Privacy Policy

1. Who we are

Woodland Studios makes and runs Shattered Void and is the controller of the personal information described here (“we”, “us”). For anything about your privacy — questions, requests, complaints — write to privacy@shatteredvoid.net.

2. The short version

• You sign in with Steam. We get your Steam ID and your Steam name — never your Steam password or payment details.
• We keep what the game needs to run your account and your matches, and first-party telemetry to fix crashes, stop cheaters and balance the game.
• We don't sell your personal information, and we don't share it for targeted advertising. There are no third-party analytics or advertising trackers in the game or on the website.
• Some things are public by design: your flag and stats on the website's leaderboards (your name only if you switch that on), and anything you choose to share.
• You can delete your account from the game at any time.

3. What we collect

Your account

• From Steam, when you sign in: your Steam ID and your Steam persona name (used as your in-game name when your account is created), and whether you're playing the demo or the full game.
• Your nation: a two-letter country code only, used for the nation board and your flag. We work it out from the country on your Steam profile, the country our network provider (Cloudflare) attaches to your connection, a country lookup of your IP address done on our own servers, the server region that handled your sign-in, or your device's language setting. We keep the country code, not your IP address. A flag you pick yourself takes priority.
• Your game account: credits, purchases and what you own, your cosmetics and ship builds (loadouts), daily-win streak and gift status, and account flags such as creator or staff roles.

Your games

• Match records: your display name, team, ship, captain and results (kills, deaths, damage, captures and similar), and match timelines (what happened when).
• Fleets you create or join (name, tag, emblem, membership, and the fleet's usual playtimes and Discord invite link if its admiral or officers set them — shown only to the fleet's members), ship names you register, wingman pacts, and map votes.
• Fleet applications: if you apply to join a fleet, we keep the short note you write and the answer. That fleet's admiral and officers see your name and your note. Kept for 30 days after it was last answered or changed, then deleted.
• Notice board and fleet nights: a fleet's pinned notice (and which admiral or officer pinned it, and when), its planned fleet nights and each member's answer (going, maybe, no). Members see how many answered each way, not who. A fleet night is deleted a day after it starts.
• Fleet Discord feed: if your fleet's admiral or officers connect a Discord channel, the game posts the fleet's wins, new members and fleet nights there. Your name appears in those posts only if you have switched on “Show my name on shatteredvoid.net” (Settings › Account); otherwise you are counted (“2 more pilots”) or called “a new pilot”.
• Gifts: when you send a gift to a Steam friend who has not played yet, we store that friend's SteamID64 with the gift until it is claimed (their first sign-in) or returned to you — unclaimed gifts are refunded after 30 days. Once a gift is delivered or returned, the SteamID is removed from it. The gift record keeps who sent what to which account, and the recipient sees the sender's account name in the game.
• Fleet invites: if a friend invites you to a fleet, we keep your Steam ID with that invite for up to 14 days so the invite can find you when you first sign in; it's deleted when used, declined or expired.
• Fleet chat: the messages you send in your fleet's chat, when you sent them, and reports members make of a message (who reported which message). Kept for 30 days, then deleted; your messages and reports are deleted straight away if you delete your account. An admiral or officer can delete a message. Reported messages may be read by us to enforce the Terms.
• Fleet treasury: credits you donate to your fleet's pool and what the pool is spent on or gifted to whom, kept as the fleet's ledger. Every member of the fleet can read the ledger (who, what, how much, when). We also record how much of a donation came from purchased credits, so a refunded purchase can be reconciled — that part is never shown to other players.
• Your connection latency to our server regions, measured when you queue, so we can put your match on a nearby server. Kept for 60 days.

Telemetry and diagnostics

• Game analytics (first-party, sent to our own servers): your operating system, graphics card, screen resolution, game engine version and server region; your account ID when you're signed in; a session ID and match ID; and gameplay events such as which screens you visit and for how long, and which tutorial lessons you've seen.
• Input summary: once per match, an aggregate summary of how the game was controlled (not a recording of your keystrokes), which we use to detect cheating and to spot controls that aren't working well.
• Crash and error reports: when the game crashes or hits an error, it sends a report with the end of the game's log, scrubbed of Steam IDs, Steam names and your computer's user folder paths. You can turn crash and error reports off in the game's Settings (Settings › Account › Send crash reports).
• Security events: failed sign-ins and requests we rate-limit, to protect accounts and our servers.
• With analytics and error reports we store a keyed hash of your IP address — a one-way code that lets us tell repeat requests apart without keeping the address itself.

