Privacy Policy

What we store, who can see it, and what we send to anyone else.

Last updated 23 September 2026 · NIKS GAMES LLC

1Who we are

Capital Rift is operated by NIKS GAMES LLC, a Nebraska limited liability company based in Omaha, Nebraska, United States. For anything in this policy, including any request about your data, write to support@capitalrift.com.

Under the UK and EU GDPR, NIKS GAMES LLC is the data controller for everything described here.

2Your account

You sign in with Google. Your email address is the only thing that identifies you to us. We ask Google for the openid email scope, so what comes back is your email address and nothing else: no name, no profile picture, no Google account id.

Your account row holds:

There is no game password to store. Sign-in runs entirely through Google.

3Payment

Payments run on Stripe. When you buy a Player Pass we hand you off to a page hosted by Stripe, and you type your card details there, into Stripe, not into us.

What we send to Stripe

• Your email address, so Stripe can send the receipt
• Our internal player id, so the payment can be matched back to your account
• The amount and what it is for
• If you withdraw, the instruction to refund that payment

What we keep afterwards

When a payment succeeds, we write one purchase record: your email address, what you bought, Stripe's session and payment identifiers, the amount, the currency, the status (paid or refunded), and the date. Your receipt number is worked out from that record rather than stored.

If you withdraw from a purchase, four more things join that record: the date you withdrew, Stripe's identifier for the refund, which version of our checkout wording you originally bought under, and the fact that you declared you live in the EU, the EEA or the UK. That last one is the only place we hold anything about where you live, and it is there because it is the declaration that entitled you to withdraw. We do not send it to Stripe, we do not use it for anything else, and we do not try to check it against your address or your IP.

We keep that record permanently. See section 10, because this is the one thing that survives deleting your account.

4Game data

Your save: money, cart, staff, buildings, leases, market orders, and where your character is standing.

We also keep a day-by-day record of how you play: which game actions you used, which in-game refusals you hit (for example "too far away"), when you signed in, and the first time you reached each part of the game. We use it to find where players get stuck or give up so we can make the game easier to learn. It is counts per day, not a keystroke log: no chat, no message content, no IP address. The day-by-day detail is deleted automatically on the schedule in section 9.

If gameplay analytics is on (section 7), the game also notes the moments you seem to get stuck, and how each visit ended. That part has its own switch.

Two parts of your game data are visible to other players by design:

• World edits. When you change the shared world, the change is recorded against your player id and other players can see who made it, in the same way OpenStreetMap keeps edit history. These stay in the world if you leave.
• Presence. While you are online and outdoors, nearby players see your character, display name, and movement. If you are inside a building you are not broadcast at all. Friends can additionally see which city you are in and, when you are offline, when you were last seen.

5Community

Chat messages, forum posts, bug reports, suggestions, votes, and any screenshots you attach are stored on our server.

• Chat and the bug and suggestion boards are visible to every player in the beta. Treat them as public.
• Direct messages are visible to you, the other participant, and to us. They are not end to end encrypted. Do not send anything sensitive.
• Your email address is never shown to other players, anywhere, ever. Other players see your display name only.
• Deleting one of your own messages blanks its text and unlinks its screenshot.
• We use an AI to read the public chat and boards and summarise what players enjoy and what frustrates them, so we know what to fix next. It sees the message text with each author replaced by a code that changes daily, never your name or email, and never direct messages or player channels. Details in section 8.

We filter slurs in display names, titles and channel names. Ordinary swearing is left alone.

6Reporting illegal content

There is a form at capitalrift.com/report for telling us that something here is illegal, as opposed to merely against the rules. The Digital Services Act requires us to have one, to let you use it without an account, and to let you use it without giving your name. This section is what happens to the data in it, and it was missing from this page until 2 August 2026.

When you send a notice we store what you typed: the category, the exact location of the thing you are reporting, and your explanation of why you believe it is illegal. If you filled them in, we also store your name and your email address. Both are optional and the form says so, because for some kinds of report you should be able to stay anonymous. If you give us an email we use it for exactly two things: sending you the reference number, and telling you what we decided.

