LAST UPDATED: 09/25/2023
This provides an overview in plain language of our outlook on privacy, what steps we take to defend the privacy of our user's information, and examples of how we internally use some of the data to help improve the game. For some of the finer legal points, we also direct you to the related content within the End User License Agreement.

What are you doing with my Private Information?
What information do you collect?
What if I want to remove my information?
What about web cookies?
How is my password handled?
Contact

What are you doing with my Private Information?

We collect personal information from our users, primarily for contact, billing and administrative purposes. For example: helping users to recover lost passwords, to make use of our support ticket system, or to let us contact them in the event of a policy violation or a billing problem.

We DO NOT sell our user's personally identifiable information. We do not disclose or distribute personal information outside of our company unless legally obligated to do so by law enforecement, or if it should become necessary due to an administrative issue, billing issue (collections agency), lawsuit or other legal matter.

Our company does offer certain low-volume email lists and event announcement systems designed to help users stay aware of the latest news and updates related to our products. Our users can easily choose to disable or avoid these lists; they are "double-opt-in" and include simple unsubscription mechanics with every email, which will permanently remove the given user from the respective newsletter or event list. We handle your email address with care and security, and send our messages via top-tier, secure providers like Amazon SES.

We may use aggregated user data to gather statistical information about our userbase, primarily for internal usage, but we may publicly share this information as long as no personally identifiable information is included. For example, we might choose to share information on the percentages of our total userbase that plays on different platforms, or uses phones vs tablets, to inform our users or help the greater development community. This sort of information only shows trends across large numbers of users, nothing related to the individual.

What information do you collect?

Generally speaking, the most critical personally identifiable information we record is that which users supply when creating an account or subscribing to our game. This includes data like their name, email address, credit card information, etc. This data is carefully stored on our secure servers. Credit card information in particular is rigorously encrypted and purged from our records as soon as it is not needed (subscription cancellation, etc). In general, we ask for the minimum amount of information needed.

Beyond this, the game client also provides information to our servers, such as the platform of the connecting client and other data that we may deem necessary for development, debugging or aggregated analysis purposes. We attempt to minimize the amount of information transmitted by the client, and try avoid any personally critical information.

All actions within our games may also be recorded, including all text chat (private or otherwise), which is temporarily archived for administrative reasons (allowing response to in-game abuse complaints, etc). We may also record every motion within the game itself, even including mouse inputs or user interface usage. This helps us identify areas of confusion for new users, and improve our user interface based on real-world usage information. For instance, we might use this kind of information to draw the initial flight paths of the last 1,000 new users, to get an idea of how they interact with their first flight.

We also record and store general network and web-service information, such as your IP address, your browser agent, and other basic information. Some of this may be shared with third-party analytics providers, such as Google Analytics.

The Mobile (iOS and Android) versions also utilize the Facebook and Firebase SDKs, both of which are included to allow us to use the analytics features and machine-learning enhanced advertising systems of Facebook and Google, respectively. These SDK integrations are normal and commonplace for the mobile game industry, which largely depends on Google and Facebook to acquire new customers. We do not directly control what data is sent by these third-party SDKs, but we have "generally" configured them to be more privacy-oriented; and we do periodically update them to the latest versions, as the SDKs change to better adhere to various evolving national and international privacy policies.

Lastly, if you log into a site or service of ours using a social network account, or utilize "like" or "+1" or "tweet" buttons on our websites or services, we may receive some basic information about your social network profile and activity, depending on how you have configured your social network privacy settings. We may correlate and track some of this information, to get a better understanding of who our users are. To restrict access to this data, you will need to review the respective social network provider's privacy policy and guidelines on data safety.

What if I want to remove my account information?

If you wish to remove your personal information from your account, you may choose to do so at any time by simply logging into the account on the website and removing the related information from "Account Info" and related areas. As mentioned previously, as soon as you cancel any subscription, your credit card information is instantly purged from our database. Deleting your account and characters are generally not necessary to remove personal information.

If you wish for your entire account and character data to be permanently deleted, you may simply log into the account on this website (www.vendetta-online.com), then navigate to "Account Info", then "Configure Personal Information" (enter your password and pass the CAPTCHA), and then use the "Delete Account" button. This may also send a one-time confirmation code (2FA) to your email address of record. After full confirmation the system will add your account to a "deletion queue" that will take place within 30 days. Any time during that 30 day period, you may log in and abort the deletion process. However, once the account is deleted, your information is permanently removed and will not be restored: BE VERY SURE YOU WISH TO DELETE ALL CHARACTERS AND DATA. As mentioned above, deleting an entire account is not usually necessary to remove personal information.

Mobile-Specific Instructions: You may also trigger the permanent account-deletion process from within a mobile version of the game, by first logging into Vendetta Online using the mobile device you have used to play the game, then logging into the account that you wish to delete, and then visiting Options, Purchasing, Account Status and choosing "Delete Account".

Personal information may also persist in our system for a period of time, in the form of archival backups that are maintained for disaster recovery and other purposes. Aggregated data that is NOT personally identifiable, such as (but not limited to) statistical information on the number of users online, or those playing on a particular OS, may be stored indefinitely.

What about web cookies?

We do use cookies to enable login features on our website. This contains a small package of information that allows our website to let users who have securely logged into the game site, access their game information and other features.

The cookies used for website login are not used for any other purpose; for instance, we do not use them to track activity on other sites. They purely exist to secure your access to this site.

How is my password handled?

Passwords are stored encoded using a proprietary high-CPU-cost hashing algorithm (with some similarities to "bcrypt"). This algorithm is one-way, so neither our people nor our servers ever record the plain text nature of your actual password (we never see what it is), nor do we ever transmit your plain-text password over a network. We allow recovery of passwords by sending a secure URL to your email address of record, where you may then define a new password (which, again, we do not store in any plaintext form).

Your password is only transmitted in an encrypted form between the game client and server, or via SSL encryption on the website. Both the game and the website also include features intended to resist remote brute-force attacks on passwords. Nonetheless, to improve your account security, we recommend using strong randomized passwords of the maximum length, and avoiding re-using passwords between sites.

Contact

Although we strongly recommend that you contact us using your personal Vendetta Online account via the website Support Ticket system, if necessary the other contact methods below may also be used. In general, the Support Ticket mechanism will have the fastest response, and also helps protect your message from being lost to a spam filter or other network-related issue.

Email address: support (at) guildsoftware (dot) com

Physical address:
Guild Software, Inc.
10437 Innovation Drive, Suite 465
Wauwatosa, WI 53226

Phone number to leave a contact voicemail:
(414)259-0959