Astrarchy privacy policy
Last updated
This policy explains what personal data the Astrarchy app and its game service collect, why, where it is kept, for how long, and the choices you have. Astrarchy is a space-strategy game played in one shared online universe.
1. Who we are
Astrarchy is provided by Knooty ("we", "us"). We decide how your personal data is used (under data-protection law, we are the "controller"). For any privacy question or request, write to app@knooty.com.
We have not appointed a representative in the European Union or in the United Kingdom. We rely on the exemption in article 27 of the GDPR and of the UK GDPR for processing that is occasional and unlikely to result in a risk to your rights and freedoms.
2. Summary
- You sign in with Sign in with Apple or with a one-time code sent to your email. We never ask for a password, your name, your phone number, your contacts, your photos or your location.
- We keep your email address, your game (commander, planets, fleets, research, reports), your Sovereigns and Accelerators with a record of every change to them, and the push tokens your device gives us so we can send the game alerts you have switched on.
- If you use Account > Support, we save your message, reply contact and app/device details for our operators and email the submission to them through Brevo. Support messages are not visible to other players.
- Other players see your commander name, a random public id for your commander, your planet and moon names and positions, your Score if you are in the top 100, and what their own scouting and battles reveal about your planets. They never see your email address or your account id.
- We do not track you across other companies' apps or websites, the app includes no analytics software, and we do not sell your personal data or share it for advertising.
- You can delete your account at any time in the app. Deletion erases your account and your game. An account with no activity for 2 years is deleted too, after a warning email.
3. What we collect and why
3.1 Account and sign-in
| Data | Where it comes from | Why we use it |
|---|---|---|
| Your email address | You type it to get a sign-in code, or Apple shares it when you use Sign in with Apple. If you choose Apple's "Hide My Email", we receive an Apple relay address instead of your real one | To identify your account, to send sign-in codes and the warning email before a dormant account is deleted (section 6), and to let both sign-in methods reach the same account when the email matches |
| A one-time sign-in code | We generate it and email it to you | To confirm you control the email address. We store only a salted hash of the code, and it expires after 10 minutes |
| Sign in with Apple data | Apple, when you use Sign in with Apple: a stable Apple user identifier, the email Apple shares, whether Apple has verified it and whether it is a relay address, and a token that lets us end your Apple sign-in link when you delete your account | To sign you in, to keep reaching the same account if Apple later shares a different email, and to revoke the link at deletion. We ask Apple for your email only, never your name |
| Account identifiers | We create them: an internal account id, a random public id for your commander, and a random purchase token used only to tie App Store purchases to your account | To run your account, to let other players refer to your commander without seeing your account id, and to make sure a purchase is credited to the account that made it |
| Sign-in dates | Recorded when you sign in | To run your account, to apply the 2-year rule in section 6, and to support security |
3.2 Your game
| Data | Why we use it |
|---|---|
| Your commander name and the names you give your planets and moons | To show your empire to you and to other players. Names pass an automatic profanity filter. Other players can report a name they find offensive, and our operators may rename a commander or planet whose name breaks our terms |
| Your game state: planets and moons, buildings, research, ships and defences, resources, timers, fleets and their missions, Score, tutorial progress, away mode, and your notification switches | To run the game. The game is played on our servers; the app shows what the servers send |
| System reports (combat, scouting, transport, salvage, colonisation, moon events), including round-by-round battle logs | To show you what happened in the game |
| Days on which you used the game and the time of your last activity | To apply the game's inactivity rules (section 6) and to count, in aggregate, how many players are active each day and how many come back after 1, 7 and 30 days |
| Name reports you file: which commander or planet name you reported, your account id and the time | To let our operators review offensive names. Reports go to our operators only, and are kept as section 6 says |
What other players can see:
- On the galaxy map: your commander name and its public id, your planet and moon names and positions, whether you are in away mode or inactive, and any wreckage at your planets.
- In the ranking: your commander name, its public id and your Score if you are in the top 100.
- In their own reports and alerts: your commander name, its public id and your planet positions when your fleets meet theirs, and, depending on their scouting research, the resources, buildings, research, ships and defences of a planet of yours they scouted or fought.
3.3 Purchases
When you buy Sovereigns, Apple takes the payment. We never see your payment card or bank details. Apple sends the app a signed record of the transaction, and our servers keep:
- the transaction ids, the product bought, whether it was a real or a test purchase, the purchase date and the Sovereigns credited;
- a ledger: one entry for every credit or spend of Sovereigns and every purchase or use of an Accelerator, with the resulting balance.
We use these to credit your Sovereigns, to make sure each purchase is credited once and only to the account that made it, and to keep your balance correct.
