Legal

Privacy Policy

Last updated: 22 September 2026

Who we are

SmellsLikeCodfish (the “Archive”) is a non-commercial project documenting the heritage of video games made in Portugal and by Portuguese creators. The Archive is operated by Gonçalo Canha, who acts as the data controller responsible for the personal data described here. You can reach us about anything in this policy — including any request concerning your personal data — at contact@smellslikecodfish.com.

This policy explains what personal data the Archive processes, why, on what legal basis, and the rights you have under the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and Portugal’s Lei n.º 58/2019.

Two kinds of people this policy covers

  • Visitors who browse the website.
  • Documented individuals — the creators, developers and other people credited in the games, studios and works recorded in the Archive.

The two are treated differently, so each has its own section below.

The Archive’s own team — the people named on the transparency page — are there by their own choice. The name, role, website link and photograph shown for each are published with that person’s consent, and are taken down when they ask or leave the team.

Visitors to the website

The Archive is deliberately built to collect as little as possible about visitors.

  • No accounts, no advertising. There are no visitor accounts, no newsletter, no advertising, and no profiling or automated decision-making.
  • Analytics, only if you allow it. The Archive uses Google Analytics 4 to count visits and see which entries are actually read. It is off until you turn it on: nothing is loaded from Google, and nothing is sent to Google, unless you accept when asked. If you do accept, Google sets cookies in your browser (named _ga and _ga_…, which expire after two years) and receives your IP address, the pages you view, an approximate location derived from that address, and basic device and browser information. Advertising features, ad personalisation and Google Signals are all switched off, so this is never used to build an advertising profile of you. The legal basis is your consent, and you may withdraw it at any moment — declining, or later turning it off, is as easy as accepting.
  • Local storage. Your language choice, your card/list view preference, whether you keep the listings' filters open, which entries you have already sent a report about (an error report and a missing-information report on the same entry are tracked separately, so you can send both), which site notices you have dismissed, whether you have already seen the short guide the front page shows on a first visit, when you last opened the updates feed, and your answer to the analytics question above are stored by your own browser. Only one of them ever leaves it: the date you last opened the updates feed is sent to the Archive’s own database as a filter, so the site can count how many posts have been published since — it is not saved there and is not tied to you. You can clear them at any time through your browser settings.
  • Reports. Every game, studio, person and mod page offers two ways to flag something: “report an error” for something wrong, and “add missing information” for something absent — both open the entry’s form filled in with what the archive holds, for you to change. If you send one, what you wrote is stored for us to act on: the fields you changed, your notes, which entry, which of the two forms you used, the address of the page you were on, and — only if you choose to give it — your email address, which we use solely to come back to you about that report. Reports are never published and are readable only by the Archive’s editor. Filling in either form is entirely up to you (consent), and you can ask us to delete your report at any time using the contact details below. Nothing is recorded if you don’t send one.
  • Submissions. The “suggest a game, studio, person or mod” form lets you send us details about something you’d like added — a game, a studio, a person or a mod — along with, only if you choose to give them, your name, your email and any notes you add (where you learned about it, for instance). We use your email solely to follow up with a question. Submissions are never published as-is and are readable only by the Archive’s editor, who checks each one against a source before anything is added to the archive. Filling in the form is entirely up to you (consent), and you can ask us to delete your submission at any time using the contact details below.
  • Naming you as a contributor. Both the report form and the submission form above offer a box reading “Name me as a contributor on this page”. It is unticked by default, so nothing about you is published unless you tick it (consent), and ticking it requires a name. Ticking the box is a request, not a publication: the Archive’s editor reviews it, writes the wording themselves, and may reword it, decline it, or credit no one at all. Where a credit is published, it is limited to the name you gave and a short line the editor writes describing what you contributed, shown on the game, studio, person or mod page it relates to. Your email address, the text of your report or submission, and whether it began as one or the other are never published. To have a published credit removed, contact us using the details below — this deletes the credit rather than making it anonymous. Separately, the editor may mark an entry with a “community” tag to say that a reader helped with it. That tag names no one and is set whether or not you ticked the box, so it publishes nothing about you.
  • Information you send us about other people. Some of that form asks about someone who isn’t you: a person suggested as an entry (their name, a website, a link to a portrait, links to interviews or talks on YouTube, and games made outside Portugal they worked on), or the people credited on a game or mod you suggest (their names and roles), or the studio or team named on a game or mod you suggest. The same is true of a report you file about a person’s page. We ask only for what documents someone’s work, never anything private, and what you send stays unpublished and editor-only until it has been checked against a public source — at which point it becomes an entry in the Archive and is covered by the section below, on the same legal basis as everything else we document. If it doesn’t check out, it is not added. Anyone documented can ask us to correct or remove their entry at any time, using the contact details below.
  • Server logs. Our hosting provider may automatically record standard technical access logs (such as your IP address, the page requested and your browser type) for the security and reliable operation of the website. This is a limited, ordinary form of processing based on our legitimate interest in keeping the site secure and available.
  • Third-party services. Loading the site causes your browser to contact a small number of third parties, which will necessarily see your IP address: Supabase (which hosts the archive and running-costs data the pages display and connects to it in real time), jsDelivr (a public code library that serves one software component the site uses), and YouTube (only when you choose to play a video, and through YouTube’s privacy-enhanced “no-cookie” domain). If — and only if — you have allowed analytics, your browser will also contact Google to load and report to Google Analytics. In addition, some images shown in the Archive — game and mod cover art, studio logos, and photographs of documented individuals or of the team — may be loaded directly from the external website that hosts them, in which case that host will also see your IP address. Fonts and language flags are served from the Archive’s own server. Each third party processes your data under its own privacy policy.
  • Links to other websites. The Archive links out a great deal — to the sources cited on an entry, to where a game can be bought or downloaded, to the websites of studios and creators, and to the other archives listed on the about page. Following any of them takes you off this site, and what happens after that is governed by that site’s own privacy policy rather than this one. The Archive does not control those sites and is not responsible for their content or for how they handle your data, and linking to a site is not an endorsement of it. If — and only if — you have allowed analytics, Google Analytics’ standard measurement may record that an outbound link was clicked and the address it pointed to; if you have declined, nothing about it is recorded at all.