We also record the IP address the notice came from. That is there to stop somebody flooding the form, it is never shown to anyone, and we delete it after 30 days while keeping the notice itself.

Who can read it: only us. A notice is never shown to other players, and neither is your name. It is deliberately not stored alongside the public bug and suggestion boards, because an allegation that somebody posted something illegal must not be a thing other players can browse.

If you are the person being reported: a notice about you is personal data about you, and you can ask us for it under section 11 like anything else. What we will not hand over is the reporter's identity, because doing so would make the reporting channel unusable for exactly the people who need it most. If we act on a notice, we tell you what we did and why, which the Digital Services Act requires of us separately.

How long: we keep a notice and our decision for 12 months after we close it, so that we can show our working if the decision is challenged, and then we delete it. The IP address goes at 30 days, as above.

Our legal basis for all of this is the legal obligation the Digital Services Act puts on us to run the mechanism at all.

7Telemetry and gameplay analytics

Two separate things, each with its own ask and its own switch: performance telemetry (how your device runs the game) and gameplay analytics (where the game is hard to learn). Saying yes to one is not saying yes to the other.

Performance telemetry

The game measures its own rendering speed so we can find stutters, and sends those measurements to our own server. Nobody else receives them.

There is no identifier in it linking a sample back to your account. But we are not going to claim it is anonymous: your graphics card, screen size and browser together are reasonably distinctive, and it is sent from your connection.

Whether it runs at all

In the EU, the EEA and the UK, telemetry is off until you say yes. The first time you play, the game asks whether you are happy to help; nothing is read from your device and nothing is sent until you answer, saying no costs you nothing, and once you have answered either way you are not asked again. The law there says measuring your device for our own benefit needs your consent rather than our judgement, and we agree with it. Where you are is judged from the country your connection comes from, request by request, and it is not stored.

Everywhere else it is on by default.

Wherever you are, the switch in your account under Privacy and data is the master control, and because it is stored against your account rather than in your browser it applies on every device you sign in from. Flipping it counts as your answer, so the ask will not second-guess it. ?notelemetry on the game URL and cr_no_telemetry in localStorage still work too, for a single browser.

Gameplay analytics

To make the game easier to learn, the game can note the moments where you seem to get stuck, and send them to our own server, linked to your account. This is what it notes:

It is linked to your account, which is what lets us see that a player who got stuck on one step later gave up. Staff can see it in our learning dashboard, including a simple count of how often each player seemed stuck, and it is used only to change the game (a clearer tutorial, a better button, a kinder default). It is never used to decide anything about your account.

In the EU, the EEA and the UK it is off until you say yes, through its own ask, separate from the telemetry one. Everywhere else it is on by default. Either way, the Gameplay analytics switch under Privacy and data (and in the game's settings) turns it off on every device, and what the game had not yet sent is thrown away rather than sent. ?learntrace=0 on the game URL turns it off for one visit.

Every night our server condenses the day into a short summary of where players got stuck, and an AI assistant (Anthropic's Claude, see section 8) reads it and writes notes for us. That summary carries counts, and a few example sequences of in-game steps with a random label in place of any player: no name, no email, no player id, no IP address.

8Who else gets your data

The complete list. There is nothing else.

Not on this list, because we do not use them: third-party analytics of any kind (our gameplay analytics in section 7 is our own and stays on our server), tracking pixels, error-reporting services, and third-party JavaScript. Our fonts are served from our own server rather than Google Fonts, so loading a page does not tell Google you visited.

The two advert platforms, and why they get a hashed email

We buy adverts on TikTok and on Reddit, and we want to know which ones actually bring players in. The honest difficulty is that people meet us on a phone and buy on a computer, hours or days later, and nothing about that second visit says where it came from. A hashed email address is what closes that gap: the platform can tell that the person who bought is the person it showed the advert to, without either of us handing over a readable address.

