1. Who is responsible for what
The data controller for this website, the store and your customer account is HaxHost ("we"), the operator of this service. Contact: [email protected].
For data about players inside a customer's room, the customer is the controller and we are the processor. The customer decides whether chat history is kept, whether player statistics are collected, and whether a public statistics page is published. We act on those instructions. If you are a player with a question about a specific room, the room's operator is the right person to ask; we will help them respond.
2. If you are a customer
2.1 What we hold and why
| Data | Why | Lawful basis |
|---|---|---|
| Name, email address, billing address, phone number | To create your account, invoice you and meet accounting obligations | Contract; legal obligation |
| Orders, invoices, payment records (never card numbers) | Billing, tax and accounting records | Contract; legal obligation |
| Support tickets and their attachments | To answer you, and to keep a history of what we changed for you | Contract; legitimate interest in a support record |
| Client-area and panel login records, including IP address | Security, fraud prevention, and diagnosing access problems | Legitimate interest in securing the service |
| Your room configuration, and the console/audit log of actions taken in the panel | To run your rooms and show you what happened in them | Contract |
| Language and currency preference | To show the site the way you chose | Legitimate interest |
We do not sell your data, we do not share it for advertising, and we do not build advertising profiles. We do not use automated decision-making that has a legal effect on you.
2.2 Payments
Payments go through the provider you choose at checkout — currently PayPal, cryptocurrency, paysafecard, or Amazon gift cards. Those providers process your payment details under their own privacy policies. We never receive or store card or bank details. We record only that a payment of a given amount succeeded, and the reference needed to reconcile it.
2.3 How long we keep it
- Account and billing records: for as long as you are a customer, then for the period applicable accounting and tax law requires us to keep them.
- Support tickets: 3 years after closure.
- Login and security logs: 12 months.
- Room configuration and console history: while the service is active, then deleted with the service (see the terms for the post-termination window).
3. If you are a player in a hosted room
You are not our customer, you have no account with us, and you are almost certainly reading this because someone linked it. Here is exactly what a HaxHost-hosted room can hold about you.
3.1 Your IP address is stored only as an irreversible hash
To connect to any Haxball room, your IP address is necessarily visible to the machine hosting it — that is how network connections work, for every host, not just us.
What is different here is that we do not store it. Before anything is written down, the address is put through a keyed one-way hash. What is retained is that hash, which cannot be turned back into your address. It exists so a room operator can ban a disruptive player and have the ban stick.
Consequence, stated plainly: neither the room's operator nor our own staff can read your IP address out of the platform. We cannot hand it to a room operator who asks, and we cannot hand it to another player. We consider this the correct design for a game where people fall out with each other, and we will not add a way around it.
3.2 What else a room may hold
| Data | When | Kept for |
|---|---|---|
| Your in-game nickname | Always — it is what the room shows other players | While the room's history is kept |
| Chat messages you send in the room | Only if the room's operator has chat history enabled | A rolling 30 days, then automatically deleted |
| Match statistics — goals, assists, wins, ratings | Only if the operator has player statistics enabled | While the service is active |
| Hashed IP address (see 3.1) | For ban enforcement | While the service is active |
| Kicks and bans applied to you, and by whom | When a moderator or script acts | While the service is active |
Public statistics pages. A room operator can publish their room's statistics at a public web address. If they do, the nicknames and match statistics on that page are public — that is the point of it. We ask search engines not to index those pages, but a link is a link and anyone holding it can open it. If you would rather not appear, ask the room's operator.
A room operator is responsible for telling their players what their room collects. If you are an operator: enabling chat history or statistics is a decision with privacy consequences for your players, and it is your job to tell them.
3.3 Haxball itself
A hosted room runs on Haxball's official platform. Joining one means your client talks to Haxball's own matchmaking and signalling infrastructure, and that is governed by Haxball's privacy policy, not ours. We have no control over it and cannot answer for it.
