Privacy Policy

Privacy Policy

1. Who we are

Informatical Analytics LLC ("we", "us") operates gameformatical, a private
social platform for small gaming groups. If you have any questions about this
policy or your data, contact us at privacy@informatical.info.

2. What personal data we process

Account data: your email address, display name, and authentication details needed
to sign you in and secure your account.

When you sign up or change your email address, we check the address's domain
against public lists of temporary email services, and we look up the domain's
mail servers in the public Domain Name System to confirm it can receive email.
We do not store the result against your account. We do keep counts of sign-up
attempts we refused, by hour; for a refused temporary address we record only the
list entry that matched (a provider's domain, such as a known temporary-email
service), never your address.
If the provider of an email address already on an account is later found on a
list of temporary email services, we may ask you to change to a different
address. We record that we asked and whether the address was changed; we never
close an account for this reason.

Sign-up protection: our sign-up forms use Cloudflare Turnstile, a service from
Cloudflare, Inc., to tell people apart from automated scripts. When you load or
submit a sign-up form, Cloudflare receives your IP address and information about
your browser and device for that purpose. See Cloudflare's privacy policy at
https://www.cloudflare.com/privacypolicy/ for how it handles that data.

Group data: the groups you belong to and content you create within them. This
includes any notes you write — on a game, a server, a match a crew tracks, a
recording or a video: a note is private to you until you share it, and a shared
note is visible to that crew's members or, when you share it with the admins
only, to its admins.

Steam data (only if you choose to connect Steam): see section 3.

Billing data (only if you buy a plan or credits, or receive a gifted plan):
see section 5.

Email delivery data: when we send you an account email — a sign-in link, a
password reset, an invitation, or a billing notice — we record that we sent it,
to which address, its subject, and what our email provider told us happened to
it. That includes whether it was delivered, whether it bounced, and whether it
was reported as spam. We do not keep the body of a message once it has been
sent, and we do not read your replies; these are one-way notifications from us
to you.

When you change your email address or password, we send a notice to your
previous email address, so that you hear about a change you did not make.

We process this data to provide the service, to operate your group's shared
features, and to keep the platform secure. We process email delivery data for a
narrower purpose: to get account email to you reliably, to stop sending to
addresses that cannot receive it, and to protect our ability to send at all —
mail providers penalise senders who keep mailing dead or unwilling addresses.

Product update emails are separate, and they are optional. We send them only if
you ask us to, by ticking "Email me about new features" on your preferences
page; the setting is off unless you turn it on. Each message summarises what we
have released since the last one we sent you, and every one carries an
unsubscribe link — including the one-click kind your mail app may show at the
top of the message. Turning them off stops product updates and nothing else:
sign-in links, password resets, invitations and billing notices are account
email, and they keep arriving because you need them to use and secure your
account.

So that we do not tell you the same thing twice, we record which releases we
have emailed you about and when. That record holds your account, the release,
and the date — not the content of the message.

3. Steam data

Connecting your Steam account is optional and always initiated by you. We only
retrieve Steam data about you when you ask us to — when you link your Steam account
and, if you choose, when you ask us to sync your Steam library. We do not retrieve
Steam data about you unless you request it.

When you link Steam, we receive and store your Steam ID and your public Steam
profile summary (such as your persona name, avatar image, and profile URL).

If you ask us to sync your library, we receive and store the list of games you own
on Steam and, where your Steam privacy settings make it available, your playtime
for those games. Steam only shares this with us when your Steam profile's game
details are public; if they are private, we cannot retrieve your library.

We use Steam data to show your library within your groups, to build your gaming
history, and to power group features you opt into. We store this data for as long
as your Steam account remains connected; disconnecting Steam or deleting your
account removes it (see sections 6 and 7).

Steam data is provided to you "as is". It originates from Valve Corporation's Steam
service, and we make no warranty as to its accuracy, completeness, or availability.

We are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Valve Corporation. Steam
and the Steam logo are trademarks of Valve Corporation.

4. Game server addresses

To track a game server, a crew admin gives us its network address — a hostname or
IP address and a port. We use it to send status queries to that server, and we
show it on the server's page so players know where to connect.

Who can see it: any signed-in user whose crew is linked to that server. If a crew
admin marks a server "public", it is listed in our public server directory and
its address is visible to any signed-in user, not only to linked crews. Whoever
marks a server public makes that choice; we do not verify that they run it.

We show only the network address. We do not publish the free-text reference some
servers are recorded under instead, and we do not publish the address of servers
we host ourselves or of addresses that are not publicly routable.

