Privacy Notice
Last updated: 3 October 2026 · Version 1.4 (3 October: a clarification in §4 — anyone can ask whether a character name is free)
Rookport is operated from Québec, Canada by Zen Solutions. This notice says what personal information we collect, why, who else sees it, and what you can make us do about it. It is written to satisfy Québec's Act respecting the protection of personal information in the private sector (as amended by Law 25) and to be honest with you, which is the same thing.
Person responsible for the protection of personal information: Mathieu Payment — matpay@zen-solutions.net
The short version: we collect the least we can get away with, we don't sell any of it, there is no advertising and nothing about you is sent to a third-party tracker, and you can delete all of it yourself — in the game, from Character → Your account, in about ten seconds. You can email us instead if you'd rather.
We do keep a record of what your character does in the game, on our own server, so the game can be balanced and its bugs found. It is described in full below, under Gameplay log — added in version 1.4, and the reason you were asked to accept this notice again.
1. What we collect, and why
When you create an account
| What | Why | Kept |
|---|---|---|
| Email address | It is your login credential — the sign-in link and password resets go there. Also how we reach you about the game. | Until you delete the account |
| Username | Your public name in the game, on chat and on the boards | Until you delete the account |
| Password | Never stored. We keep a scrypt hash with a per-account salt, which cannot be turned back into your password | Until you delete the account |
| Confirmation that you accepted these terms, and when | Proof of consent, which the law requires us to be able to show | Until you delete the account |
While you play
| What | Why | Kept |
|---|---|---|
| Your game state — character, position, money, crew, property, history | It's the game | Until you delete the account; material progress wipes each round by design |
| Session tokens | Keep you logged in for 30 days | Expire on their own; deleted on logout |
| IP address | Rate-limiting sign-in and posting, so the game can't be hammered or spammed. Held briefly in memory, not written to a database, and lost on every restart | Under an hour, in memory only |
| Chat messages and board posts | To show them to the people they're addressed to | Chat is capped and rolls over; board posts stay until you delete them |
| Last-active timestamp | To show how many players are online | Overwritten continuously |
| Gameplay log — see below | Balancing the game and finding its bugs | Rolls over automatically; see below |
The gameplay log
Every action your character takes writes one line to a log on our own server: which character, what they tried, whether the game allowed it, the game's own reason if it said no, and your character's level, money, heat and position at that moment. Nothing else — not what you typed, not what you read, not anything about your device.
Why it exists, plainly. Rookport is one person's game and it is not finished. Without this, "is the burglary payout too low?" and "can anybody actually find the pawn shop?" are guesses. With it they are questions with answers. The game also runs simulated players (see the Player Guide) whose actions land in the same log, and comparing the two is how we tell a balance problem apart from an interface problem.
What is deliberately true of it:
- It is keyed to your character, not to your name or your email, and it is never joined to either except by the operator looking at one player in the admin console.
- It never leaves our server. No third party receives any of it, and no third-party analytics product is involved at any point.
- It is capped and rolls over — the oldest entries are discarded automatically as new ones arrive, so it is a recent window, not a permanent archive.
- Deleting your account deletes your character, and with it the only thing that connects those lines to a person. What remains is an identifier that resolves to nobody, and the admin console cannot open it.
- It is not used to profile you, target you, or make any automated decision about you. There is nothing to target you with.
If you upload a photo for your portrait
Your boss's portrait can be drawn from a photograph of you, if you choose that option. You never have to: the other two routes are describing him in your own words, or letting the game roll a description for you, and both produce a portrait without a photo ever existing.
| What | Why | Kept |
|---|---|---|
| The photograph you upload | It is sent to the illustration service to be redrawn as your character | Minutes. It is deleted the moment the drawing is finished, refused or abandoned — and immediately if you upload a different one or press never mind |
| The portrait that comes back | It is your character's face, shown wherever your character appears | Until you delete the account or replace it |
We keep the picture we drew, never the photograph. That is a design rule, not a policy promise: the file is removed from disk on every terminal outcome, including failures. The illustration service does see the photo in order to redraw it (see §3), and it keeps its own copy of what it generates for seven days.
There is no face recognition, no biometric template, and no matching of your photo against anything or anyone. It is used once, to draw one picture, and then it is gone.
When you file a bug report
A bug report attaches a diagnostics block so the problem can actually be found: your character and level, the block you were standing on, the round, your actions/heat/cash, your browser's user agent, your screen size, your language setting, and the last dozen lines of your in-game action log.
- You are shown the exact contents before you post. Nothing is attached silently.
- Only you and the operator can read it. On the public boards and to other players it appears as "📎 Diagnostics attached" and nothing more.
- Deleting the post deletes the diagnostics with it.
What we do NOT collect
- No advertising. No third-party analytics — no Google Analytics, no pixels, no third-party scripts of any kind. The gameplay log described above is our own, stays on our own server, and is about what your character did in the game, not about you or your browsing.
- No cookies for tracking. The game stores your session token and a few preferences (display settings, and whether to ask before violent acts and big spends) in your browser's own local storage; that never leaves your device except to prove you're logged in.
- No device fingerprinting today. The game design contemplates it as a future anti-cheat measure against duplicate accounts. It is not built and not running. If that changes, this notice will be updated and you will be told before it starts.
- No payment information. There is nothing to buy yet.