Two things about how we do it. Nothing from TikTok or Reddit loads in your browser on this site: there is no advert pixel, no advert script and no advert cookie here, and we decided against adding one. And this happens only for accounts outside the EU, the EEA and the UK. Inside them we record nothing and send nothing, which is why there is no consent banner on this site.

Cookies

One sign-in session cookie, which is strictly necessary to keep you logged in, plus a couple of short-lived cookies that exist only during the sign-in handshake itself and protect it against cross-site request forgery. Those are all of them. There are no analytics or advertising cookies, and Cloudflare, who relay our traffic (see the table above), set none here either.

We also use your browser's localStorage. The full list, because we would rather write it out than round it off:

• Your player id, cached so a returning visit does not have to wait on a round trip to find out who you are.
• Your telemetry opt-out, mirrored from your account so a browser that has already been told stays quiet from the first frame.
• A referral code, if you arrived from someone's link.
• A flag that you have been here before.
• Where you last left the camera, so the world opens where you closed it.
• Your window layout: which panels you pinned, and where.
• One game setting (whether to auto-buy seeds when planting).
• A note that you just finished the tutorial, written when the tutorial hands you to the real world and cleared the moment it is read, so the city picker knows to open. Added 7 August 2026.
• Whether telemetry may run here without asking, set when you answer the telemetry ask, or when you connect from somewhere the ask is not required (section 7). Added 25 August 2026.
• The advert you arrived from, if you reached us by clicking one of our TikTok or Reddit adverts: the click identifier and the campaign numbers, kept for 28 days so that a purchase you make later can be matched to it. Only stored if you are outside the EU, the EEA and the UK; inside them it rides the address bar for that one visit and is never written to your device. Added 2 September 2026.
• The unsent end of a visit, only while gameplay analytics is on: what the game noted in the last minute and had not yet sent, so that if the tab crashes or is closed without warning, the next visit can report how the last one ended. Removed when a visit ends normally, and thrown away if you turn gameplay analytics off. Added 23 September 2026.

Four more entries live in sessionStorage, which your browser empties by itself when the tab closes: a flag that keeps the loading screen up for one navigation while the tutorial moves you into the city, whether you dismissed the low-graphics-mode notice, so it does not nag you twice in one sitting, and, if you clicked the telemetry ask or the gameplay-analytics ask away with its close button, a note not to re-ask this sitting (one for each).

One correction to something this page used to say. It said there were four of these and that none of them ever left your device. There are more (the list above is current as of 25 August 2026), and one does leave: your player id is sent to us once when you sign in, so that any progress you made before you had an account gets attached to it. The rest genuinely stay in your browser. Corrected 2 August 2026, and when the game gains a new entry, updating this list is part of shipping it.

9How long we keep it

Our application logs record player ids for actions like granting access, but contain no email addresses and no IP addresses. They are capped by size rather than by age, which in practice means days.

Two of these numbers were wrong until 25 July 2026. This page said access logs were kept 14 days when we had already cut them to 5, and said telemetry lasted about three weeks when the file it is written to fills up in well under a day. Both errors meant we were keeping less than we told you, not more, but the numbers were still wrong and they are now the real ones.

10Deleting your account

You can delete your account from the account screen. Here is exactly what happens, including the parts that are not deletion.

Erased

Your game save, cart, bank accounts and transactions, market orders, friendships and channel memberships, our day-by-day record of how you played, your tutorial progress, and everything gameplay analytics noted about you are deleted outright.

Anonymised

Your account row survives with the display name Deleted Player and your email address removed. Your player number stays attached to that row, because that is what stops the number being handed to somebody else.

Released

Buildings and businesses you owned go back to being unowned.

Kept

We keep it because it is the record of a completed sale: we need it for tax and accounting, and to answer a bank if a payment is ever disputed. Stripe holds its own copy of the same transaction independently of us. This is the one carve-out to an erasure request, and we would rather write it down than let "we delete your data" quietly mean something narrower.