The website

• First-party analytics: pages visited, sections viewed, clicks, how far you scroll, the page that referred you, and your browser's user agent (reduced to a device and browser type). If the link you followed carried campaign tags (UTM parameters) or an advertising click ID, we record them — only to learn which links bring visitors. We never send them back to an advertising platform.
• A random ID for your visit, kept in your browser's session storage and cleared when you close the tab.

Emails and applications

• Your email address, only if you give it to us — for example to be told when the game launches, or in a creator program application.
• Fleet emails (optional): if you ask for your fleet's news by email in the game, we keep the address you give, the fleet it's for, and when you confirmed it. Nothing but a confirmation is sent until you press the link in it. Only your fleet's admiral and officers can write, at most one email a week to the whole fleet; they never see your address (only how many members signed up), and neither does anyone else in the fleet. We'll ONLY use this for your fleet to contact you — and for any other notifications you choose to OPT in to later. No spam, ever. Every fleet email has a one-click unsubscribe link, and turning it off, leaving the fleet or deleting your account deletes the address. We keep a copy of each fleet email that's sent (who sent it, the subject and text, the fleet's tag and name, how many it went to) for 90 days, to deal with abuse reports — even if the fleet disbands. To stop the form being used to email strangers, we also keep, for 2 days, a record of each confirmation email sent: which account asked and a one-way hash of the address (never the address itself). Fleet emails are sent without open or click tracking.
• Creator applications also include your channel name and link, platform, typical audience size, SteamID (to credit your account) and your message.

Chat

Private-lobby chat is held in server memory only while the lobby exists (the last 50 lines) so its members can read it. It is never written to our database.

We do not collect your real name, postal address, phone number, payment card details or precise location.

4. How we use it

• To run the game: sign you in, keep your account, progress and purchases, matchmake you onto a nearby server, show your name and ship to other players.
• To keep it fair and safe: detect cheating and abuse, enforce our Terms, protect accounts and servers.
• To fix and improve it: find the causes of crashes and errors, measure performance, balance ships and modes, and understand where new pilots get stuck.
• To run the public boards, the war page and share pages you create.
• To email you, only if you asked us to (every email has an unsubscribe link) — including your fleet's news, if you switched it on and confirmed your address — and to answer your messages and creator applications.
• To meet legal obligations, such as keeping purchase records for accounting.

We don't use your information for targeted advertising, and we don't make decisions about you that have legal or similarly significant effects by automated means alone.

5. Legal bases (EEA, UK and similar laws)

If data protection laws such as the GDPR or UK GDPR apply to you, we rely on:

• Contract — to provide the game and your account under our Terms (sign-in, progress, purchases, matchmaking, match records, what other players see in a match).
• Legitimate interests — anti-cheat and security, game and website analytics, crash and error diagnosis, balancing and improving the game, and the public leaderboards. Our interests are a fair, working, secure game; we keep this data first-party, minimal and time-limited. You can object (see your rights).
• Consent — where we ask for it: emails you sign up for (fleet emails included), and crash reports (which you can switch off in Settings). You can withdraw consent at any time.
• Legal obligation — keeping records we're required to keep.

6. What other players and the public can see

Some information is visible by design:

• In the game: your display name, fleet tag, registered ship names, ship appearance, flag and match performance are visible to other players in your matches and lobbies.
• On the website: the public leaderboards (/leaderboard) show your rank, nation flag, favourite ship and stats, and the war page (/war) shows the best player of each recent battle. Your name appears on the website only if you switch it on — in the game, Settings › Account › “Show my name on shatteredvoid.net”, off by default. Until then you're shown as “A pilot from” your nation. The nation board (/nations) shows each nation's position and the month its first match was flown.
• Share pages you create (/ship/…, /kill/…): an image of your ship or kill and “Commander” with your name, for anyone with the link. Sharing is your choice, so a share page carries your name whatever the website setting says; delete the share to take it down.
• Fleet invite pages (/fleet/…): the fleet's name, tag and emblem, for anyone with the link — never its pilots' names.
• Find a fleet: a fleet that recruits openly or by application is listed to signed-in players with its name, tag, emblem, how many pilots it has and how many are online, its usual play times, whether it has a Discord, and — only when most of its pilots share one — a nation. Never its pilots' names. An invite-only fleet is never listed.

