Privacy Policy
What personal data Wardsong collects, why we are allowed to process it, who else sees it, how long we keep it, and the rights you have under the GDPR.
This policy explains how Wardsong Oy, an individual operator established in Finland (“we”, “us”), handles personal data when you play Wardsong or visit this website. We are the data controller for that data under the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
We collect the data we need to run an online game with accounts, and no more. We do not sell personal data, and we do not build advertising profiles about you.
1. Who we are and how to reach us
- Controller — Wardsong Oy, individual operator, Business ID 1234567-8
- Address — Wardstreet 123, 00100 Helsinki, Finland
- Privacy contact — [email protected]
- Data protection officer — Not appointed — our processing does not meet the GDPR Art. 37 threshold. The privacy contact above answers all data protection questions.
2. The short version
- To play, you need an account. That means we store a username, a password hash or a Google account identifier, and everything your characters do in the game.
- We log IP addresses and request metadata for security and abuse prevention, for a short period.
- Purchases run through Google Play or the App Store. They tell us that a purchase happened and give us a token to verify it; they do not give us your payment details.
- Optional rewarded ads only load after you consent, and consent is revocable.
- You can ask for a copy of your data or for your account to be deleted, at any time, for free.
3. Where your data comes from
Almost all of it comes from you: what you type when registering, and what your characters do while you play. The rest comes from your device automatically (IP address, client version, device type), from your identity provider if you sign in with Google, and from the platform store when you make a purchase.
4. What we collect and why
4.1 Account and identity
| Data | Purpose | Legal basis |
|---|---|---|
| Username, password hash (bcrypt — we never store the password itself), account creation time | Creating and securing your account, signing you in | Contract (Art. 6(1)(b)) |
| Google account identifier, email address and whether it is verified, when it was linked (only if you sign in with Google) | Letting you sign in without a password, recovering an account | Contract (Art. 6(1)(b)) |
| Discord account identifier and link status (only if you link your Discord account to claim a community reward) | Verifying that a reward is claimed once per person and once per Discord account | Contract (Art. 6(1)(b)) |
| Session tokens and short-lived realtime connection tickets | Keeping you signed in, connecting you to the game world | Contract (Art. 6(1)(b)) |
| Versions of the Terms, Privacy Policy and Community Code presented to you; minimum-age confirmation; acceptance time and sign-in method | Proving which rules governed the account and that required notices were presented | Contract (Art. 6(1)(b)) and legitimate interests (Art. 6(1)(f)) in resolving disputes |
| Account-deletion request status, request time, verification method and processing deadline | Verifying and completing an erasure request safely | Legal obligation (Art. 6(1)(c)) and legitimate interests (Art. 6(1)(f)) in preventing unauthorised deletion |
4.2 Gameplay
| Data | Purpose | Legal basis |
|---|---|---|
| Characters: name, class, level, experience, position, gear, inventory, quests, professions, talents, in-game currency | Running the game and saving your progress | Contract (Art. 6(1)(b)) |
| Social features: guild and group membership, friends, invitations, trades, in-game mail | Providing those features | Contract (Art. 6(1)(b)) |
| Chat messages, character names and guild names | Delivering chat, and investigating reports of abuse or cheating | Contract (Art. 6(1)(b)) and legitimate interests (Art. 6(1)(f)) — keeping the game safe |
| Combat and economy event records | Anti-cheat, correcting bugs, restoring lost items, balancing the game | Legitimate interests (Art. 6(1)(f)) |
| Feature-use counts (for example, how often the Wanderer’s Ledger is opened or a Verse is claimed) | Improving game design and content placement | Legitimate interests (Art. 6(1)(f)) |
| Play-session times (when a character connects and disconnects, and why that connection ended) | Measuring returning play and session length | Legitimate interests (Art. 6(1)(f)) |
Feature-use counts cover Ledger opens, full-bag prompts, Verse Board actions (activating the board, locking choices, rerolls, and claiming Verses and the weekly reward, including claims that reach the account limit), and reward-project choices and claims. We keep weekly totals capped at 200 per character and feature, with the first and last use times. Play-session times include idle or background connections; they do not measure your attention. You can object to this measurement as described in section 9.
