Privacy Policy

This is placeholder text. It lists what Bastard Games collects and who processes it today. The legal bases, transfer mechanisms and retention periods marked [TBD by counsel] are not decided yet.

Who is responsible

Bastard Games (bastard.io) decides why and how your data is used (the controller). The operating entity and its address are [TBD by counsel]. See Contacts.

What we collect

Everyone

• Technical data in server logs kept by our hosts (Vercel and Cloudflare), such as IP address, requests and errors. We use the country and region of your connection to apply the sanctions block.
• To prevent abuse, your IP address (and your account id, when you are signed in) is kept briefly, up to about 2 days, in a rate-limiting store (Upstash Redis). If that store can't be reached, the limits are switched off rather than turning you away.
• The cookies listed in Cookies.
• We do not use advertising cookies or third-party analytics.

Players with an account

• Your email address and sign-in details, held by our identity provider Clerk. We keep your Clerk user id and email. When you delete your account we remove the email; the Clerk user id stays, pointing at a Clerk account that no longer exists.
• Your date of birth. We use it to enforce the 13+ rule and the 18+ rule for mature games.
• Your library: the games you bought or claimed.
• Your orders: the game, price, tax, currency, billing country, status, time of purchase, any refund or dispute, and the time of your first download or play of the game (it decides whether you can still withdraw). Card details are collected and stored by Stripe, not by us.
• Downloads: which file of which release you downloaded, linked to your account when you were signed in. We also count each game's downloads per hour to spot a game used as file hosting (one with more than 500 downloads in an hour, far above its usual rate); that check uses the counts, not who downloaded.
• Your reviews: thumbs up or down and up to 2,000 characters of text, linked to your account. They are shown on the game's page without your name, and hidden while you no longer have the game. You can edit or delete them. If we remove one, we email you the reason.
• Emails: order confirmations, and notices about your account.

Developers

• Your display name and public page address.
• The card you keep on file for listing fees: we keep its brand and last four digits; Stripe holds the card.
• If you set up payouts: your Stripe Connect account id and the country of your payout account. Stripe collects your identity and bank details itself.
• A tax form (W-8BEN for non-US developers), which we encrypt before we store it.
• Your games, builds and store pages, which are public once listed, and the signing identity pinned to your account.
• The game engines and libraries our scan detects in your builds. For open-source ones, the game's public notices page shows their license notices.
• Records of what we did to your content, the statements of reasons we sent you, and your appeals.

People who send a report or notice

• The details you enter on the form: name, organization (optional), email, phone and address as the form asks, the content you report, your statement and signature. The public takedown log shows only the date, the content, the kind of notice, your organization (or "Individual") and the status. For intimate-image and child-safety reports, the details of the content (its titles) are withheld from the log.
• The developer concerned receives a copy of a copyright or trademark notice, including your contact details, as the law requires. [TBD by counsel: what we pass on for each kind of notice]

Why we use it

• To run your account, sell and deliver games, and pay developers (contract).
• To keep the store safe and prevent fraud, abuse and malware: scans, the well-known-name check, region blocks and dispute evidence (legitimate interests).
• To follow the law: tax, sanctions, copyright and other illegal-content notices, age rules (legal obligation).
• Anything that needs your consent, we ask for first. [TBD by counsel: lawful basis for each purpose]

Who processes it for us

• Clerk: sign-in and accounts.
• Stripe: card payments, tax calculation, developer payouts and identity checks for developers.
• Neon: our database.
• Cloudflare: storage of builds and store images (R2) and serving web games on bastardbox.xyz (Workers).
• Vercel: hosting of the site and API, and the AI Gateway that carries store images to an AI model to be labelled for sexual content. The images, not your personal data, are sent.
• Resend: sending our emails.
• Upstash: the rate-limiting store (Redis) that briefly holds IP addresses and account ids to prevent abuse.

We do not sell personal data. We share it with the providers above, with the developer or the sender of a notice where the law requires it (see above), with public authorities when the law requires, and with a buyer's card issuer in a dispute. These providers may process data in the United States and elsewhere. [TBD by counsel: international transfer mechanisms and data processing agreements]

How long we keep it

• Account data: while your account exists. When you delete it, we remove your email address and date of birth at once (keeping only whether you were under 18 or an adult) and ask Clerk to delete your sign-in account. [TBD by counsel: period after closing]
• Orders and tax records: as long as the law requires us to keep accounting records. [TBD by counsel: period]
• Notices, enforcement records and appeals: kept as a record of what we did and why. [TBD by counsel: period]
• Game builds: the files of each game's live release and of the 2 newest earlier releases for each platform. Older releases' files are deleted; the records of the releases stay. Files that may be evidence are kept: those of releases named in a notice or an enforcement action, and releases a rescan quarantined. A release rejected by our checks loses its served copies 30 days after the rejection; the upload itself is kept as the record of what was rejected.
• Rate-limit counters: up to about 2 days (see above).
• Server logs: as set by our hosts. [TBD by counsel: period]

Your rights

Depending on where you live (for example under the GDPR, the UK GDPR or California law), you can ask to see, correct, export or delete your data, object to some uses, and complain to your data protection authority. Contact us at the address on Contacts for any of these.

On your account page you can also do two things yourself:

• Download my data: a JSON file with your profile (email address, date of birth, when you joined), your library, your orders (the game, price, tax, total, currency, status, dates and any refund; no card details, which Stripe holds) and your reviews.
• Delete my account: we replace your email address with an address that reaches nobody, keep only your age bracket instead of your date of birth, remove the games from your library, delete your reviews (and their text), revoke and rename any developer API tokens and command-line sign-ins, and delete your Clerk sign-in account, which signs you out everywhere. If Clerk can't be reached, we retry daily until it is done. We keep your orders, payouts owed on them to developers, and download records for our accounting, linked to the anonymized account, which identifies nobody; Stripe keeps its own records of your payments under its own policy. You can sign up again later with the same email address; that is a new account. You can't delete your account while a checkout you started is still open: complete it, or wait until it expires (at most 24 hours).

A report or notice you sent us (for example a copyright or trademark notice) is not part of your account: we keep it, with the contact details you gave in it, after you delete your account, as a record of the notice and what we did about it, which the law requires us to keep.

A developer account with games, payout or tax records, or open notices about its games can't be deleted from the account page: other people own or remixed those games, and we must keep payout and tax records and answer notices. The account page explains why and asks you to contact us, and we close it with you. [TBD by counsel: wording]

Children

You must be 13 or older. If your date of birth says you are younger, we refuse the account.

Games that collect data

Web games run on a separate domain. A game the developer hasn't marked online can load files only from its own build: the browser stops it from fetching from, sending forms to or embedding other sites. That is a browser rule, not a promise that such a game can never reach another site (it can still open a link, for example). A game marked online may connect to any site, and its page shows a badge saying so. Developers are responsible for what their games collect. [TBD by counsel: wording]

Changes

We post a new version of this page when it changes. The version is at the top.