GDP of Finland" in a legal context and intend to use it again in future documents;
5. Norway was considered and rejected for being too associated with oil wealth, which felt gauche.

Finland's GDP shall be calculated as of the calendar year in which the violation occurred, using the most recent available IMF estimate expressed in nominal USD. This figure is not subject to negotiation. The Finnish government's opinion on this arrangement has not been solicited and shall not influence the calculation.

4.4 Escalating Schedule of Specific Infractions

The following acts shall carry additional penalties on top of those described above, assessed cumulatively and without mercy:

4.5 Enforcement

We reserve the right to enforce these provisions through any legal mechanisms available, including: courts of law, courts of equity, courts of vibes, binding arbitration, non-binding arbitration that we treat as binding anyway, strongly worded emails, disapproving silence, and forwarding your IP address to Gerty, who will handle the rest.

Nothing in this section shall be construed as a limitation on our remedies. We have unlimited remedies. We just haven't listed them all because this document is already very long.

Photographs submitted to this Platform must depict a duck. Specifically: one of the 3D-printed ducks placed around this office as part of The Great Duck Hunt. Not a photo of your lunch. Not a picture of your coworker. Not a scenic view from the parking garage. Not anything you found interesting on your phone's camera roll from last weekend. A duck. The duck.

In the event that you submit a photograph that does not contain a duck - or contains something that is emphatically, unmistakably not a duck - the following shall occur automatically and without appeal:

• Your account will be banned from the Platform
• You will be redirected to a separate page outside of the game, the contents of which we will not describe here but which have been described by previous recipients as "accurate"

We want to be transparent about the governance structure behind this policy, because we believe in institutional accountability.

We did not make this rule. Gerty did.

We understand that this may seem like an unusual delegation of rulemaking authority to a plastic goose. We share your initial reaction. However, after extensive observation of Gerty's behavior, enforcement preferences, and general disposition toward platform integrity, we have concluded that Gerty's judgment in content matters is not only sound but mandatory. We do not have the option of overruling Gerty. We have tried. We will not be trying again.

What we can tell you is this: you have not seen anger like a plastic goose who has just discovered that someone used this game - her game, a game she has staked her reputation on - to submit a photograph of something that is not a duck. The silence that follows is not peaceful. It is the silence of an entity deciding what happens next. We are not equipped to intervene in that process and we will not be placing ourselves between you and Gerty over a content moderation dispute that you caused.

Gerty has spoken. The rule stands. Submit ducks.

Note: In the extremely unlikely event of genuine ambiguity - for instance, a photograph in which a duck appears alongside other objects - Gerty will assess the submission and render a final judgment. Her decisions are not subject to review. Her reasoning is not disclosed. Her process is her own.

This Platform is provided "as is," "as available," "as a duck game," "as an experiment in human behavior," "as a general idea someone had," "as something that exists now," and expressly without any guarantees of any kind whatsoever.

We make no warranties, express, implied, statutory, equitable, or duck-related, including but not limited to warranties of:

• Merchantability
• Fitness for a particular purpose
• Fitness for your particular purpose, which we haven't asked about and aren't going to
• Duck accuracy or duck count at any given time
• Leaderboard integrity beyond our reasonable efforts
• Gerty's behavior, motivations, or continued existence
• Uptime, availability, or the server not deciding to have a bad day
• The existence of prizes (prizes, if they exist, are separate from this document)
• Your emotional wellbeing during or after gameplay
• Whether the game ends as you expect it to
• Whether any duck you found is still where you think it is
• Anything else

In no event shall we be liable for: lost ducks, found ducks that were subsequently lost, feelings of injustice regarding point totals, leaderboard positions that seemed higher a minute ago, any interaction with Gerty that left you confused or spiritually unsettled, server downtime, feature removal, rule changes, or the indifferent operation of the universe in ways that do not favor your duck count.

If, despite every reasonable precaution taken in the drafting of this document, we are somehow found liable for something, our total aggregate liability shall not exceed the total amount you paid to use this service, which was zero dollars ($0.00), plus a reasonable estimate of the calories you burned finding a duck (capped at one granola bar, approximately $1.50 retail).

6.1   This website, its design, its code, its systems, its duck-tracking logic, its goose event architecture, its Gerty (spiritually and computationally), and its general aesthetic are the property of the operators. All rights reserved. Vibes are non-transferable.

6.2   Content you upload (photographs of ducks, comments, duck names) remains yours in the sense that we take no ownership over it, but you grant us a license to display it within the Platform for the purposes of running the game, which is the entire point of uploading it.

