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Privacy Policy

Last updated: 23 September 2026

Who runs this site

Wasdary (wasdary.com) is run by a single private individual, as a personal non-commercial project. There is no company behind it and no team. For anything to do with your data — questions, corrections, or exercising the rights listed below — write to support@wasdary.com. That address reaches the person responsible directly; there is nobody else it could be escalated to.

Under the GDPR that person is the data controller. Their full name and postal address are not published on this page, but they are given on request to the address above — and to the supervisory authority, the Italian Garante per la protezione dei dati personali, or to anyone who needs them in order to exercise a right or bring a complaint. This policy explains what the site stores about you, why, who else can see it, and for how long.

What we store

  • Your account. Username, email address, and your password as a bcrypt hash — never in plain text, and we cannot read it. If you signed in with Google or Steam we store the identifier that provider returns instead, plus your display name and avatar where available. Steam accounts have no email address at all, because Steam never gives us one.
  • Your library. The games you add, your scores, the reviews you write, the playtimes you record, and your wishlist.
  • Your preferences. The country and currencies you choose, used only to decide which store offers are relevant to you. This country is always whatever you select yourself — we never infer it from your IP address for this purpose. (Our visit counter, described under “Cookies” below, does derive a country from IP addresses, but for a different, anonymous purpose and never yours by name.)
  • Sign-in links. When you reset a password or verify your address we store only a SHA-256 fingerprint of the emailed link, never the link itself, so a stolen copy of our database yields nothing usable.
  • Technical data. Our servers log the usual request information — IP address, time, page, browser — to keep the site running and to investigate abuse. Your IP is also used, in memory only, to rate-limit sign-in attempts.

There is no advertising, no profiling and no behavioural tracking anywhere on this site, and we do not sell or share your data for anyone’s marketing.

What is public

Worth being blunt about, because it is the part that surprises people. These are visible to anyone on the internet, including people who are not logged in:

  • the reviews you write, with your score and your username, on the game’s page;
  • your profile at /user/your-username — avatar, the month you joined, your hand-picked “Best 3” games, your most-played games, and aggregate figures such as your average score and total playtime;
  • the score you gave individual games, shown on your profile in the “Rated games” section — a sample of the games you loved, the ones you felt were middling and the ones you did not like, each with your score on it. The section shows a few games per group, not your whole library, and it appears only once you have voted something.

Your email address, your password and your preferences are never public. The contents of your wishlist are not public either — nobody but you can see which games are on it. Its size is a different matter: your profile page shows how many games you have wishlisted, the same count-only tile it shows for your library and your reviews, never the titles behind it. Profile pages ask search engines not to index them, so they are reachable by link but should not turn up in search results — that is a request to crawlers, not a guarantee. Everything public is there because you put it there, and you can edit or delete it at any time — removing a vote (from the game page or from your library) takes that game out of the section; profile pages are cached for up to a minute, so allow for that.

Why we are allowed to

Under the GDPR, our legal bases are:

  • Performance of a contract (art. 6(1)(b)) — your account, your library, your preferences and your public profile. This is the service you signed up for; without this data there is nothing to provide.
  • Legitimate interests (art. 6(1)(f)) — keeping the service secure and available: rate limiting, server logs, error reports, backups, and the moderation records described below. You can object to any of these at any time.

We do not rely on consent for anything, because there is nothing here that needs it: no marketing email is ever sent, and there are no tracking cookies to ask about.

Who else sees it

Running a website means using suppliers. These process data on our instructions and for no purpose of their own:

  • Hetzner — the server, in Germany. Everything lives here.
  • Cloudflare — sits in front of the site for security and speed, and stores the daily database backups.
  • Resend — delivers account emails (address verification, password resets, password-change notices). European region. We send no marketing email, so it is never used for anything else.
  • Zoho — hosts the support@wasdary.com mailbox, so anything you write to us passes through it.
  • Sentry — receives a report when something breaks. European region, and stripped before sending: no cookies, no headers, no query strings, no user identity, and fields such as passwords and tokens replaced with [redacted].

Separately, these companies act on their own account, not ours, and their own privacy policies apply: Google, if you choose to sign in with it, and Ko-fi with Stripe if you donate. A donation happens entirely on their pages: we never see or store your card details, and we keep no record of who donated.

Signing in with Valve (Steam) and the optional Steam library sync are built into the site but switched off today — both buttons are disabled sitewide, so neither can currently be used, and neither sends anything to Valve. When either is turned back on, this page will be updated to say so on the day it happens. For the record, this is what each would do once live: Steam sign-in would put you under Valve’s own privacy policy, the same way Google’s does today; the Steam library sync would send your SteamID to Steam to read your owned-games list, and only when you press the button for it.

Game information comes from IGDB and prices from Steam, Gamesplanet, MacGameStore, GamersGate, GameBillet and the Microsoft Store. Our own server only reads those feeds — nothing about you is sent to them that way. And no store link on this site is an affiliate link: we earn no commission, and the links carry no tracking parameters.

Two things reach a third party directly from your browser, not through our server, and are worth naming precisely. The screenshots shown in a game’s hover preview, and in the big rotating panel on category and on-sale pages, are loaded straight from IGDB’s own image server, images.igdb.com — so IGDB sees the visitor’s IP address and browser when one of those loads, the same as opening any other website that hosts its own pictures. And the still picture shown under a game’s trailer, before you press play, is loaded straight from i.ytimg.com, Google’s YouTube thumbnail server — so Google sees your IP address as soon as you open a game page that has a video, whether or not you ever press play. Only if you do press play does the video itself start, streamed from youtube-nocookie.com, the privacy-hardened embed Google offers for exactly this reason.