Individuals documented in the Archive

The purpose of the Archive is to document, value and preserve the heritage of Portuguese video games. Doing that unavoidably involves recording information about the real people who made those games.

  • What we record. For a documented individual this may include: their name; the professional roles and credits attributed to them; the games, mods and studios they are associated with; links to publicly available sources about them, which may include a public professional profile (for example a LinkedIn page) or personal website used to confirm their identity; a photograph where one is publicly available; links to publicly available recordings in which they appear — such as interviews or conference talks published on YouTube, which are played from YouTube rather than copied into the Archive; and the fact that a source indicates they are Portuguese, since Portuguese authorship is the Archive’s inclusion criterion.
  • Where it comes from. This information is gathered from publicly available sources — press coverage, game credits, public professional profiles and official or personal websites. We link to a public profile as a way of verifying that an entry refers to the correct person; we do not access any private or restricted information.
  • Incomplete entries are marked as such. Where an entry is still missing key details, it is listed publicly on the Archive’s Wanted board and marked on its own page, so readers can see what the record doesn’t yet hold and help fill it in. The listing names only the entry and which details are absent.
  • Why (purpose). The information is processed solely to document, contextualise and preserve Portuguese video game heritage and to make that record freely available to researchers, players and future creators. It is never used for marketing, profiling or automated decision-making, and it is never sold.
  • Legal basis. We rely on our legitimate interests (GDPR Article 6(1)(f)) in preserving cultural heritage and making a documented historical record publicly accessible, and on the provisions for freedom of expression and information and archiving in the public interest (GDPR Articles 85 and 89) as implemented in Portuguese law by Lei n.º 58/2019. We have weighed this interest against the rights and freedoms of the people documented, and limit ourselves to information that is already public and relevant to a person’s role in a documented work. We do not seek to process special categories of data (such as health, religion or political opinions).

Retention

Information in the Archive is kept for as long as it remains relevant to the Archive’s documentary and preservation purpose, which may be indefinite for a historical record — subject always to your rights below. A report is kept while it is being checked and acted on, and is deleted at your request. Visitor local-storage values stay in your browser until you clear them. If you allow analytics, Google retains the associated event data for 14 months, and its cookies expire two years after your last visit; turning analytics off deletes those cookies from your browser straight away.

International transfers

Some of the third-party services above (in particular Supabase, jsDelivr, YouTube and — where you have allowed analytics — Google) may process data on servers outside the European Economic Area. Where that happens, those providers rely on legally recognised transfer mechanisms, such as the European Commission’s Standard Contractual Clauses, to protect the data.

Your rights

Under the GDPR you have the right to:

  • access the personal data we hold about you;
  • rectify data that is inaccurate or incomplete;
  • erase your data (the “right to be forgotten”);
  • restrict or object to our processing;
  • data portability where applicable.

If you are documented in the Archive and would like your entry corrected, or would like it removed, contact us at contact@smellslikecodfish.com. Because the Archive processes data for archiving in the public interest, in some cases we may keep a documented record where the law allows — but we will always consider your request, explain our decision, and correct anything that is inaccurate. We aim to respond within one month.

Complaints

If you believe we have handled your personal data unlawfully, you have the right to lodge a complaint with the Portuguese supervisory authority: Comissão Nacional de Proteção de Dados (CNPD), Av. D. Carlos I, 134, 1.º, 1200-651 Lisboa — www.cnpd.pt.

Children

The Archive is a documentary resource not directed at children and does not knowingly collect personal data from children.

Changes to this policy

We may update this policy as the Archive evolves. The date at the top shows when it was last changed; material changes will be reflected here.