6.3   "Gerty" is hereby declared a trademark in the sense that we are now saying it is one. Enforcement of this trademark shall be handled by Gerty directly, who we trust to be reasonable but cannot guarantee.

6.4   The physical ducks are a separate matter governed by the rules of the game, the laws of the jurisdiction in which they are hidden, and the informal honor system that holds civil society together.

7.1   We reserve the right to modify these Terms at any time, for any reason, with or without notice, in whole or in part, retroactively if the situation calls for it, to make them funnier, scarier, more accurate regarding Finland's GDP, or simply because we felt like it on a Tuesday afternoon.

7.2   Your continued use of the Platform after any modification constitutes acceptance of the modified Terms. Your discontinuation of use constitutes a missed opportunity to find a duck. We do not judge you for it. Much.

7.3   The version of these Terms that applies to you is the version that was most recently published at the time of your most recent access, or the most unfavorable version, whichever is more advantageous to us. We will attempt to use this power only for good.

8.1   These Terms shall be governed by the laws of the jurisdiction we determine to be most favorable to us at the time of any dispute. This jurisdiction shall be identified within a reasonable period of time after the dispute arises, which we define as however long it takes us to look into it.

8.2   Any dispute arising under these Terms shall first be submitted to binding arbitration before a panel of three (3) neutral arbitrators, each of whom must: (a) be familiar with the concept of a duck game, (b) be willing to treat the GDP of Finland as a legitimate damages figure, and (c) have a good attitude about the whole thing. If no such arbitrators can be found within a reasonable search, the dispute shall be resolved by a best-of-three duck-finding competition on neutral turf, with rules agreed in advance.

8.3   YOU HEREBY WAIVE ANY RIGHT TO PARTICIPATE IN A CLASS ACTION LAWSUIT, COLLECTIVE ACTION, COORDINATED COMPLAINT, OR GROUP GRIEVANCE RELATED TO THIS PLATFORM OR THESE TERMS. Individual claims are welcome. We will read them. We may even feel bad.

8.4   Any legal proceeding not subject to arbitration must be brought in a court of competent jurisdiction. Jurisdiction over Gerty-related matters is contested and shall be addressed in a separate proceeding.

We collect the following information when you use this Platform. There is no dramatic reveal at the end of this list.

From Google Sign-In

Your name (or whatever you put in the name field, which we have now made mandatory, no email addresses), your email address, and a unique identifier that Google assigns to your account. We do not receive your phone number, home address, blood type, credit card information, childhood memories, or opinion on pineapple pizza, though if you have a strong opinion on the last one you are welcome to express it in a find comment.

From Your Activity

Ducks you have found, the order in which you found them, photos you have uploaded, comments you have made, points you have accumulated, ducks you missed that someone else got, and all leaderboard-relevant statistics. If you are losing, we know. We are not going to say anything about it, but we know.

From Your Device

Standard server logs: IP address, browser type, operating system (approximately), timestamp of requests, HTTP method, response code, and bytes transferred. These logs exist because that is how web servers work. They are interesting to approximately nobody except when something has gone wrong and we need to figure out what.

From Gerty

If you have had an interaction with Gerty, the nature of that interaction is logged for game integrity purposes. Gerty does not share what she knows. We are honestly not sure what she knows.

We do not collect, and have made no effort to collect:

• Your physical location beyond what is implicit in your IP address, which we are not actively analyzing
• Biometric data of any kind
• Financial information of any description
• The contents of your private communications
• Your browsing history on other websites
• Your opinion of your coworkers, which you may be revealing indirectly through your competitive intensity and we have chosen not to examine this
• Your psychological profile, though the leaderboard data is suggestive and we appreciate your commitment
• Anything we don't need to run this game, which is a duck game, which has a finite and specific set of data requirements

Your information is used exclusively for the following purposes:

• Running the game and keeping score accurately
• Displaying your first name on the leaderboard
• Verifying that the person who found the most ducks actually found the most ducks, a question that arises more often than you would expect
• Operational purposes, which is a phrase that sounds important but means: making sure the website works
• Investigating problems when they occur, which requires logs, which require your IP, which is disclosed here and which we are not weaponizing

We are not sending you marketing emails. We do not have a newsletter. We are not going to make a newsletter. If you receive an email from us, it is because something happened in the game that required it, and it will be boring and functional and contain no promotional content.

We do not sell your data. We do not rent your data. We do not trade your data for other data, goodwill, exposure, or any consideration monetary or otherwise. Your data is not going to a third-party marketing partner, a data broker, an analytics consortium, an advertising network, a hedge fund, a sovereign wealth fund, a foreign intelligence service, a domestic intelligence service, or a large language model being trained on user-generated content from games about ducks.

