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. A fifth leaves it only if you play the Challenge: the player name you choose, which is shown on its public leaderboard, a note when each Challenge run starts, and its score and end figures when it ends, so our server can rank it.

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, with one exception you choose yourself: if you play the Challenge, your player name and the Challenge runs you play are also held by our server, as the privacy page describes. Clear these and this browser 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
• powerstate.posts.v1which update posts you have read, so the start screen stops pointing at them
• powerstate.windows.v1where you moved the windows to, written only once you move one
• powerstate.challenge.player.v1your Challenge name and the key that lets this browser post runs under it
• powerstate.challenge.entries.v1the Challenge runs you sent, and any waiting to be sent
• powerstate.challenge.save.v1*your Challenge run, saved apart from your colonies, in this browser only

If you play the Challenge, three more items are stored: your player name with the key this browser made for it and the random player id our server gave it, a note of the Challenge runs you finished and any still waiting to be sent, and your Challenge run itself, saved apart from your colonies. The key is the one item on this list that is transmitted: it goes to our Challenge service when you choose a name, when a run starts and when it ends, as proof the name and the run are yours. A Challenge run’s save holds the ticket our server gave the run when it started, which goes back with the finished run. The button above removes all three. After that this browser can no longer change that name or send runs under it; the name itself stays on the leaderboard until the retention below ends, or until you ask for it to be deleted.

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.

Seven 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 years a run reached, up to twenty and then every tenth, in which world, and whether it was running free
• 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.

08The Challenge

Nothing about the Challenge is sent unless you play it. If you do, this is what our server receives, and this is the whole of it:

• the player name you choose, with a random key your browser makes for it. Our server keeps a one way hash of the key, never the key, and gives your browser a random player id
• for each Challenge run, the time it started and, once it ends, the score and grade, how it ended, the score at the end of each year, the end figures (renewable share, citizens supplied, peak population, cash, debt, days of blackout, carbon intensity) and the version of the game
• a salted hash of your IP address with the time of each request, to limit how often names can be tried and runs sent. The address itself is not stored

It is used to rank your runs and for nothing else. Your name and your best result are shown on the public leaderboard. Your player id and your key are never shown, and the player id is not linked to anything else the game records or to a purchase.

Before a name is stored, the name alone is sent to the moderation service of OpenAI, L.L.C. (USA), acting as our processor, to check that it is not offensive. OpenAI does not use it to train its models. The transfer to the United States is covered by the EU Standard Contractual Clauses.

Names, runs and leaderboards are stored in our database at Supabase, hosted in the EU, as our processor. Legal basis: Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR, because playing a Challenge run is asking us to rank it, and Art. 6(1)(f) for the address hashes, our legitimate interest in keeping the leaderboard free of abuse. How long each is kept is set out under Retention.

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: 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.

If you play the Challenge, the name you chose and the runs sent under it are held too. To have them deleted before the retention below ends, write to info@powerstate-game.com with the name, and they 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.

Challenge runs and everything sent with them are deleted by a scheduled job twelve weeks after the Challenge they were played in ends. A Challenge’s leaderboard, which carries the names and scores of its top hundred, is deleted a year after that Challenge ends. A player name is deleted, with every run under it, a year after it was last used to choose a name or play a Challenge run, and the IP address hashes after two days.

Nothing else is retained here.