4.3 Technical and security
| Data | Purpose | Legal basis |
|---|---|---|
| IP address, request time, requested path, response status, user agent | Operating the servers, rate limiting, blocking abuse and attacks | Legitimate interests (Art. 6(1)(f)) |
| Crash and error reports, including device model, operating system version, client version and a technical stack trace | Finding and fixing faults | Legitimate interests (Art. 6(1)(f)) |
| Aggregated service metrics (players online, request rates, error rates) | Capacity planning and reliability | Legitimate interests (Art. 6(1)(f)) |
4.4 Purchases and advertising
| Data | Purpose | Legal basis |
|---|---|---|
| Purchase token, product identifier, order identifier, purchase and acknowledgement time, subscription state, a store account identifier | Delivering what you bought, verifying it is genuine, handling refunds and chargebacks | Contract (Art. 6(1)(b)) |
| Accounting records of purchases | Meeting Finnish bookkeeping and tax obligations | Legal obligation (Art. 6(1)(c)) |
| Rewarded-ad session records and an advertising identifier passed to the ad network | Granting the reward you earned and preventing reward fraud | Consent for the advertising identifier (Art. 6(1)(a)); contract for granting the reward |
4.5 Support and reports
When you email us or report another player we keep your message, our reply, and enough of the surrounding game record to act on it. Legal basis: legitimate interests (Art. 6(1)(f)) in answering you and moderating the game, and legal obligation where the report concerns illegal content.
When you send a bug or issue report from inside the game, the report text you wrote, technical details about your client (version, device type) and the relevant server-side game context are stored and forwarded to our internal issue-tracking service so we can investigate and fix the problem. Legal basis: legitimate interests (Art. 6(1)(f)) in keeping the game working.
4.6 This website
The website is static and sets no cookies of its own for analytics or advertising. Your browser may store a colour-theme preference locally on your device; that never leaves your device. The web server writes standard access logs as described in 4.3. See the Cookie Policy for the full list.
5. What we do not do
- We do not sell or rent personal data.
- We do not use your gameplay data to target advertising.
- We do not use special categories of data (health, beliefs, biometrics) and ask you not to put such information into chat or character names.
- We do not use automated processing to make decisions with legal effects. Automated anti-cheat systems can flag or temporarily restrict an account, but a permanent ban is confirmed by a person, and you can always ask for human review by appealing in the game or to [email protected].
6. Who else processes your data
We use a small number of service providers. Each acts on our instructions under a data processing agreement, except where noted as an independent controller.
| Provider | What it does | Data involved | Where |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hetzner Online GmbH | Hosts the game servers and database | Server-side game and account data | Finland (EU) |
| Hetzner Online GmbH — Object Storage | Stores encrypted backup copies | Server-side data in backups | Finland (EU) |
| Google Ireland Ltd — Google Play Billing | Sells and verifies in-app purchases; independent controller for its own payment processing | Purchase tokens, store account identifier | EU/US |
| Google Ireland Ltd — Google Sign-In | Authenticates you if you choose it; independent controller for your Google account | Account identifier, email | EU/US |
| Google Ireland Ltd — AdMob | Serves optional rewarded ads and verifies them server-side | Advertising identifier, ad session identifiers, IP | EU/US |
| Functional Software, Inc. (Sentry) | Collects crash and error reports | Technical error data, truncated IP, account identifier | EU region |
| Discord Netherlands B.V. | Runs the community server and the account-linking sign-in; independent controller for your Discord account | Discord account identifier (only if you link your Discord account) | EU/US |
| Hetzner Online GmbH — our own mail server | Delivers support and account email | Email address, message content | Finland (EU) |
We also disclose data where we must: to authorities acting under a valid legal request, to our professional advisers, and to an acquirer if our business is sold — in which case we will tell you before your data is transferred.
Transfers outside the EEA
Where a provider processes data outside the EEA, the transfer relies on an adequacy decision, the European Commission’s Standard Contractual Clauses, or the EU–US Data Privacy Framework, together with technical measures such as encryption in transit. You can ask us for a copy of the safeguards that apply to a specific provider.
