Privacy

The short version

Scartown is run by one person, not a company with a data department. Nothing here is collected to sell, and there is no advertising anywhere on the site or in the game.

• An email address, so a lost password has somewhere to go.
• Your character, on the server, because that is what an online game is.
• A login token and a copy of your character, in your own browser.
• Nothing else. No advertising networks, no data brokers, no profile of you built up across other websites.

You can ask for all of it to be deleted, and it will be.

Your account

When you create a character, the following is stored on the server:

• Username, which you log in with, and handle, the name the city sees. The handle is public: it appears on the citizen register, gang rosters, the hospital ward and anywhere you have been in a fight.
• Email address. One account per address. It is never shown to other players and it is never passed to anybody.
• Your password, as a hash. The real password is never written down anywhere. Nobody, including staff, can read it or recover it; a forgotten password is replaced, not looked up.
• When the account was made and when it was last seen, which is what draws the online, away and offline marks on the citizen list, and what decides your first three days of protection from attack.
• Your character. Level, attributes, money, gear, gang, mission history, everything the game is made of.

What is kept in your browser

Scartown sets no cookies. Not one. What the game keeps is in your browser's own local storage, on your device, and it is never sent anywhere except back to the game's own server:

• A login token, so you are not asked to log in on every page.
• A copy of your character, so the game is usable the moment it opens.
• Your display preferences: dark or light, and which colorway you picked.

Clearing your browser data removes all of it. Your character is safe: it lives on the server, and logging back in brings it down again.

Other people, and staff

Other players can see your handle, level, gang, district, whether you are in hospital or a cell, and your fight record. That is the game: a city where nobody knows anything about anyone is not one.

Staff can read player mail. This is the one piece of access worth being plain about. It exists so that a harassment report can actually be looked into, and every staff action is logged. Staff do not read mail for entertainment, and they cannot see your email address or your password.

Who else is involved

Three companies touch the site, and none of them are advertising businesses.

• Netlify serves the pages you are reading.
• Render runs the game server and the database your character lives in. Both keep ordinary server logs, which include IP addresses.
• Your IP address is used by the game itself for one thing: refusing too many requests a minute from the same place. It is not stored against your account.

The site loads no fonts, scripts, images or trackers from anywhere else. Everything you see is served from Scartown or drawn by your own device.

Analytics

Scartown uses Google Analytics to count visits and see which pages people arrive on. It sets its own cookies and sends your visit to Google. It is not used for advertising, it is not linked to your account, and nothing from inside the game is sent to it. You can opt out for every site at once with Google's own browser add-on, or by using your browser's Do Not Track or tracking protection settings.

How long any of it is kept

Your account and character are kept while the account exists. Nothing is deleted for inactivity, so a character you leave alone for a year is still there when you come back.

Player mail is kept so that reports can be looked into. Server logs at Netlify and Render age out on their schedules, which are measured in days and weeks rather than years.

If you ask for your account to be deleted, it goes, and so does the character, the mail and the email address.

Getting your data, or getting rid of it

Ask a member of staff through player mail and it happens. There is no form and no waiting on a department.

• A copy of what is held about you, sent to the email address on the account.
• Correcting something that is wrong.
• Deleting the account entirely. This cannot be undone: the character does not come back, and neither does anything in it.

Depending on where you live, some of these are rights rather than favours. Either way the answer is the same one.

Age

Scartown is a crime game with fighting in it and is not built for children. Do not create an account if you are under 13, or under 16 in the countries that set the line there. An account found to belong to somebody under age is deleted rather than corrected.

When this page changes

The game is under active development and this page moves with it. Anything material is announced on the news page at the same time, so a change to what is collected is never a quiet one.

Questions, or a request to see or delete what is held about you, go to a member of staff through player mail inside the game. Staff are named on the citizen register.