Privacy

01Controller

02The short version

There is no account and no email list held here. The game runs in your browser and your saved colonies stay in it. Three things leave your machine while you play: the hosting provider’s own logs, a plain count of how the site is used that identifies nobody and writes nothing to your device, and two optional measurement scripts that do not run at all unless you say yes. A fourth leaves it only if you send one: a bug report, which is what you typed and, if you tick the box, the colony you were in. If you buy the supporter unlock, one record exists on our side: the code, the transaction it belongs to, and the address it was emailed to, kept for as long as tax law demands and joined to nothing about how you play.

03Kept in your browser, sent nowhere

Local storage holds your saved colonies, whether you chose to continue on a small screen, and your answer to the measurement question. None of it is transmitted, none of it has an account behind it, and clearing your browser’s site data removes all of it, as does the button below, which works here without the game running.

Everything Powerstate keeps about you is in this browser, and this is all of it. There is no account behind these and no copy on a server. Clear them and the game has forgotten you.

• powerstate.save.slot.*your saved colonies, up to five, in this browser only
• powerstate.saves.v1the names of those saves and which one you are playing
• wattmark.save.v1a run saved by an older version, kept only until it is moved to a save slot
• powerstate.gate.dismissedthat you chose to play on a small screen anyway
• powerstate.tour.sentthat a small screen has already been shown the gameplay page once
• powerstate.consent.measurement.v3this consent decision, so you are not asked again
• powerstate.install.v1a random id your finished runs are filed under, only if you agreed to that
• powerstate.runlog.v1your own finished runs, so the end screen can compare them, in this browser only
• powerstate.commendations.v2which achievements you have been awarded, per world, in this browser only
• powerstate.commendations.v1the same record in its old shape, kept only so this button can erase it
• powerstate.scenarios.v1the scenarios you wrote in the editor, in this browser only
• powerstate.lesson.opened.v1that you have opened the lesson, so the console stops holding the worlds shut
• powerstate.units.v1that you picked metric or US units yourself, written only if you overrode the guess

If you activate a supporter code, two further items are stored: the signed activation itself and a random device identifier it is bound to. They are deliberately not part of the erase button above, because removing them would spend one of your three device slots without telling you; an activated copy hands its slot back from About inside the game. The device identifier is minted at activation, describes nothing about your machine, and is kept apart from every identifier the game may record runs under.

Storage strictly necessary to provide a service you explicitly requested is exempt from consent under Art. 5(3) ePrivacy Directive and §25 Abs. 2 TDDDG. It is disclosed here rather than negotiated in a banner.

04Hosting

The site is hosted by Vercel Inc., 440 N Barranca Ave #4133, Covina, CA 91723, USA. Serving a page necessarily processes your IP address and request metadata. Legal basis: Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR, our legitimate interest in operating a reachable website. Transfers to the United States are covered by the EU Standard Contractual Clauses and Vercel’s certification under the EU-US Data Privacy Framework.

05Counting how the site is used

A small number of counts are kept without asking, because they do not do the thing consent exists to protect you from. Nothing is written to your device and nothing is read off it. Each page load is given a random number that is held in memory for as long as the page is open and then lost, so reloading this page makes you a different one and there is no way to recognise you on a second visit, or on a second page.

Six things are counted, and this is the whole list:

• a page was opened, with which page it was, whether the link came from this site or elsewhere, and which of five size bands the window fell into
• which card of the gameplay tour was on screen, and for how long
• how far through the tour someone got before leaving, and how long they stayed
• which of the three links out of the tour was clicked
• a run was begun, and in which world
• the answer given to the measurement question above, so the rest of this page has a denominator

What none of these counts records: your IP address, the page address you came from, your browser’s user agent string, and any free text of any kind. The referrer is read in your browser to decide one of five words and is never sent. The exact width of your window is turned into a band for the same reason. The one place free text does reach us is a bug report, which happens only when you write one and press send; it is described below.

Legal basis: Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR, our legitimate interest in knowing whether the site works. §25 Abs. 1 TDDDG does not apply, because no information is stored on or read from your terminal equipment. If your browser sends a Global Privacy Control signal or a Do Not Track header, none of it happens at all, and you can also object at any time by writing to info@powerstate-game.com. The individual counts are deleted after ninety days. The daily totals they are rolled into contain no identifier of any kind and are kept.

06Measurement, only with consent

If, and only if, you accept, two Vercel scripts run: Web Analytics, which counts the page view, and Speed Insights, which reports how quickly the page rendered on your device. Both are cookieless. Neither builds a profile, follows you across sites, or feeds any advertising.