7. How long we keep it
| Data | Retention |
|---|---|
| Account and character data | For as long as your account exists |
| After you ask us to delete your account | Erased or anonymised within 30 days |
| Chat messages | 24 hours, then deleted — longer only for a specific message under active investigation |
| Web and API access logs (including IP) | 14 days |
| Crash and error reports | 90 days |
| Group-boss combat records and per-character fight statistics | 365 days |
| Feature-use counts | 180 days |
| Play-session times | 180 days |
| Anti-cheat integrity records (refused requests, detection signals) | 90 days; records attached to a case under review: while the case is open, plus 12 months |
| Purchase and accounting records | 6 years from the end of the accounting year, as Finnish bookkeeping law requires — we cannot delete these earlier |
| Ban and moderation records, including notices and appeal texts | While the sanction is in force, plus 12 months, so we can handle appeals and repeat offenders |
| Support email | 24 months |
| Policy-acceptance records | For the account lifetime and 3 years afterwards |
| Account-deletion request record | Until the request is completed or cancelled, then 3 years |
The 180-day period for a feature-use count runs from its last use. For a play-session record, it runs from the time the connection ended.
When we erase an account we delete its characters, sign-ins, linked Google identity, chat, mail, bug reports and game history. We keep only an account number with no name, password or way to sign in, so that the purchase, moderation, anti-cheat and policy records above can stay for their own periods. We do not send a confirmation: the erasure is complete by the date shown in Settings when you made the request.
Backups follow their own cycle and are overwritten within 90 days. Data you asked us to delete stays in a backup until that backup expires; we do not restore deleted data from backups except to recover from a disaster, and we re-apply deletions afterwards.
8. How we protect it
Passwords are stored as bcrypt hashes. Traffic between your device and our servers is encrypted with TLS. Access to production systems is restricted to named administrators, database credentials are held outside the application release, backups are encrypted before they leave the server, integrity-verified, and access to them is restricted, and we keep audit logs of administrative actions. We review security regularly and patch promptly.
No system is perfectly secure. If a breach is likely to result in a risk to your rights, we notify the Finnish Data Protection Ombudsman within 72 hours and tell affected players without undue delay where the risk is high.
9. Your rights
Under the GDPR you can:
- Access — get a copy of the personal data we hold about you;
- Rectify — have inaccurate data corrected;
- Erase — have your data deleted (“right to be forgotten”), except records we must keep by law;
- Restrict — have processing paused while a dispute is resolved;
- Port — receive your data in a machine-readable format, or have it sent to another controller where technically feasible;
- Object — object to processing based on our legitimate interests, at which point we stop unless we can show compelling grounds;
- Withdraw consent — for anything based on consent, such as personalised ads, with no effect on processing that already happened.
For account deletion, use Settings → Account in the game or the account-deletion page. The authenticated in-game request is held for a seven-day safety window, during which you can cancel it from Settings. If you cannot access the game, email [email protected] from the address linked to your account. For other rights, email the same address. We answer within one month, and may extend by two further months for complex requests, telling you if we do. This is free unless a request is manifestly unfounded or excessive.
We may need to verify your identity before acting, so that nobody else can get your data or delete your account.
To object to feature-use and play-session measurement, email the privacy address above. Once we verify and record your objection, we stop collecting those counts and session times for your account and delete the ones we hold.
Complaints
You can complain to the Finnish supervisory authority:
Office of the Data Protection Ombudsman (Tietosuojavaltuutetun toimisto) Lintulahdenkuja 4, 00530 Helsinki, Finland · https://tietosuoja.fi
If you live in another EU country you can complain to your own national authority instead.
10. Children
The Service is for players aged 13 and over. We do not knowingly collect personal data from children under 13. If you believe a child under 13 has an account, tell us at [email protected] and we will delete it.
For players under 18 we do not use personalised advertising, and purchases require the consent of a parent or guardian.
11. Changes to this policy
We update this policy when our processing changes. Material changes are announced in game and on this website at least 30 days before they take effect. Every version is published here with its version number and effective date.