3.4 Alerts, Live Activities and widgets
If you allow notifications, your device gives us push tokens. We store them with your account id so we can send the alerts you have switched on (incoming attack, construction finished, research finished, fleet arrived, fleet returned, recon detected) and keep Live Activities on your Lock Screen and in the Dynamic Island up to date. Alerts are delivered through Firebase Cloud Messaging and Apple's push service. Cloud Messaging gives the app installation its own identifier and, as Google states, records the device model, language, time zone, operating system version and app version with the token. You can switch each alert off in Settings, or turn notifications off in iOS Settings.
Home Screen widgets show game data that the app keeps on your device. They send nothing to us.
3.5 Security and abuse prevention
| Data | Why we use it |
|---|---|
| App Attest data, through Firebase App Check | To check that requests come from the genuine Astrarchy app on a real Apple device |
| Your IP address | Sign-in requests are limited per IP address and per email address to stop abuse. Our counters store only a one-way hash of the address and are deleted after the limit window (at most one hour). Google's servers also record the caller's IP address when the app calls our server functions (section 4) |
| Rate-limit counters per account | To stop any one account from overloading the game |
| Server logs | To keep the service running and fix problems. Logs record your account id and what kind of action failed or succeeded. They do not record your email address in clear text, your sign-in codes or your push tokens |
| Account status (active, suspended, banned) and our operators' actions | To enforce our terms. Every action an operator takes on an account is logged: who acted, what they did, to which account or planet, and when. Entries may include game names, for example in a rename. These entries keep the account id as an audit record, also after the account is deleted (section 6) |
| For banned accounts that are later deleted: a one-way hash of the email address and of the Apple user identifiers | So that a banned person cannot open a new account with the same address. The address itself is not kept |
3.6 Support
When you send a message through Account > Support, we collect its category and text, your account id and commander name, your account email, and an optional reply email you enter. We attach the app version and build, operating system version and device model to help investigate the issue. We keep a submission id and per-account counters to prevent duplicates and limit spam. Our operators can read the submission in the private admin console, and we send them an email notification through Brevo containing the message and its context. Email delivery status is recorded separately; an email failure does not discard your message. Do not include passwords, sign-in codes or payment card details.
3.7 What we do not collect
We do not request your name, phone number, postal address, location, contacts, photos, camera or microphone input, browsing or search history, health data, or any advertising identifier. Please avoid including these details in support messages. The app includes no analytics software and no tracking software.
4. Who processes your data
We use these service providers to run Astrarchy. They process data for us under their own terms and privacy policies.
| Provider | What it does for us | Data involved | Location |
|---|---|---|---|
| Google (Firebase and Google Cloud) | Sign-in accounts (Firebase Authentication), the game database (Cloud Firestore), server functions (Cloud Functions), timers (Cloud Tasks), app verification (App Check), push delivery (Cloud Messaging) and server logs (Cloud Logging) | Everything in section 3 except the payment itself | Our Firebase resources run in Google Cloud's us-central1 region (Iowa, United States), and Firebase Authentication stores its records in the United States |
| Brevo | Sends sign-in codes, dormant-account warnings and support notifications to our operators | Email addresses and email content; support notifications include your message, commander identity, reply contact and app/device context | The European Union |
| Apple | Sign in with Apple, App Store payments, push notification delivery, App Attest | As described by Apple's own privacy policy | Apple |
We do not sell your personal data, and we do not share it with anyone for advertising. We may disclose data if the law requires it, to protect players or the service, or as part of a sale or reorganisation of our business, in which case this policy continues to apply to it.
Our operators (people we authorise to run the game) can look up an account and see its email address, sign-in methods, game state and Sovereigns balance, the name reports filed about it, and support submissions, in order to support players and enforce our terms.
5. International transfers
Our servers are in the United States. If you play from another country, your data is transferred to and stored in the United States. Brevo, which sends our emails, holds its data in the European Union. Transfers of personal data from the European Economic Area and the United Kingdom rely on the standard contractual clauses in Google's Data Processing and Security Terms and in Brevo's Data Processing Agreement, which we have accepted.
