Data protection

This page sets out how Evidence City handles personal data under the UK and EU General Data Protection Regulation. Our Privacy page says the same things in fewer words; this one is the formal version, with the legal bases and your rights spelled out.

Who is responsible

Evidence City decides why and how your personal data is used, which makes it the controller for that data. The operator's contact details are on our contact page, and that address reaches whoever handles these requests.

Why we use your data, and on what basis

To give you an account and let you play — because we cannot provide the service you asked for without it. Basis: performance of a contract.

To run a game session — the station you have reached, items collected, notes, hints used, time taken. Without this the game cannot continue across a refresh. Basis: performance of a contract.

To take payment for a paid case — Basis: performance of a contract, and a legal obligation for the records tax law requires us to keep.

To show you on a leaderboard, and to publish your reviews — only if you choose it. Basis: consent, which you may withdraw at any time in Settings without losing anything else.

To keep the service working and safe — diagnostics when something breaks, and checks against cheating or abuse. Basis: our legitimate interest in a service that runs and is fair. We use the least data that answers the question.

To review a case before it is published — Basis: our legitimate interest in not sending players somewhere unsafe or unlawful.

What we hold

Account identifiers from our sign-in provider, and a display name and short bio if you enter them. Game session data while a session is live. Purchase records. Reviews and leaderboard entries you have chosen to make public. Diagnostic records of errors. Pictures and story text you upload as an author.

We never receive your password, and we never receive your card number.

Your location

A station can unlock when you arrive somewhere. That check happens on your own device. Your position is not transmitted to us and is not stored. You can refuse the permission and unlock stations manually instead. Because we never receive it, there is no location data for us to disclose, export or erase.

Your camera

Two kinds of puzzle ask you to point your camera at something. The picture is
processed entirely on your own device — read frame by frame to work out what
it is looking at, then discarded. No image is recorded, transmitted or stored,
and because we never receive one there is no camera data for us to disclose,
export or erase. The browser asks for the permission and you can refuse it;
the cost is that those puzzles cannot be completed.

Who else handles it

• Clerk — sign-in and account records
• Stripe — payments. Card details go to Stripe directly and never reach us
• Railway — hosting, the database, and the session store
• Anthropic — analyses a picture when an author asks the Creator Studio to describe one. This affects creators using that tool, never players
• OpenStreetMap — map tiles are fetched by your browser directly, so your IP address is visible to them whenever a map is on screen

Each acts on our instructions under a contract, except OpenStreetMap, which your browser contacts itself.

Data leaving the UK and EEA

Some of these providers operate outside the UK and EEA, including in the United States. Where data is transferred there, it relies on the safeguards in the provider's own terms, such as the standard contractual clauses approved for that purpose.

How long we keep things

• Game sessions expire automatically 48 hours after they start
• Your account and its content stay until you delete them, which you can do yourself at any time from Account, or from the delete your account page
• Purchase records are kept as long as tax law requires, which is longer than your account, and cannot be deleted on request
• Diagnostic records are kept only as long as they are useful for fixing the fault they describe
• A published case stays available while it is published and for as long afterwards as we need to serve people who already bought it

Your rights

You have the right to:

• Know what we hold about you and get a copy of it
• Correct anything wrong
• Erase it, where we have no overriding reason or legal duty to keep it
• Restrict how we use it while a dispute about it is resolved
• Object to any use we base on legitimate interests
• Portability — receive what you gave us in a machine-readable form
• Withdraw consent for anything we do on that basis, such as the leaderboard, without it affecting what was done before you withdrew

How to use them

Write to the address on our contact page and say what you want. We answer within one month. If a request is unusually complex we may take longer, and we will tell you why before the month is out. We may need to check you are who you say you are before we act.

There is no charge, unless a request is repetitive or excessive.

If you are unhappy

Tell us first and we will try to put it right. You also have the right to complain to a data protection supervisory authority — in the UK the Information Commissioner's Office, and in the EU the authority for the country you live in. You do not have to come to us first.

Decisions made about you

We do not make decisions about you by automated means alone, and we do not profile you. Being placed on a leaderboard is a ranking of scores, not a decision about you.

Children

Evidence City is not intended for children under 13. If you believe a child has given us personal data, write to us and we will remove it.

Changes

If this notice changes, the date at the top changes with it. Where a change materially affects your rights we will say so in the app rather than expecting you to notice.