Privacy policy.

Who runs this

NetRacer is made and operated by one person, Alex Wilkinson, in Canada. There is no company behind it, no advertising in it, and no analytics or tracking scripts on this site.

Your NetRacer account holds no name, no email address, no phone number and no payment details: nothing that identifies you as a person. It is a driver name you invented and a hash that recognises your Google sign-in. The one thing here that can point at a real person is the IP address your connection comes from, which any internet service sees and which is covered further down.

What the account stores

Signing in uses your Google account, and we ask Google for the least it can give: a single identifier that says you are the same person who signed in last time. We do not receive your email address, your name, or your photo, and we never see your password. Signing in gives us no access to your Gmail, Drive, contacts or anything else in your Google account.

Even that identifier is not stored as-is. It is put through a one-way hash before it is written down, so what sits in the database cannot be turned back into your Google account by us or by anyone who ever stole the file. It is only good for recognising you at the next sign-in.

You choose a NetRacer driver name when you first sign in. It is permanent, it is public, and it is what appears in game and on every board. It is the only name we have for you.

The flip side of holding nothing: if you lose access to your Google account, your NetRacer account goes with it. There is no recovery, because there is nothing we could check you against.

What playing records

Every verified lap on an official server is recorded: the track, your time, your checkpoint splits, and the stream of inputs that produced the lap. The input stream is kept so the run can be re-driven to verify it, watched as a replay, and raced against as a ghost. This is the ladder, and it is public by design.

A lap reaches the board only after the server re-drives your inputs and reproduces the run exactly, so what is stored is the run you actually drove and nothing inferred about you.

Text chat sent on a server is processed for moderation and can be stored with a report.

Laps driven on LAN servers, servers other people host, and tracks you host yourself for practice are not sent to us at all.

Network and device information

Game servers and this website see the IP address your connection comes from, as any internet service does. It is used to run the game and to keep the ladder honest: laps set by two players connecting from the same address are recorded without counting, because from the outside they are indistinguishable from one person running two clients.

The game client sends no hardware identifier of any kind. What travels to a game server when you join is a one-minute, single-use ticket that proves you are your account and is worthless anywhere else.

Server logs contain IP addresses and connection events and are kept for a short period for debugging and abuse investigation.

Cookies

This site sets one cookie, and only after you sign in: a session cookie that keeps you signed in. There are no advertising cookies, no third-party cookies, and nothing tracks you across other websites.

Who it is shared with

Nobody. Your data is not sold, rented, or handed to advertisers or data brokers.

Two companies necessarily process some of it for the service to exist: Google, which handles the sign-in itself, and DigitalOcean, which hosts the servers this all runs on. Your driver name, your times and your ladder standing are public on this website because that is the point of a ladder.

How long it is kept

We do not quietly delete your times, your driver name or your ladder standing: a record that removed itself would not be a record, so we keep them for as long as we keep running NetRacer.

That is not a promise they will survive. NetRacer is a free game in active development on a small server, nothing here is guaranteed to be backed up, and progress and standings can be lost. Do not treat your rank as something that cannot disappear. The terms say the same in more detail.

Ban records are kept for as long as a ban stands, because a ban that expires from the database is not a ban.

Deleting your account

There is very little to delete, by design: no email, no name, no contact details. What exists is the hashed identifier that connects your Google sign-in to your NetRacer account. Ask in the NetRacer Discord and it is removed, which permanently disconnects the two.

Nothing you drove is deleted. Your driver name and every verified time stay where they are on the boards. They are simply no longer connected to a real person, because a world record is a fact about a track that other drivers measured themselves against, not only about you.

One exception, stated plainly: if you are banned, that hash stays for as long as the ban stands. It names nobody, but without it, deleting an account would be the cheapest way to undo a ban.

You can also revoke NetRacer's access to your Google account at any time from your Google account settings, which stops you being able to sign in.

Changes

If this policy changes in a way that affects what is collected, the change will be announced in the Discord before it takes effect.