Privacy Policy
Who we are
Idle Guilds is an independent online game built by a solo developer. Idle Guilds is the data controller for the personal data described in this policy and is established in the Netherlands. For anything in this policy — including access, correction or erasure requests — contact [email protected].
Because we are established in the European Union, the EU General Data Protection Regulation applies. If you believe we have handled your data improperly you can complain to us directly at the address above, and you have the right to lodge a complaint with a supervisory authority — in our case the Dutch Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens.
What we collect
- Closed Alpha waitlist. We collect your email address, confirmation and development-update consent records, the page and bounded campaign attribution that brought you to the form, and an opaque referral relationship. After confirmation you may optionally add a preferred name, Discord handle, testing interests, testing strengths, and a short note. We do not ask for a date of birth, age, country, or legal name to join the waitlist.
- Account identity. Your email address and, if you sign in with a provider such as Google, the display name and account linkage that provider shares. We use these to run your account.
- Credentials. Passwords are stored only as one-way cryptographic hashes and two-factor secrets only in encrypted form. We never store or see your password in plaintext.
- Security telemetry. To rate-limit abuse we store a salted hash of your IP address for account services. Waitlist requests may send the requesting IP address to Cloudflare Turnstile for abuse verification, but Idle Guilds does not retain a raw IP address in its waitlist records.
- Game economy records. Your in-game actions produce pseudonymous economy ledger entries (trades, gold movements). These reference your player ID, not your identity.
- Chat and safety records. If chat is available to your account, we store global, guild, and direct-message text, participant and character identifiers, public display-name snapshots, timestamps, your block and direct-message preferences, player reports, bounded report evidence, review signals, moderator decisions, and the audit records needed to operate the safety process.
Chat, moderation, and automated rules
We process chat to deliver the service, keep global and guild conversations available across reconnects, deliver direct messages to their intended participants, enforce the conduct rules in our Terms of Service, investigate reports, protect players, and preserve the integrity of the game. We rely on performance of our agreement with you for message delivery and on our legitimate interests in player safety, abuse prevention, dispute handling, and service security for moderation and related records.
Direct messages are stored on our servers and are not end-to-end encrypted. Authorized moderators may review a message after a player report or a bounded high-risk safety signal. Local automated rules may refuse high-confidence prohibited content or place a message in a human-review queue. A review signal by itself never mutes, suspends, or bans an account; account-affecting moderation decisions are made by a human and can be appealed.
We do not send player chat to a third-party or machine-learning moderation provider.
Chat retention
- Players can retrieve up to 24 hours of global and guild history and seven days of direct message history. Ordinary source messages are deleted after 30 days.
- Unresolved reports remain until a moderator decides them. Evidence for a resolved report is deleted 180 days after the final decision unless an open appeal or a documented legal hold temporarily pauses deletion.
- Bounded moderation outcome metadata is deleted 24 months after the final decision. It does not keep an expired message body.
- Encrypted database backups are normally retained for 36 days; a first-of-month backup can remain for up to 12 months. They are access-restricted and expire on that schedule rather than being edited for each individual deletion request.
Why we use waitlist data
We use confirmed waitlist data to operate the Closed Alpha list, send requested confirmation and management messages, understand broad testing interests, contact selected testers, prevent abuse, and reconcile invitations. Joining the waitlist does not guarantee access or create a queue position.
Development news is separate and optional. Its checkbox is unchecked by default, and the preference becomes active only after you confirm your email. You can withdraw that preference from your secure waitlist management link at any time without leaving the waitlist.
Email and abuse-verification providers
Resend processes transactional waitlist email and, only when you have explicitly opted in and confirmed, our development-updates contact list. PostgreSQL remains our record of your consent; Resend is used only to deliver and project that preference. Cloudflare Turnstile processes technical request information, which may include your IP address, to distinguish legitimate requests from abuse.
Waitlist retention
While a transactional waitlist email is queued, its link credential is encrypted at rest with a dedicated server key and is removed from the delivery record after provider acceptance or terminal failure. Raw link credentials are never stored.
- Unconfirmed entries become eligible for deletion after 30 days. If you requested a fresh confirmation email near that boundary, the entry remains only until that 48-hour confirmation link expires.
- Confirmed entries remain while the Closed Alpha waitlist is operating, until you leave, or until they are invited.
- After an invitation, optional profile, Discord, referral, attribution, and note data are removed after a 30-day reconciliation period. Only the minimum email, invitation, delivery, and development-update consent evidence is retained for the remaining operational need.
- When the Closed Alpha program ends, remaining waitlist personal data and corresponding Resend development-update topic projections are purged under the documented operator procedure. Unrelated preferences on a shared Resend contact are preserved.
What we don't do
- No advertising trackers and no sale of personal data.
- Site analytics are cookie-less and privacy-friendly (Cloudflare Web Analytics).
Your rights and deleting your data
You may ask for access, correction, erasure, restriction, or a portable copy of your personal data, and you may object when we rely on legitimate interests. You may also appeal a moderation decision without charge. Email[email protected]. We may need to verify that the request concerns your account.
A confirmed waitlist member can use the secure management link to leave the waitlist and delete waitlist data. Sending stops immediately, and optional profile, Discord, referral, note, and attribution data are removed immediately. If the Resend waitlist-topic update is temporarily unavailable, only the minimum email/contact cleanup record is held in a non-sending deletion-pending state while we retry; the local record is deleted as soon as that cleanup is verified. A delay approaching 30 days is escalated as a privacy incident rather than hiding possible provider residue by deleting the local cleanup record. Provider cleanup removes the waitlist-topic preference, not the Resend contact itself; that contact record may remain, and any unrelated email preferences are unchanged. Leaving the waitlist does not revoke a separately granted game account or Alpha invitation.
You can request erasure of your account at any time by emailing [email protected] from the account's email address. Erasure removes your email, display name, and provider linkage, revokes all sessions, and destroys stored credentials.
Account erasure also deletes ordinary chat you authored, every direct-message conversation involving your account, chat preferences, and block relationships. If a live report, appeal, confirmed abuse record, or documented legal hold still needs evidence, direct account and character identifiers are replaced with non-public pseudonyms and the restricted evidence remains only until its applicable deadline.
Two things can persist after erasure, and we want to be upfront about them: pseudonymous economy ledger entries are retained to protect the shared game economy against fraud (they no longer link to your identity), and erased records can remain in access-restricted, encrypted backups until the backup schedule described above expires rather than through targeted deletion.
Changes
As the game moves from closed alpha toward wider release this policy will grow more formal. Material changes will be announced on Discord before they take effect.