- No location data beyond what an IP address implies.
- No data about you from anywhere other than you and your own play.
2. Why we're allowed to hold it
- Your consent, given when you created the account, for running your account and contacting you about the game.
- Necessity for the service — we cannot run a persistent multiplayer game without holding your character's state.
- Legitimate protective interest — rate-limiting by IP and reviewing accounts for duplicate-account and automation abuse protects every other player. This is fraud prevention, and it is narrow and short-lived.
3. Who else sees it
Three service providers, all acting on our instructions:
| Provider | What they get | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Railway — hosting | Everything, because the game runs on their infrastructure | United States |
| Resend — email delivery | Your email address and the contents of the messages we send you | United States |
| Higgsfield — character illustration | The text description of your character, and the photograph you upload if you choose that route — nothing else. No email, no username, no account. They keep the image they generate for seven days | United States |
Your information is therefore stored and processed outside Québec, in the United States, where the legal protections differ from Canada's. We have assessed this: both are established providers under contractual confidentiality and security obligations, the data involved is limited and low-sensitivity, and no financial, health or government-identifier data is held at all. By creating an account you accept this transfer.
We do not sell your personal information, and we do not share it for advertising. We would disclose it only if legally compelled, and only what was compelled.
People, as opposed to companies
Rookport is run by one person, and today he is the only one with access. But the game can grant a key to someone helping — so here is exactly what a key is worth, because "trusted staff" is not an answer:
| Key | Can see | Cannot |
|---|---|---|
| Owner — Mathieu Payment | Everything. Set outside the game, in the server's configuration, so it cannot be granted or taken away from inside it | — |
| Admin — a moderator | Accounts, including email addresses, and can suspend or delete one | Grant or remove anyone else's key |
| Dev — someone tuning the game | What characters do: the gameplay log, the balance figures, the error log, and public usernames | See any email address, open the account list, or change anything at all. It is read-only, and it cannot identify you |
Every key is held by a named person, and every action taken with one is recorded — who did it, to which character, and what changed. A key is never given to a company, an automated system or an advertiser.
4. What other players can see
- Your username, your character's name, and everything your character does in public in the city. Every character's name is unique, so anyone — signed in or not — can ask the game whether a name is free; the answer is only "free" or "taken", never who holds it.
- Anything you write in chat or on the boards.
- Your position in the rankings, and your character's obituary in the graveyard if they're killed.
Other players never see your email address, your IP address, or your bug-report diagnostics.
5. Your rights
Under Québec law you may, at any time:
- Access the personal information we hold about you, and get a copy.
- Correct anything inaccurate or incomplete.
- Delete your account and personal information.
- Withdraw your consent — which in practice means deleting your account, since the game cannot run without it.
- Complain to the Commission d'accès à l'information du Québec if you think we've handled your information badly.
Deletion you can do yourself, from Character → Your account in the game. It asks for your password and takes effect immediately — nothing is queued and nobody has to approve it. For anything else on this list, email matpay@zen-solutions.net and we'll respond within 30 days.
What deletion actually does, precisely, because a vague answer here is worth nothing:
| Erased outright | Kept, and why |
|---|---|
| Your email, username, password hash and consent record | — |
| Every session you have open, anywhere | — |
| Your character and his whole history | — |
| Your portrait, and any photo you uploaded, off our disk | — |
| The diagnostics attached to any bug report you filed (character, tile, round, browser, screen) | — |
| — | Buildings your boss owned go back to the city, unowned. They are property in a shared world, not information about you — destroying them would punch holes in the map every other player is standing on. |
| — | Your board posts stay, with your name replaced by "a departed boss" and the account link removed. Deleting a bug report takes its answer away from the players still reading it, and leaves replies quoting a thread that no longer exists. The words remain; the person does not. |
| — | Gameplay-log lines survive until they roll over, keyed to a character id that no longer exists. With the character gone there is nothing left to join them to — not a name, not an email, not another line — and the admin console cannot open them. They age out on their own. |
Anonymous traces may also remain in the game's historical record — a past round's final standings, a graveyard obituary — because they no longer identify you once the account is gone. We'll tell you exactly what remains when you ask.
6. Security
Passwords are hashed with scrypt and a per-account salt — we could not tell you your password if we wanted to. The site is served over HTTPS. Sessions expire after 30 days and a password reset invalidates every other session. Access to production data is limited to the key-holders described in §3, each of whom is a named person, and every action taken with a key is recorded.
None of this makes a small alpha game a bank. Use a password you don't use anywhere else.
7. Breach
If personal information is lost or exposed in a way that presents a risk of serious injury, we will notify the Commission d'accès à l'information and the affected players promptly, as the law requires, and keep a register of the incident.
8. Young people
Rookport is not for anyone under 14 (see the Terms). That line comes straight from the law we operate under: in Québec, a person 14 or over gives their own consent to the handling of their personal information, while for anyone younger it must come from a parent or guardian. We have no way to collect and verify parental consent, so we don't accept accounts below that age.
We don't knowingly collect information from anyone younger. If we learn we have, we delete it and close the account.
9. Changes
The version and date at the top change when this notice does. Material changes — new categories of information, a new provider, anything like device fingerprinting — will be announced on the in-game boards before they take effect.
Questions, requests, complaints: matpay@zen-solutions.net.