Auto Ball is a game made by Dominick Favata ("we", "us"). This policy explains what the game collects, why, and what you can do about it. It is written to be read, not to be survived.
1. The short version
- Playing offline collects nothing at all. No exceptions.
- Playing online requires a Steam account, so we store an account record for you, and - if you play ranked - a rating.
- We also collect anonymous gameplay statistics to balance the game. These are never linked to your account, and you can switch them off.
- There are no advertisements, no trackers, and no third-party analytics. We do not sell or share your data with anyone, ever.
2. Playing offline
Nothing is collected, transmitted, or stored on our servers when you play offline. Your settings, your career history and your saved replays live on your own device and are never uploaded. The game is fully playable with no internet connection.
3. Your account (online play)
To play online you sign in through Steam. We store:
| What | Why |
|---|---|
| An internal player ID (a random identifier we generate) | To recognise you between sessions |
| Your SteamID | To match you to your Steam account when you sign in |
| Your display name | So other players can see who they are playing |
| When your account was created, and when it was last used | To operate and maintain the service |
We receive your SteamID from Valve as part of signing in. We never receive your Steam password, your email address, your real name, your payment details or your friends list, and we do not ask Steam for them.
Legal basis (GDPR): performance of a contract - you cannot play online without an account.
4. Ranked play
If you play ranked matches we additionally store your rating, your peak rating, how many ranked sessions you have completed, and a per-session history of how your rating changed. This is what makes ranked work: matchmaking, placement, and the ladder.
Your display name and rank are shown publicly on the in-game leaderboard, visible to other players.
Legal basis (GDPR): performance of a contract.
5. Anonymous gameplay statistics
When you play online, our server records what happened in the game so we can balance it. Specifically:
- About the session: your platform (e.g. Windows), your game language, the game version, and whether this was your first online session.
- About the game: lobby size, how many players were human and how many were bots, round results, unspent gold, final placement, and whether you quit before the end.
- About the match itself: the random seed, both teams' line-ups and the score - used to work out which characters and items are too strong.
These records are not linked to your account. Each one is tagged with an identifier our server generates for that seat, which is never written to your device and never connected to your player ID or SteamID. We cannot tell that two sessions were the same person.
You can turn this off in Settings → Advanced → Privacy. Switching it off does more than stop future collection: it tells the server to delete what it already recorded for the session you are in. Because these records carry no identifier that spans sessions, records from earlier sessions cannot be found and removed - by us or by anyone.
Legal basis (GDPR): legitimate interest in understanding and balancing our own game, weighed against the fact that the data cannot be traced to a person.
6. Crash reports
If the game crashes, it writes a report to your device. The next time you launch it, that report is uploaded so we can fix the bug. A report contains the error, the stack trace, the game version and your platform.
File paths are stripped before upload, because a file path can contain your computer's username. This is automatic and applies to every report.
Crash reports are covered by the same setting as gameplay statistics - if you have switched that off, nothing is uploaded.
Legal basis (GDPR): legitimate interest in a game that works.
7. Technical logs
Our servers record connection information, including IP addresses, for security and abuse prevention - rate limiting, and blocking denial-of-service attempts. This covers two things: our own server logs, and a sampled record of network connections to our machines.
These logs are kept for 30 days and then deleted automatically. They are not linked to your account, and we do not use them for anything other than keeping the service available and secure.
Legal basis (GDPR): legitimate interest in keeping the service available and secure.
8. How long we keep things
| Data | Kept for |
|---|---|
| Account record | As long as your account exists |
| Ranked rating | As long as your account exists |
| Ranked match history | 24 months |
| Gameplay statistics | 18 months |
| Crash reports | 12 months after the last time we saw that crash |
| Match results (line-ups and scores, with no session or account reference) | Indefinitely - this is anonymous balance data that cannot be traced to a player |
| Server connection logs | 30 days |
These are enforced by a scheduled job, not by hand.
9. Your rights
If you are in the EU, the UK, or another region with equivalent law, you have the right to access the data we hold about you, correct it, delete it, object to processing based on legitimate interest, and receive a copy of it.
To exercise any of these, email admin.autoball@gmail.com from an address we can tie to your account, or include your SteamID. We will respond within 30 days.
Deleting your account removes your player record, your Steam link, your rating and your rating history. It does not remove anonymous match results, because those contain nothing that identifies you and cannot be traced back to your account.
You may also lodge a complaint with your local data protection authority.
10. Who else touches your data
| Who | What they do | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Valve (Steam) | Verifies who you are when you sign in | Governed by Valve's own privacy policy |
| Google Cloud | Runs our servers and database | United States (Iowa, us-central1) |
We do not use any advertising network, analytics provider or tracking service. We do not sell your data. We have never done so and have no plans to.
If you are in the EU or the UK, your account data is stored on servers in the United States. That transfer is covered by the Standard Contractual Clauses approved by the European Commission, which form part of our data processing agreement with Google Cloud. You can request a copy of the relevant terms using the contact address below.
11. Children
Auto Ball is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect data from them. Online play requires a Steam account, which Valve requires its own minimum age for.
If you believe a child has provided us with personal data, email admin.autoball@gmail.com and we will delete it.
12. Changes to this policy
If we change this policy we will update the date at the top. If a change is significant, we will say so in the game.
13. Contact
admin.autoball@gmail.com Dominick Favata