Our lawful basis for this processing is our legitimate interest in operating a
service that lets groups find and connect to the game servers they play on. We
have assessed that interest against the rights of the people who run those
servers, and we limit the processing accordingly: we publish only a network
address, never a free-text reference; we do not publish addresses that are not
publicly routable; and we stop publishing an address on request from the person
who runs that server.

We do not rely on consent for this, because the person who marks a server public
is often not the person who runs it and so cannot consent on their behalf.

Retention: we keep a server's record, its status history and the crews' activity
for that server while the record exists. Making a server private stops the
address being shown but does not erase the history of the period during which
crews tracked it.

If you run a game server and want its address removed from this service, contact
us at privacy@informatical.info. We will ask you to demonstrate control of the
endpoint, then stop publishing the address. Because a server's address is fixed
when the record is created, a correction is made by replacing the record rather
than editing it.

5. Payments and billing

Paid plans and credit bundles are sold through Stripe, our payment processor.
When you buy something, you enter your card details on a page Stripe hosts;
card numbers never reach our servers, and we never see or store them. Stripe
processes your payment data under its own privacy policy
(https://stripe.com/privacy).

What we do keep: Stripe's identifier for you as a customer, your subscription's
plan and status (active, past due, cancelled), and a record of each purchase
and of every credit added to or charged against your account — the ledger that
your balance is calculated from. Your invoices and receipts live in Stripe's
customer portal, which you reach from your billing page. If you gift a plan to
a friend, we keep the link between your account and theirs while the gift is
active, so we know whose plan pays for it.

What we measure: the paid plans and the metered rates are based on usage — the
files you keep, the downloads and streaming your files generate, and the
servers you have monitoring switched on for. We record those quantities per
account and per day, as totals, so that a charge can be explained. The
records hold amounts, never the content of a file, an address, or a name.

Retention: purchase and ledger records are financial records, and we keep them
for as long as tax and accounting law requires, in anonymised form once your
account is deleted (see section 8). A balance left on a deleted account is
forfeited, not refunded; the deletion page says so before you confirm.

6. Where your data is stored

We store your data, including Steam data, on servers located in the United
States. By using the service you understand that your data is processed there.

7. Your choices and rights

You can export a copy of the data we hold about you at any time from the data
export page (/compliance/data/export/).

You can disconnect Steam at any time from your account connections page, which
removes the Steam data described in section 3.

You can request deletion of your account and associated personal data from the
account deletion page (/compliance/account/delete/). Some records we are required
to retain for legal reasons are kept in anonymized form.

Depending on where you live, you may have additional rights over your personal
data (such as access, correction, and erasure). Contact us at
privacy@informatical.info to exercise them.

8. Data retention and deletion

We keep your personal data while your account is active. When you delete your
account we anonymize your identity and remove personal data that we are not legally
required to retain, including your connected Steam data.

If you sign up and do not confirm your email address within 7 days, and have
never signed in, we delete that registration, so the address can be used to sign
up again. Counts of sign-up attempts (how many were made, created an account, or
were refused, and why) are kept for 400 days; they contain no addresses or names.

Email delivery data is kept on its own schedule, because it stops being useful
quickly:

- A message waiting to be sent is held for at most 72 hours. After that we stop
trying and discard it, which is why an expired password-reset or invitation
link has to be requested again.
- The record of a sent, failed or skipped message — its recipient, subject and
outcome, never its body — is kept for 14 days. That is long enough to answer
"I never got the email" while a person still remembers asking.
- Bounce, complaint and delivery notifications are kept for 90 days from when we
receive them. That window covers support requests, delayed bounces, and any
investigation into our sending reputation.
- The record of which releases we have emailed you about is kept while your
account exists, because its only purpose is not repeating ourselves. It is
deleted outright when you delete your account.

If an address hard-bounces or is reported as spam, we add it to a suppression
list so we stop mailing it. That decision is kept until it is reversed, rather
than for a fixed period: the address stopped working, or its owner asked not to
be contacted, and neither fact expires on a timer. Ask us and we will review it.

Deleting your account does not delete a suppression entry made because you
reported our email as spam. We keep it as a one-way cryptographic digest of the
address, with the address itself removed — enough to recognise it and keep not
mailing it, not enough to read it back or to identify you from it. Honouring
"stop contacting me" would otherwise require forgetting the request. A
suppression entry that exists only because an address bounced is deleted with
the rest of your data.

Deleted data can persist in our encrypted backups until those backups age out on
their own schedule; we do not restore backups to recover data you asked us to
delete.

9. Changes to this policy

We may update this policy from time to time. When we do, we will publish the new
version here with an updated effective date.

10. Contact

Questions about this policy or your data: privacy@informatical.info,
Informatical Analytics LLC.