The whole row survives, so if you had already withdrawn, the withdrawal details in section 3 survive with it, including your EU, EEA or UK declaration. Two practical things follow. Your purchase is unhooked from your account when you delete, so the self-serve withdraw button stops working even if your window is still open: withdraw first, then delete. And if you did delete first, the right is still yours and the record is still there, so email us from the address you bought with and we will refund you.

Also kept:

• World edits, attached to the now-anonymous account, because they are part of the shared world other players are still using.
• Chat and forum posts, shown as from Deleted Player. If you want specific messages gone, delete them before deleting your account.
• Screenshots you attached, unless you delete the message they belong to.

11Your rights

If you are in the UK, the EU or the EEA, you can ask us for a copy of your data, to correct it, to delete it, to take it elsewhere, or to object to how we use it. Email support@capitalrift.com and we will answer within 30 days. It is a small operation, so it will usually be much faster.

Three of those you do not have to ask us for at all, because they are buttons in your account:

• A copy of your data, and taking it elsewhere. Privacy and data then Download my data gives you a JSON file built live from the database: profile, purchases, save, money, property, the messages you wrote, and your world edits. It holds only messages you wrote, because the other half of a conversation is somebody else's data.
• Objecting to telemetry or to gameplay analytics. One switch each, in the same place, described in section 7.
• Deletion. The danger zone, and section 10 spells out exactly what it does and does not remove.

The purchase-record carve-out in section 10 is the one limit on erasure, and it rests on our need to keep accounting records and to defend legal claims.

Our lawful bases: performing our contract with you (running your account, delivering what you paid for), our legitimate interests (keeping the game working, preventing abuse, understanding performance problems), your consent where you have opted in (notification emails, which are off by default), and legal obligation (keeping records of sales, and running the illegal-content reporting mechanism in section 6).

Where we rely on your consent you can take it back at any time, without giving a reason and without it affecting anything we did while you had given it. In practice that means the notification toggles in your account, and, in the EU, the EEA and the UK, performance telemetry and gameplay analytics.

Nothing here makes automated decisions about you. Our learning dashboard counts how often each player seemed stuck (section 7), and staff use it only to make the game easier to learn; no algorithm decides anything about your account, and nothing is scored to decide whether you keep it. Two filters run automatically as you type, one masking slurs and one refusing links, and both tell you when they act; neither records anything against you. If your account is ever restricted, a person read it and decided.

If you are unhappy with our answer you can complain to your local data protection authority. In the UK that is the ICO.

Sending your data to the United States

We are a US company and our servers are in the United States, so using Capital Rift means your data is transferred there. Under UK and EU data protection law that transfer needs a legal basis, so here is ours.

Every company in section 8 that receives your data is certified under the EU-US Data Privacy Framework, and its UK extension, which the European Commission has formally decided offers adequate protection. That covers Google, Stripe, GitHub and Cloudflare. Anthropic, added to section 8 on 23 September 2026, is the one we are still confirming: what we send it is the nightly summary, which names nobody, and the text of public board posts every player can already read. For our own servers, we are the controller and we are the ones handling it, so what protects you there is this policy plus the rights in section 11, which we honour regardless of where you live.

12Children

Capital Rift is not intended for children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect anything from them. If you are between 13 and 16 and live in the EU or the UK, you need a parent or guardian's permission to use it. If you believe a child has an account, email us and we will remove it.

13Security

Everything runs over HTTPS. Sign-in is Google's, so there is no game password for us to lose. Card details never reach us. The game API is locked to your own account, so one player cannot act as another.

What we will not claim: we are a small operation, not a bank. No service is unbreakable, and we are not going to print a paragraph of security theatre here. If something happens that puts your data at risk, we will tell you.

14Changes

If this policy changes we will update the date at the top, and tell you in the game if the change is significant. The game is in active development, so it will change.