Your in-game name comes from your Steam name. If you'd rather not be identifiable, use a Steam name that isn't your real name.

7. Who we share it with

We don't sell your personal information, and we don't “share” it for cross-context behavioural advertising. We use a small number of service providers who process it for us, under their terms and only to run the Service:

• Fly.io — hosts our servers and database.
• Cloudflare — the network in front of our website and servers (it sees your IP address to deliver traffic).
• Valve (Steam) — sign-in, purchases and payment, achievements and stats, friend invites, rich presence and game-recording timeline markers. Valve's own privacy policy covers what Steam does with your information.
• Discord — only if your fleet connected a Discord channel: the fleet's posts (wins, new members, fleet nights — names only of pilots who show them publicly) go to that Discord server, where Discord's own privacy policy applies.
• Mailgun — sends fleet emails and their confirmation messages for us, so it handles the email address and the message. Only if you switched fleet emails on.

We use a MaxMind country database on our own servers to look up a country from an IP address; no information is sent to MaxMind.

We may also disclose information if the law requires it, to protect players or the Service from fraud or harm, or to a company that takes over the game (in which case this policy continues to apply to your information, and we'll tell you).

8. International transfers

Our servers run in the United States and in other regions around the world, so that matches can be played close to the players. That means your information may be stored and processed outside your country, including in the United States, where data protection laws may differ from yours. Where the law requires it, we rely on appropriate safeguards for these transfers, such as the European Commission's standard contractual clauses.

9. How long we keep it

10. Your rights and choices

• Delete your account: in the game, go to Settings › Account › DELETE ACCOUNT, or email privacy@shatteredvoid.net from an address you can confirm, with your Steam ID. Deleting removes your account and progress, anonymises your match history and removes your share pages. Unspent credits — including any you bought — are lost. Purchase records (the Steam order details, including the Steam ID and amount) are kept only as accounting law requires, detached from your account. A sign-in that was already open stays valid for up to 24 hours, and game logs age out within 90 days.
• Access and portability: ask us for a copy of the personal information we hold about you, in a machine-readable format.
• Correction: ask us to fix anything that's wrong. (Your in-game name follows your Steam name.)
• Objection and restriction: object to processing based on our legitimate interests, or ask us to limit how we use your information.
• Withdraw consent: switch off crash and error reports in Settings, switch off “Show my name on shatteredvoid.net” (Settings › Account) to take your name off the website within a few minutes, use the unsubscribe link in any email, and turn fleet emails off in the game (FLEET › COMMS).
• Complain: if you're in the EEA or UK, you can complain to your data protection authority — though we'd appreciate the chance to sort it out first.

Send requests to privacy@shatteredvoid.net. We may need to confirm the account is yours (for example, through Steam) before acting. We answer within one month, or sooner where the law requires, and we don't charge for reasonable requests.

11. California and other US state privacy rights

If you live in California or another US state with a consumer privacy law, you have the right to know what personal information we collect and how we use and disclose it (this policy sets that out), to access it, to correct it, and to delete it. We do not sell personal information or share it for cross-context behavioural advertising, including of anyone under 16, so there is nothing to opt out of. We don't use or disclose sensitive personal information for anything beyond running the Service. You can use an authorised agent to make a request, and we will never treat you differently for exercising your rights. Send requests to privacy@shatteredvoid.net.

12. Children

Shattered Void is not directed to children under 13, and you must meet Steam's age requirements to play (13 or older, and 16 or older where local law requires that age to consent). We don't knowingly collect personal information from children under 13. If you believe a child under 13 has an account, email us and we will delete it.

13. Security

Connections to the game and the website are encrypted (TLS). Where we can, we store identifiers in hashed or keyed form rather than in the clear (for example, IP addresses), access to our systems and data is limited to the people who need it, and we keep the data we collect to what the game needs. No system is perfectly secure, so we can't guarantee security, but if a breach affects your information we'll tell you and the authorities as the law requires.

14. Cookies and browser storage

The public website uses no cookies for analytics or advertising. It keeps a random visit ID in your browser's session storage (see the website), which is cleared when you close the tab. A sign-in session cookie is set only on the account, admin and creator-program pages, because those pages need one to work.

15. Changes to this policy

We'll update this policy when what we collect or how we use it changes, and move the “last updated” date above. If a change is significant we'll tell you in the game or on the website before it takes effect.

16. Contact

Woodland Studios — privacy@shatteredvoid.net (privacy questions, data requests and account deletion).