Cookies

There is no cookie banner because there is nothing to consent to. Every cookie we set is strictly necessary to sign you in, which is the one case that needs no consent. There are no advertising, analytics or profiling cookies of any kind, and none of the cookies we set can follow you to another site. (The IGDB screenshots and YouTube thumbnail described in “Who else sees it” above are a different matter — no cookie is involved, but the image request itself does reach IGDB or Google.)

The complete list:

  • wasd_token — your session, httpOnly so JavaScript cannot read it. Lasts 7 days.
  • wasd_user — your username and display settings, so the page can be built without asking the server who you are on every request. Lasts 7 days.
  • g_state, g_nonce, g_verifier, g_next (Google sign-in) and s_next (Steam sign-in) — set only if you start a sign-in with one of those providers, and only for the 10 minutes the redirect takes. They exist to stop somebody tampering with the sign-in itself.
  • g_accept — set only when you start a Google sign-up from the registration page with the age and Terms checkbox ticked, so the acceptance carries through the redirect to Google and back. Same 10-minute lifetime as the other sign-in cookies above.

The two session cookies disappear when you log out; the sign-in ones expire on their own.

Your browser also keeps your recently-viewed games and your search history in local storage. That stays on your device, never reaches our server, and you can clear it whenever you like.

We count page views with Umami, which we run on our own server — the figures never reach a third party. It sets no cookies, and it never stores your IP address. For every visit it does work out one thing from that address: the country you are visiting from — a coarse, one-time geolocation, the same way any “visitors by country” figure works. It keeps only that country, never your region or city, alongside the page, where you arrived from, and rough details such as your browser. It cannot follow you across sites and cannot identify you. Statistics are kept for 12 months.

How long we keep it

  • Your account and library — until you delete them. There is no expiry and no inactivity purge.
  • Accounts that never verify their email — deleted automatically 30 days after sign-up. You are warned on every page, with the date, for the whole period.
  • Password-reset and verification links — 1 hour and 24 hours respectively, single use.
  • Server logs — kept only as long as they are useful for security and troubleshooting, and rotated and overwritten routinely. They are never used to build a profile of you.
  • Backups — 14 days (see the note below).
  • Moderation records — 24 months in full, then reduced to a bare counter (see the section below).
  • Emails you send us — 24 months after the conversation ends.

Deleting your account, and what backups mean

You can delete your account yourself, at any time, from your account settings. It is a real deletion, not a hidden flag: your account, library, reviews, playtimes and preferences are removed from the live database immediately, and the scores you gave are subtracted from the games’ averages.

One honest caveat. We take a daily backup and keep it for 14 days, so for up to two weeks a copy of your data still exists in an archive before it ages out on its own. We do not edit backups to remove one person — rewriting an archive would destroy the only thing that makes it useful in a disaster. Those copies are never used to bring an account back.

Moderation records

One thing outlives your account, and you should know about it before it applies to you.

If a moderator removes one of your reviews, we keep a record of it: the text of the removed review, your username, the score attached to it, the reason, and the date. The same applies to suspending or reinstating an account. This record is kept even if you afterwards delete your account.

Why: removal is permanent and immediate, so without a copy there would be nothing left to point at if you disputed the decision, no way to show it was not arbitrary, and no way to tell a first incident from a tenth. The basis is our legitimate interest in being able to justify and account for moderation decisions, and the text in question is something that was published publicly, not something private you entrusted to us. It is visible only to an administrator.

We keep the whole of it for 24 months from the action. After that we erase the text of the removed review, the moderator’s note, the score and your username, and keep only the fact that the action happened, its date, and an internal reference to the account — enough to tell a first incident from a tenth, and not enough to reproduce what was written. That remainder is kept for as long as the account exists; if you delete your account, nothing in it points at you any more. These records are the one thing not included in the data download described below — write to support@wasdary.com and we will send you what we hold about you, and erase it on request unless there is an unresolved dispute about the removal itself. We withhold only the identity of the moderator who acted.

Being suspended does not lock you out: you stay signed in, you can still read your data, download all of it, and delete your account. A moderation decision must not hold your own data hostage.

Your rights

You have the right to access your data, correct it, delete it, receive a portable copy, restrict how we use it, and object to the processing we base on legitimate interests. Two of those you can exercise yourself, right now, without asking anyone:

  • Get a copy of everything — your account settings has a “Your data” download: one JSON file with your account, preferences and every library entry including the full text of your reviews.
  • Delete everything — same page, permanently.

For anything else, write to support@wasdary.com. If you think we have handled your data badly, please tell us first — but you always have the right to complain to a supervisory authority. Ours is the Italian Garante per la protezione dei dati personali (garanteprivacy.it), and you can also complain to the authority in the EU country where you live.

Age

This site is not intended for anyone under 16, and registration asks you to confirm it. We do not knowingly keep accounts for younger users; if you believe a child has registered here, write to support@wasdary.com and the account will be removed.

Changes

If this policy changes, the date at the top changes with it, and anything material will be signalled on the site rather than slipped in quietly.

Read our Terms of Service →