Between them they record the page, the referrer, a coarse country, the class of device and browser, and page-load timings. The visitor identifier is derived from the request and rotated daily, so nothing links one day to the next.

Legal basis: Art. 6(1)(a) GDPR (your consent), together with §25 Abs. 1 TDDDG. Decline and neither script is fetched, so there is nothing left running to opt out of. Consent can be withdrawn at any moment from the About panel inside the game; withdrawal takes effect on the next event rather than the next visit, and does not affect the lawfulness of what was processed beforehand.

07Bug reports

The game has a button marked Bug report. Nothing is sent by it until you write something and press send, and nothing about it is switched on for you in advance.

What arrives is this, and this is the whole of it:

• what you typed, up to five hundred characters
• the version of the game, and whether the copy you are playing is the one we published
• which world you were in, what year of it you had reached, and which phase
• a block of figures about the run: the seed the map was generated from, the difficulty, the money and the debt, the score, how many settlements there are, a count of each kind of asset and circuit you had built, how many development programmes were finished and which was running, the seven operating dials, and whether this was a sandbox run or the lesson

There is no account, no email address, and no identifier that survives a page load, so nothing here follows you between runs, between colonies or between visits. One thing is worth stating plainly rather than glossing: two reports sent from the same colony carry the same map seed, so they can be recognised as coming from the same run. That is a property of describing a game state accurately, it says nothing about who you are, and it is the only link of any kind on this table.

You can also tick a box to attach the colony you are playing. That is the same kind of file the export button on the saved games screen writes, minus its charts and its ledger: the map, your assets, the money and the clock. The only words in it are any names you have given your own machines, and, if you wrote the world yourself in the scenario editor, its name, its tagline, its briefing and its world code. The name you gave the save on the shelf is not among them, and neither is the lesson, which cannot be attached at all. The box starts empty and the form says all of this beside it.

The form also asks you not to put your name, your email address or anything else about you into the message, because there is nothing here that needs it and no way to reply to it. For anything that wants an answer, write to info@powerstate-game.com.

Reports are stored in our database at Supabase, hosted in the EU, which acts as our processor and does nothing with them but hold them. They go nowhere else: no ticketing service, no mailing list, no third party of any kind.

Legal basis: Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR, our legitimate interest in being told that our own software is broken, and Art. 6(1)(b) where fixing it is part of providing the game to you. §25 Abs. 1 TDDDG does not apply: nothing is stored on or read from your device to send one.

08Payments

Purchases are handled by Paddle.com Market Ltd, which sells the software to you as merchant of record. Paddle collects the payment and billing details it needs and is the controller for them under its own privacy policy; those details are not passed to us in full. We receive what is necessary to fulfil and support the order: the fact of a purchase, its supporter code and the contact address you bought with. Legal basis: Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR, performance of the contract.

The email that delivers the code is sent through Resend, Inc. (USA), acting as our processor; it handles your address for that delivery and nothing else. Activating the code sends the code and a random device identifier to our licence service, hosted on Supabase, so the three-device limit can be enforced. Transfers to the United States by both are covered by the EU Standard Contractual Clauses. Legal basis for each: Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR, performance of the contract.

09Your rights

Under Art. 15–21 GDPR you may request access to your data, a copy of it, correction, deletion or restriction, object to processing based on legitimate interests, and receive your data in a portable form. Where processing rests on consent you may withdraw it at any time. Requests go to info@powerstate-game.com.

In practice the answer to “what do you hold about me” is short: unless you have bought something, nothing that identifies you exists here at all. That is also why a bug report cannot be looked up by who sent it — there is no identifier on one — so if you want yours deleted, quote roughly what you wrote and roughly when, and it will be.

You also have the right to complain to a supervisory authority, which in Germany is the data protection authority of the federal state in which you live.

10Retention

The individual usage counts described above are deleted after ninety days by a scheduled job. What survives is a table of daily totals with no identifier in it, which is kept for as long as the site runs. Data from the two consented scripts is aggregated and retained by Vercel under its own retention windows.

A colony attached to a bug report is deleted from the database by a scheduled job thirty days after the report is marked solved, and after ninety days whatever state it is in. The report itself is kept: it is a few hundred bytes, it has no identifier on it, and it is the record of what was wrong with the game. Where a colony has to be opened to reproduce a fault, the working copy of it is deleted once the fault is fixed.

Records connected to a purchase are kept for as long as German commercial and tax law requires (six to ten years under §257 HGB and §147 AO) and then deleted.