Privacy policy

What we keep

• Your account: your email address, a display name, and how you sign in. If you sign in with Discord or Google, we receive the email address that provider has verified, your name there and its ID for your account, and nothing else from it.
• Signing in: the codes we email you last only minutes. While you sign in, the sign-in page keeps your code in an encrypted cookie; afterwards the website keeps your sign-in in your browser’s local storage, which signing out clears.
• Your plays: the tier and region, the machine, when each play started and ended, the minutes and what they cost, whether it was pressed on the website or in Discord, and whether it was played on the trial or on credits you bought. While you play, your browser measures the picture and the connection (frames a second, bitrate, the round trip to the machine, freezes and lost packets, and whether the picture reached you over UDP or TCP) and sends us a summary each minute, which we keep with the play to find faults.
• Where you came from: whether your account began on the website or in Discord, and what brought you to the website the first time: a code on the link you followed, or the name of the site that linked to us. Your browser remembers that until you make an account, and we keep it with the account to see which links bring players.
• What you write to us: the feedback and bug reports you send from your account page, with the browser you sent them from and your latest play, so we can see what went wrong.
• Your balance: every purchase, trial, play, day of storage and refund, with the order number Polar gives a purchase.
• Your trial: the email address that claimed it, the network it was claimed from (your IP address with its last part removed) and a random name your browser gives itself, so each person has it once. When you claim it we may ask Cloudflare’s Turnstile to check that you are a person and not a script; that check runs a script from Cloudflare on the account page, then and only then.
• Your disk: whatever you put on it, and a summary of its size, which the account page and the storage charge use.
• The waitlist: the email address you gave and when you gave it, to tell you when you can play.
• Requests to our servers: your IP address and the details of each request, which Cloudflare handles to deliver and protect the site. Our services keep logs to find faults.

What we do not do

• No advertising, and no analytics or tracking scripts from anyone else on any page. What we count, we count ourselves, and it is listed above. The one script that is not ours is Cloudflare’s check when you claim the free trial.
• We do not sell your data, or share it for advertising.
• We never see your card details: Polar handles payment.

Who else handles it

• Cloudflare runs the website, the API and sign-in, and stores disks.
• Neon hosts our database.
• Polar sells credit packs as our merchant of record, and receives your email address and your order.
• Resend sends our emails.
• Discord and Google, if you sign in with them.
• Vast.ai and its hosts, and any other provider of GPU machines we add, run the machine you play on. During a play that machine handles your disk, what you type and click, the picture, and your IP address, because your browser connects to it directly; the host of the machine could in principle see all of these.
• Our own server at Oracle Cloud rents those machines. It knows a play by its number and your account by its ID, not by your email address.

We also disclose data where the law requires it.

Why we keep it

For those in the European Union and the United Kingdom, the legal grounds are:

• providing the service you signed up for: your account, plays, balance and disk;
• meeting legal duties: records of payments, for tax and accounting;
• our legitimate interests: keeping the service secure, and the trial to one per person;
• your consent: the waitlist, which you can leave at any time.

How long we keep it

• Your account, while it exists.
• Your balance and payment records, for as long as tax and accounting rules require.
• Your disk, until you clear it, delete your account, or your balance stays below zero for thirty days (terms, section 6).
• The waitlist, until you can play or ask us to remove you.
• Server logs: a few days at Cloudflare. The server that rents machines keeps its log until newer lines overwrite it, and names plays and accounts only by number.

Your rights

You can ask us for a copy of your data, to correct it, to delete it, or to stop using it in a particular way, by writing to support@plouch.com. We answer within thirty days. In the European Union and the United Kingdom you can also complain to your data protection authority. If you live in California: we do not sell or share personal information, and you will not be treated differently for using these rights.

Where it is

Our providers keep data in the United States and other countries, and a play runs on a machine in the region you choose. Where data leaves your country, we rely on our providers’ data protection terms for it.

Children

Plouch is not for children under 13. If we learn that we hold data about a child under 13, we delete it.

Security

Everything between your browser, our servers and the machines travels encrypted, and stored disks are encrypted by our storage provider. The machines themselves are run by others, as above.

Changes to this policy

When this policy changes, the date at the top changes with it, and we email you before a change that matters takes effect.