Privacy Policy

Who is responsible

Playroste is run by an individual developer, not a company. Anything on this page — a question, a request to see your data, a request to delete it — goes to privacy@playroste.com.

What is stored, and why

Only what the app needs in order to work. There is no advertising, no tracking across other apps or sites, and nothing is sold or handed to a data broker.

• Your email address, so you can sign in and so the app can send you the four emails it sends: password reset, address confirmation, address change and the confirmation that your account has been deleted.
• Your nickname, which is how other players see you.
• Your first and last name, which stay private — see the next section.
• Your profile photo, only if you sign in with Google. Playroste never uploads one and has no screen to do it.
• Your language, country and unit preference, so the app and the notifications speak to you in the right one.
• Your password, stored only as a hash that cannot be turned back into the password. If you sign in with Google there is no password at all, only the stable identifier Google gives for your account.
• The games you set up or join, with their time, their place on the map, capacity and fee.
• Your location, only if you allow it and only while the app is open: to open the map where you are when you choose where a game is played, and to show you the games nearby. It travels with each request and is never stored.
• A device identifier from Firebase Cloud Messaging, so a reminder can reach your phone. It is not your phone number and it does not identify you outside Playroste.
• Crash reports, if the app closes unexpectedly. These are sent by Firebase Crashlytics and describe the failure, not you.
• Your IP address, while a request is being served, to stop somebody trying thousands of passwords against your account. It is used for that and not kept as a profile.

Your nickname is public. Your name is not.

This is the one distinction worth reading twice, because the whole app is built around it.

Other players see your nickname and your photo, next to the games you set up and in the list of who is coming. Your first and last name are yours: they are used to tell you apart on your own screens, and no other player is ever shown them. They are two different fields, stored separately and served by two different parts of the server, precisely so that one cannot end up on screen in place of the other.

If you signed in with Google, your name and photo come from your Google account and are refreshed from it every time you sign in. That is why the app shows them locked in your profile: they belong to your Google account, not to Playroste. Your nickname is always yours to change.

On what legal basis

Your account, your profile and the games you take part in are processed because they are what you asked Playroste to do — there is no app without them.

Push notifications are sent only if you allow them, and Android and iOS ask you first. You can withdraw that at any time in your phone settings, and everything else keeps working.

Your location is used only if you allow it, and Android and iOS ask you first. Without it the app still works: you search for the place by hand and see every game instead of the nearby ones.

Crash reports and the rate limit on sign-in attempts exist to keep the service standing up and other people out of your account.

Who else handles it

Playroste uses four external services, each for one job, and none of them receives your data for its own purposes.

• Hetzner — the server, in Helsinki, Finland. This is where the database lives.
• Resend — the emails the service sends, on its European region.
• Google — push notifications, crash reports and the Google sign-in button if you use it (Firebase); and the map, the place search and the "Open in Google Maps" link (Google Maps). What you type in the place search reaches Google through the Playroste server, without your name or your account.
• Cloudflare R2 — where the encrypted backups are kept. They are encrypted before they leave the server, so what is stored there cannot be read without a key that never leaves its owner.

Where it is, and for how long

The database is in the European Union and stays there. Google processes push, crash and map data under its own terms and may do so outside the EU.

Your data stays for as long as your account does. When the account goes, it goes — see the section below.

Backups are the exception, and it is worth being precise: they are encrypted snapshots taken every night and kept for 7 days. A deleted account can still appear inside a backup until that copy expires. Backups are only ever restored whole, after a disaster, and never opened to look somebody up.

What you can ask for

Write to privacy@playroste.com and you can ask to see a copy of everything Playroste holds about you, correct anything wrong, get it deleted, take it elsewhere in a readable format, or object to a particular use of it. You do not have to explain why.

If you live in the European Union and you think this has been handled badly, you can complain to your national data protection authority.

Deleting your account

You can delete your account and everything personal in it. How to do it, what disappears and what survives is on its own page, linked at the bottom of this one.

Children

Playroste is not aimed at children under 13 and accounts are not knowingly created for them. If you believe a child has an account, write to the address above and it will be removed.

If this page changes

The date at the top says when it last did. A change that affects what is stored or who sees it is announced in the app before it applies, not slipped in quietly.