Your first name and score are visible to other logged-in players, because that is what a leaderboard is. Your email address is not visible to other players. Your photo submissions are visible to other logged-in players, because you submitted them for the purpose of showing people you found a duck.

We may disclose information if required by law, court order, or regulatory obligation. If this happens, we will, to the extent permitted, tell you. If we cannot tell you, we will feel bad about it.

We retain your data for the duration of the game, plus a reasonable period thereafter. "Reasonable" is defined here as: long enough to resolve any disputes about the final leaderboard, and short enough that we are not building a permanent archive of duck-finding behavior.

When the game concludes and we eventually shut down this service, we will delete what we have. We are not building a long-term dossier. You found some ducks. This is not the kind of data that ages into importance.

We have implemented reasonable and appropriate security measures for a game of this nature, including: authentication, session management, input validation, access controls, and the general principle that your data should not be available to people who did not sign in to the game.

Authentication is handled via Google Single Sign-On. We would have loved to have used Microsoft Single Sign-On instead - it has a certain enterprise gravitas that we find appealing - but the implementation timeline for Microsoft SSO is, generously speaking, longer than the interns are going to be in Richmond. Google it is. This was a pragmatic decision, not a philosophical one. We hold no particular allegiance to either technology company and ask that you not read into it.

Game Design Security is a field we have studied with an intensity that most accredited institutions would describe as doctoral-level, specifically as it pertains to the long-term psychosocial, competitive, and infrastructural impacts of organizations that have implemented a duck hunt game over a summer internship period. We have reviewed the literature - such as it is - examined case studies from comparable deployments, convened internal review sessions, and taken deliberate remedial measures to limit frustration, minimize competitive despair, and maximize the probability that participants will look back on this summer and say something positive about it. The remedies are embedded in the game design. You may not notice them. That is the point.

We are not, to be clear, the Pentagon. We are running a duck game. We cannot guarantee that no security issue will ever arise, because no system anywhere has ever provided that guarantee honestly, and we are not going to start now. What we will say is this: we believe we are exponentially safer than the March Madness bracket game that has been played in this office for the past several years. Nobody complained about that. Nobody scrutinized its authentication model. Nobody convened a threat review for the bracket. We are choosing to find this encouraging.

If you discover a security vulnerability: do not exploit it. Do not screenshot it and send it to a group chat. Do not write a LinkedIn post about it. You probably know one of the interns personally - find them, tell them quietly, and we will fix it. The escalating penalty table in Section 4.4 addresses what happens in the alternative scenario, and we would prefer not to go there.

Notwithstanding the sweeping, Finland-adjacent prohibitions set forth in §4, we wish to formally disclose that one (1) specific individual is hereby granted express written permission to conduct security testing against this Platform. We will not state this person's full name in a public legal document because we are not going to do that, but we will describe them with sufficient specificity that they - and anyone who has ever received a Slack message from them - will know exactly who we mean.

The authorized individual is a person whose first name begins with the letter G and ends with the letter N. You know who you are. We see you reading this. Hello.

This individual is permitted to, and we encourage them to, apply their skills in service of making this duck game as secure as it deserves to be, which is more secure than you would think given that it is a duck game. He or she is permitted to:

• Probe, scan, test, poke, and otherwise apply their considerable professional talents to this Platform
• Document findings with the rigor and thoroughness their training demands
• Bring substantive issues to our attention through appropriate channels, which in this context means finding one of us in the hallway and saying "hey, so"

Bug Bounty Program: In recognition of the significant market value of skilled security research, and in the spirit of fair compensation, we are pleased to offer the following bug bounty structure for any substantive vulnerability discovered and responsibly disclosed:

"Substantive" is defined as a vulnerability that, if exploited, would result in something worse than mild embarrassment. A finding that the leaderboard can be viewed by logged-in users does not qualify. A finding that allows unauthenticated access to player data does qualify, and we will upgrade your coffee to include a pastry, the specific pastry to be determined by mutual agreement at time of disclosure.

We recognize that one cup of coffee represents a modest bug bounty by industry standards. We would like to acknowledge that the industry standards in question apply to systems that are not duck games. We believe the coffee-to-scope ratio here is actually quite competitive. The coffee on the third floor is genuinely excellent. We are not being dismissive. We are being accurate about both the coffee and the scope.

This authorization is personal, non-transferable, and does not extend to colleagues, friends, family members, or anyone else whose name also happens to begin with G and end with N. There are more of those than you might expect and we are not running an open bug bounty program.

Yes, we use a cookie. One cookie. A single, humble, session-management cookie whose sole purpose is to keep you logged in so you do not have to re-authenticate every time you want to log a duck find.