6. How long we keep data
| Data | How long |
|---|---|
| Your account, commander name, research, Sovereigns, Accelerators and ledger | Until you delete your account. If your account has no activity for 2 years, we delete the whole account as in section 7; we email the account's address 30 days before. The 2 years run from your last activity, and any use of the game while signed in counts as activity |
| Your planets, moons, fleets and everything on them | Until you delete your account, abandon them in the game, or lose them in the game. After 90 days with no activity (away mode does not count toward this), all your planets and moons are removed from the universe; your account, commander name, research and Sovereigns are kept and you can start a new empire when you return |
| System reports | 30 days from the report's date, or sooner if you delete them. Expired reports are removed automatically, normally within about a day |
| Activity days | The most recent 31 days on which you played, until your account is deleted |
| Daily player counts | 2 years. They are totals only (numbers of players), with no link to any account |
| Sign-in codes | Valid 10 minutes; removed automatically, normally within about a day after they expire |
| General rate-limit counters | Removed automatically after their window (at most one hour), normally within about a day |
| Support submissions and support-specific rate metadata in our database | Until your account is deleted. Account deletion removes the messages and metadata from the admin console; it does not automatically recall notification emails already delivered to our operators. Contact app@knooty.com about copies held in email |
| Push tokens | Until your account is deleted, the token stops working, or another account signs in on the same device and registers it |
| Apple sign-in token | Until your account is deleted, when we revoke it with Apple |
| Name reports | 1 year after our operators resolve the report. A report is deleted sooner if the account that filed it or the account it is about is deleted |
| Operator action log, including the account id of a deleted account | 2 years from the entry's date |
| Server logs | 30 days |
| Hashed email and Apple identifiers of banned accounts that were deleted | As long as Astrarchy runs |
| Copies and logs held by Brevo of the emails it sends for us | For Brevo's standard retention period for transactional email logs |
7. Deleting your account
You can delete your account in the app at any time, whatever its state, also before you have created a commander and while it is suspended or banned. In Settings, or on the screen the app shows when you have no active empire, choose Delete Account, then confirm twice. Deletion takes effect at once and cannot be undone. It erases:
- your account record, email address and sign-in links, and it revokes your Sign in with Apple link with Apple;
- your commander, planets, moons, fleets, research, reports and activity record, and frees your commander name and the orbits you held;
- every report about you in other players' report lists;
- the name reports you filed and the name reports filed about your names;
- your in-app support submissions and support rate metadata from our database;
- your Sovereigns and Accelerators (unspent Sovereigns are lost), your ledger and your purchase records;
- your push tokens.
Deletion does not remove our operators' log entries that name your account id, server log lines, or automatically recall support notification emails; section 6 explains these records.
You delete your own account in the app, so that only someone signed in to the account can delete it. If you write to app@knooty.com asking us to delete your account, we will point you to the steps above. Our operators delete an account themselves only when it belongs to a child under 13 (section 10) or when the law requires it; that deletion erases the same data as above and is recorded in the operator action log.
8. Your choices and rights
- Access and correction: most of your data is shown to you in the app. You can rename your planets and moons in Settings. To get a copy of your data or to ask about it, write to app@knooty.com.
- Deletion: see section 7.
- Notifications: switch each alert off in Settings, or turn notifications off for Astrarchy in iOS Settings.
- Hide My Email: Sign in with Apple lets you share an Apple relay address instead of your own.
9. If you live in the European Economic Area or the United Kingdom
The EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and, in the United Kingdom, the UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018 give you the rights below. The controller is named in section 1.
Why we may use your data (legal bases)
| Use | Legal basis |
|---|---|
| Running your account, sign-in, the game, your Sovereigns and Accelerators, and the alerts you switch on | Performance of our contract with you (the terms of service) |
| Security, abuse prevention, rate limits, app verification, enforcing our terms (suspensions, bans, renames, name reports), the operator action log and server logs | Our legitimate interests in keeping Astrarchy secure, fair and running |
| Counting active players in aggregate | Our legitimate interest in understanding how many people play |
| The warning email before a dormant account is deleted | Our legitimate interest in not deleting an account its owner still wants |
| Purchase records | Performance of our contract with you, and legal obligations for accounting where they apply |
Your email address is needed to create and keep an account; without it you cannot play. Notifications are sent only if you allow them in iOS, and you can withdraw that permission at any time. We do not make decisions about you based solely on automated processing that have legal or similarly significant effects.
Your rights. You may ask us for access to your personal data, to correct it, to erase it, to restrict its use, to receive the data you gave us in a portable format, and you may object to uses based on our legitimate interests. To erase your account and your game, delete your account in the app (section 7); for everything else, write to app@knooty.com. We answer within one month, which the law lets us extend by up to two further months for complex requests; we will tell you if we do. We may need to confirm that the request comes from the account's owner.
Complaints. You may complain to a data protection authority, in particular in the EU country where you live or work, or, in the United Kingdom, to the Information Commissioner's Office (ico.org.uk). We would welcome the chance to answer your concern first at app@knooty.com.
Transfers outside the EEA and the United Kingdom are described in section 5.
10. Children
You must be 13 or older to use Astrarchy. Astrarchy is not directed to children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal data from children under 13. If you believe a child under 13 has an account, write to app@knooty.com and we will delete it: in that case our operators delete the account and everything in it, as section 7 describes.
11. Security
Requests to our servers are encrypted in transit and accepted only from the genuine app. The app cannot change game data directly; only our server functions can. Sign-in codes are stored only as salted hashes, and the addresses of deleted banned accounts only as one-way hashes. No system is perfectly secure, but we work to protect your data.
12. Changes to this policy
When we change this policy, we post the new version on this page and update the "Last updated" date at the top.
13. Contact
Knooty: app@knooty.com.