These are the terms for using spunt.mt, including the games and anything you sign in to. They also say what we hold about you and what you can make us do with it. Last updated 25 October 2026.

Using the site

Everything on Spunt is free to read and free to play. You may link to it, quote it with attribution, and use it in a classroom without asking us. You may not republish whole articles, sell access to them, or present them as somebody else's work. The words, the artwork and the games are ours unless a page says otherwise.

We write carefully and correct ourselves in public when we get something wrong, but the site is offered as it stands. Our games are works of history and, where one departs from the record, it says so on the screen where it matters. Nothing here is legal, financial or professional advice.

Accounts

Reading Spunt needs no account and never will. Our games are different: the Great Siege game and the Fantasy Election League both ask you to sign in before you can play. That is so a score or a squad can follow you between devices, sit on a shared table against everybody else, and still be there when you come back. The same goes for our Budget tool, which asks you to sign in so your answers are kept for the next Budget.

If you would rather not have an account, the honest answer is that you cannot use those three. Everything else on the site is open.

You create one by signing in with Google or with Facebook. We never see or store your password for either. What we receive and keep is your email address, the display name on that account, a link to its profile picture, and, in the case of Facebook, the account id so we can recognise you next time. If you sign in with both on the same email address, you get one account rather than two.

We also store what you do in the games while signed in: your scores, when you played, and for the Fantasy Election League the squad you picked. The Budget tool keeps the answers you give it, which the next section explains. Nothing else. We do not ask for your date of birth, your address or your phone number, and we would rather not have them.

The Budget tool

Our Budget tool asks you to sign in, then asks about you, page by page: your age band, your town or village, where you are from and, if you came from abroad, how long you have lived in Malta, who lives with you and your children's ages, your housing, your work, industry and business, your income band, any benefits or pensions you receive, how you get around and how many cars your household runs, work planned on your home, a few details of your life such as pets or volunteering, your plans for the next few years, what you want to do more of, and what interests you. Each question exists because at least one measure in the Budget depends on it. We ask for bands and ticks, never your exact age or income, your address or the names of anyone in your household. You can answer "Rather not say" to the income and locality questions. If something does not apply, every page has a "none" answer.

We use your answers for two things. The first is to pick out the measures in the Budget speech that apply to you, this year and when the next Budget is read. That is the service you ask for when you fill them in, and it is our legal basis under the GDPR (Article 6(1)(b)).

The second happens only if you ask for it. Under your results there is a box, unticked, that reads "Email me new Spunt articles, games and news picked for me using these answers". Tick it and we will send you our emails and use your answers to choose what goes to you, so that, for example, a new game reaches people who said they like history, or a piece on business grants reaches people who run a business. Ticking it is your consent (Article 6(1)(a)). Untick it, or use the unsubscribe link in any email, and both stop at once. If you never tick it, we keep your answers for the Budget tool only and never use them for email. We do not use your answers for advertising, we do not sell them, we do not share them with anyone, and we do not use them to decide anything about you. The list you see is information, and the speech itself is the authority.

The measures in each speech are read and tagged once, with the help of an AI model, when the speech is published, and we check the result against the speech. Your answers are then matched against those tags by the page in your own browser. They are never sent to an AI service.

Two pages, on health needs and on disability and support, would be health information, so we have chosen not to hold it. Those answers stay in your browser on your own device and never reach us. They go when you clear your browser data.

The rest are stored with your account in the database Cloudflare runs for us. You can change them at any time, and the Clear my answers button on that page deletes them from our database straight away. If neither you nor your answers have been seen for two years, we delete them automatically. Deleting your account deletes them too. Spunt Insights Ltd, of Marsaxlokk, Malta, is responsible for this data.

Emails from us

On the screen where you sign in there is a box, ticked by default, that subscribes you to Spunt's emails. Untick it before you sign in and we will not email you. Whether it is ticked or not makes no difference to the account, the game or the leaderboard.

Those emails cover whatever we are publishing at the time. Today that is likely to be a monthly letter on Maltese history and the pieces we have put out; over time it may also include writing on politics and the economy, our fact checks, new games, and anything else Spunt makes. We would rather tell you that plainly now than pretend we know exactly what we will be sending in two years.

Every email has an unsubscribe link, one click, no reason needed. You can also write to us at the address below and we will take you off the list. Unsubscribing does not close your account and does not touch your scores.

What else we measure

We use Google Analytics to count how many people read a page and roughly where in the world they are, in aggregate. It is how we know whether a piece landed. It is not tied to your account and we do not use it to build a profile of you.

A signed-in session is kept in a cookie so the site knows it is still you. Some of our games also keep a leaderboard in your own browser, on your own machine, which never reaches us and disappears when you clear your browser data.

Who else sees it

Nobody buys this data from us, because we do not sell it. It sits with the companies that run the site for us: Cloudflare, which hosts spunt.mt and stores the accounts database, and Google Analytics for the counting above. When we start sending emails we will use an email provider to send them, and your address will sit there too. Sign-in itself goes through Google and Facebook, who have their own terms and see that you signed in.

Your rights

Spunt is based in Malta, so the GDPR applies. You can ask us for a copy of everything we hold about you, ask us to correct it, ask us to delete your account and everything on it, or object to us holding it at all. Ask and we will do it, normally within a few days and at most within a month. You can also complain to the Office of the Information and Data Protection Commissioner in Malta if you think we have handled you badly.

We keep account data for as long as the account exists. Ask for deletion and it goes, including the scores attached to it. Analytics data expires on Google's own schedule.

Children

The Great Siege game is built to be played by schoolchildren, and on this site it asks for an account like everybody else. That account holds an email address, a name and the scores, and nothing more. The newsletter box is the only part that is about marketing, and unticking it costs the player nothing.

If your child has signed in and you would rather they had not, write to us and we will delete the account and everything attached to it. Schools that would rather no child signed in at all can write to us as well: the game runs as a plain folder of files with no account and no network behind it, and we will send it to you to put on your own machines.

Changes, and how to reach us

If we change these terms in a way that matters we will say so on this page and move the date at the top. This is version 2026-10-25.

Everything above runs through one address: info@spunt.mt. Deletion requests, unsubscribes, corrections, or a question about any of this.