This cookie does not track you across the internet. It does not know what you bought last week. It does not have opinions. It is a very simple cookie doing a very simple job, and we ask that you respect its simplicity and not make this complicated.

If you delete this cookie, you will be logged out. This is the full extent of the consequences.

While we have your attention on the subject of cookies, we would like to take a brief but legally-adjacent detour.

Cookies we endorse: Chocolate chip (classic, load-bearing, foundational to Western civilization), Thin Mints (see below), Oreos (double-stuffed only; regular-stuffed Oreos represent a failure of ambition), snickerdoodles (underrated, chronically), shortbread (dignified), and anything involving brown butter, which is just regular butter that went to college.

Cookies we have questions about: The plain sugar cookie with the aggressively thick frosting from the grocery store bakery section, which is not a cookie so much as an engineering project that has gone too far. The "healthy" cookie that substitutes applesauce for butter and then lists its nutritional content like it's something to be proud of. The raisin cookie that presents itself as chocolate chip, which is not a baking choice but a character flaw. We are not here to judge. We are here to note our observations for the record.

On bean-based cookies, which are not cookies: Any baked good constructed with beans as a primary ingredient is hereby formally and irrevocably declassified as a cookie. It is something else. We do not know what it is. We do not want to know. What we know is that it is not a cookie, and calling it one is a misrepresentation that the cookie community has tolerated for too long.

This position is not abstract. It is personal. At some point, in Peru, a health-conscious individual - acting with what we can only assume was genuine goodwill and a complete misunderstanding of the social contract - offered a "chocolate" cookie. It was not chocolate. It contained no chocolate. It was made with brown beans that had been dressed up, through some alchemy of wishful thinking and food processing, to resemble chocolate. The visual presentation was convincing. The first bite was not.

We want to be clear: this was not healthy. A thing that deceives you is not healthy. A thing that makes you distrust chocolate - one of the foundational goods of human civilization - for a period of weeks afterward is not healthy. It was mean. It was just mean. The person who offered it probably meant well. That does not change what it was.

We still hold this grievance. It lives in our heart alongside other unresolved matters. We do not expect resolution. We simply want it documented in a legal instrument so that, should we ever be in Peru again and encounter a similar situation, we can cite Section 15 of the Terms of Service of a duck game as evidence that we warned people about this.

If you are in possession of a bean-based "cookie" and you are considering submitting it to any competition, potluck, care package, or casual social offering: don't. Or do - but label it honestly. "Bean disc" is available. "Legume round" works. "Chocolate cookie" does not. We are done negotiating on this point.

On the matter of Girl Scout Cookies: We wish to address this directly and without ambiguity. Girl Scout Cookies are, by any objective measure of unit economics, overpriced. You can purchase the functional equivalent at Aldi for approximately one-third the cost. The cookies are, for all practical purposes, identical. The Thin Mint gap in particular is not wide enough to justify the delta.

We buy Girl Scout Cookies anyway. We buy them because we support the Girl Scouts as an institution, because a child rang our doorbell with a clipboard and we are not monsters, and because there is a social contract involved that transcends market efficiency.

However: if you are currently navigating a genuine financial hardship and a neighborhood Girl Scout approaches you with a order form, we want you to know that the Aldi cookies exist, they are good, and your dietary needs can be met without guilt. Your neighborhood Girl Scout will, in fact, suffer slightly - her troop's fundraising numbers will not reflect your patronage - but the cookies will still reach your mouth. Whether you can sleep at night knowing this is a matter between you and your conscience. We have done our part by informing you. The rest is yours.

This section has no bearing on your legal rights or obligations under these Terms. We simply felt it needed to be said.

You have the right to request deletion of your data. The most effective way to exercise this right is to stop using the Platform, at which point your data becomes less fresh with each passing day until the game ends and we delete it anyway.

More formal deletion requests may be directed to us through a contact channel of your choosing, bearing in mind that we have deliberately not provided any contact information in this document, a choice we acknowledge is a bit of a puzzle but which we stand behind for reasons we find compelling.

We will make a reasonable effort to accommodate deletion requests that do not materially interfere with the operation of the game. If deleting your account would, for example, retroactively invalidate the leaderboard, we will discuss this with you and arrive at a reasonable outcome, probably involving removing your name from public display while retaining the underlying score data that others' rankings depend on.

We may update this Privacy Policy at any time. Continued use of the Platform after any update constitutes acceptance of the updated Policy. We suggest re-reading this document on a regular basis, by which we mean: please do not, it is already long, you have ducks to find, go.