Privacy Policy

Galaro is run by Ben Hartley, a sole trader based in the UK, who is responsible for your data (the “data controller”). Write to Jactin House, 24 Hood Street, Ancoats, Manchester, M4 6WX, United Kingdom, or email support@galaro.app. “We” and “us” on this page mean him.

• Account. Your email address, a password (hashed by Supabase Auth, never visible to us), and the username you choose.
• Game state. Your commander handle, race, planet names and coordinates, fleets, resources, battle history, alliance membership, and any chat or messages you send.
• Push subscriptions. Only if you opt in: your browser's push endpoint and its encryption keys, or, in the iPhone app, the notification token Apple gives your phone.
• Site analytics. For each page view we store the path, the referring site, your country, your device type (mobile, tablet or desktop), and a hash of your IP address and browser combined. The hash changes every day and cannot be reversed, so it lets us count roughly how many people visited without identifying anyone or storing an IP address. There is no analytics cookie, which is why this site has no cookie banner.
• Operational logs. Our hosting provider's request logs can contain IP addresses for a short period. We do not copy them into the game's own database.
• Error reports. When something breaks, a report goes to our error tracking service, Sentry, so we can fix it. It carries your account ID but not your email. See “Who else handles your data” below.

• No advertising or third-party tracking scripts.
• No analytics cookies, and no cross-site tracking of any kind.
• No IP addresses in our own database, only the daily hash described above.
• No location data beyond the country your IP suggests.
• No microphone, camera, contacts or device storage access.
• We never sell, rent or share your data for marketing.

Only to run the game: to sign you in, draw your cockpit, resolve combat, send the notifications you opted into, keep the servers standing up, and deal with cheating and abuse.

The legal basis for most of this is that we need it to provide the game you signed up for. Fixing errors, counting visits and handling abuse rest on our legitimate interest in keeping the game working and safe. Notifications rest on your consent, which you can withdraw at any time in your settings.

Galaro is for players aged 16 and over. If you are under 16, please do not sign up. If you believe a child has created an account, email us and we will remove it.

By design, these are visible to other players in the same round:

• Your commander handle and race.
• Your planet names and coordinates.
• Battle reports involving your planets, and replays of them.
• Chat and alliance messages you send.
• Alliance membership, and your position in the standings.

Your email address, your password and your push subscription are never visible to other players. The game has no feature that shows one player another player's email, and we have an automated test that fails the build if anyone adds one.

You can delete your account yourself, at any time, from your account page. No need to ask us.

Deleting removes your login, your email address, your username, your commander, your planets, your fleets, your push subscription, your private messages and the chat you posted. Your planets leave the map and any fleets in flight are sent home first, so that other players are not left attacking something that no longer exists.

It cannot be undone, and there is no waiting period: we would rather delete your data immediately than hold on to it for a month in case you change your mind. You can sign up again later with the same email address, but it will be a fresh start with no history.

Two things survive on purpose. Finished seasons keep their final table, including the commander name you used, because past results are a public competitive record. If you need your name removed from those too, email us and we will do it by hand.

And reports survive. A report made by you or about you, with its copy of the reported message and the names involved, is kept after you delete your account, as is a record of any warning, mute, suspension or ban. Otherwise deleting an account would erase the complaints against it. See “Reports and moderation” below.

When a player reports a message or a name, we save a copy of it with the report, together with a few messages either side for context, the commander names of both players and which accounts they belong to. We keep that copy because the original message may be deleted or pruned before a moderator gets to it.

Only moderators can read reports. A moderator may delete the message, or warn, mute, suspend or ban the account, and every action is logged. We do this under legitimate interest: keeping players safe and being able to handle an appeal fairly. The alert that tells a moderator a report arrived carries no message text and no names.

• Your account and personal data: until you delete it.
• Game history: for the life of the game, because past rounds, standings and replays are part of the product.
• Reports: 12 months after a moderator reviews them, then deleted automatically. A report nobody has reviewed yet is kept until someone does.
• Analytics rows: kept, but they are not linked to you. The daily hash makes them impossible to trace back to a person.

• Supabase. The database, sign-in and realtime updates.
• Vercel. Hosting for the site and its server code.
• Resend. Sends account emails such as confirmations and password resets.
• Cloudflare Turnstile. The invisible check on the sign-in page that keeps bots out.
• Sentry. Error tracking, and the inbox for the in-game bug report. It receives error details, your browser and device, the page you were on and your account ID (never your email). A bug report you send also includes your message, your commander handle and your planet. There is no screen recording.
• Your browser's push service (Apple, Google or Mozilla), only if you turn on notifications.
• Apple Push Notification service. In the iPhone app, alerts are delivered through Apple. Apple receives your phone's notification token and the text of each alert, only if you allow notifications.

The game's database is in Ireland. Some of these services, including the site's hosting, are based in the United States, so your data may be processed there. Where that happens, it is covered by the safeguards UK and EU law require for international transfers, such as the UK-US data bridge or standard contractual clauses.

Under UK and EU data protection law you can also ask for a copy of your data, ask us to correct it, or object to how we use it. Email support@galaro.app and we will respond within a month.

If you are not happy with how we handle it, you can complain to your national data protection authority. In the UK that is the ICO.

Questions about any of this: support@galaro.app.