4. This website
4.1 Analytics
We use Umami, self-hosted on our own infrastructure. It sets no cookies, stores no identifier that follows you between sites, and sends nothing to a third-party advertising network. It records aggregate page views, referrers, and coarse country-level location derived from your IP address without storing the address.
4.2 Cookies and local storage
We use no advertising or tracking cookies. What is set:
- Session cookies in the client area and control panel — strictly necessary to keep you logged in. Without them the service cannot function.
- Local storage on the ping test — the ping test writes your measured
results (
hh:ping:v1) and, if you click a location, your choice (hh:pick:v1) into your own browser, so checkout can pre-select the fastest location for you. It stays on your device, contains no identifier, expires within minutes, and clearing site data removes it.
4.3 The ping test
The ping test opens a real WebRTC data channel from your browser to each of our locations and times the round trip. Establishing that connection reveals your IP address to the responder, as any connection would. We use the timings; we do not store the address, and we do not associate the result with you.
4.4 Bot protection
Our forms, and the point where a room obtains its authorisation from Haxball, are protected by Google reCAPTCHA. Google processes data about your interaction to tell humans from bots, under Google's privacy policy. We cannot remove it from the Haxball authorisation step — Haxball requires it.
5. Who else touches the data
| Who | What for | What they see |
|---|---|---|
| Cloudflare | CDN, TLS and DDoS protection in front of the site | Connection metadata for requests to our websites, including IP address |
| PayPal / paysafecard / Amazon / the crypto network you choose | Taking payment | Whatever that payment method requires |
| Google (reCAPTCHA) | Telling humans from bots | Interaction signals from the protected form or step |
| Haxball | The platform the rooms run on | Player connection data, when a player joins a room |
| Our server providers | The machines rooms and the site run on | Nothing in the ordinary course; they host encrypted infrastructure we operate |
Our billing system, control panel, analytics and databases run on infrastructure we operate ourselves rather than on third-party SaaS. We may also disclose data where the law requires it, or to protect our rights or the safety of others.
6. Where the data is
Our billing and control-plane systems are in the European Union. Rooms run wherever you asked them to run — the entire product is choosing a location close to your players, so a room in Brazil or Singapore processes that room's data there. Cloudflare and Google operate globally.
Where data is processed outside the EU/EEA, we rely on the data protection terms our providers offer as part of their standard contracts, which for Cloudflare and Google include the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses.
7. Your rights
If you are in the EU/EEA or the UK you can ask us to: give you a copy of your data; correct it; delete it; restrict or object to how we use it; or send it to you in a portable format. Where we rely on consent, you can withdraw it at any time.
Ask at [email protected] and we will respond within one month. We may need to confirm who you are first — not to obstruct you, but because handing someone's data to the wrong person is the failure that matters most.
Two honest limits:
- We cannot delete what we are legally required to retain, such as invoices.
- We cannot produce your IP address, because we never stored it (section 3.1). A hash cannot be reversed on request.
If you are a player asking about a specific room, start with that room's operator — they are the controller. If you are unhappy with how we have handled a request, you can complain to your data protection authority — the one in the country where you live or work.
8. Security
TLS everywhere, encrypted internal links between our own machines, mutual-TLS authentication between the control plane and the servers running rooms, each room isolated in its own process with its own resource limits, hashed player IP addresses, and administrative access limited to the people who need it.
The current platform was rebuilt from the ground up rather than upgraded, which is why rooms are isolated per process and why player IP addresses are never written down in readable form. No security claim is a guarantee: if a breach affecting your personal data occurs, we will notify you and the relevant supervisory authority as the law requires.
9. Children
The service is sold to people aged 18 or over, and we do not knowingly collect account data from children. Haxball is played by minors, and a room operator collecting player data should bear that in mind when deciding what to enable and publish. If you believe a child's data has reached us in a way it should not have, tell us and we will remove it.
10. Changes
The date at the top of this page is when it last changed. Material changes will be announced in the client area or by email before they take effect.