Zero Runway · Terms and policies

Privacy policy

Last updated: 30 October 2026

Who is responsible

Sam Larsen-Disney is responsible for the personal information processed by the Zero Runway website, game activation and game-delivery service.

For privacy enquiries, contact sam@zerorunwaygame.com.

Information we use and why

When you browse or download the game, our hosting and delivery providers may process your IP address, request details and security logs to serve the website and files and protect them against abuse. We rely on our legitimate interests in operating a secure, reliable service for this processing.

For purchases, we receive your purchase email address and customer details from Paddle and store your email address, Paddle customer and transaction identifiers, payment status, currency and total, licence identifiers and status, and checkout-session records. We use these to fulfil your purchase, provide downloads and support, and manage refunds. Processing necessary to deliver your order is based on our contract with you.

We also store payment event identifiers and delivery-processing records to prevent duplicate fulfilment and recover failed deliveries. Our basis is our legitimate interest in reliable fulfilment and preventing fraud. Where records must be retained to meet a legal obligation, that obligation is our basis.

If you contact us, we receive your email address and the information you include, such as your order reference and description of an issue. We use it to respond to you and resolve your request, based on our contract with you or our legitimate interest in answering enquiries.

Paddle collects checkout, billing, payment and tax information as merchant of record. We do not receive your full payment-card details. Paddle explains its separate processing in its privacy notice.

Activation and licence recovery

When you activate the full game, it sends your licence key and a hashed identifier derived from your computer’s system identifier to our activation service. We store the hashed identifier against your licence, together with the first activation and most recent successful activation or refresh times. The raw system identifier is not sent to our activation service. The hash identifies a device and is not anonymous.

We use these records to check your licence, enforce the three-computer limit, issue time-limited offline access and release a device slot when you deactivate it. Providing activation is necessary to perform our contract with you; preventing unauthorised licence sharing is also our legitimate interest. Without this information, we cannot activate the full game. Activation does not send your saved games or gameplay history.

We use your purchase email address to deliver licence keys and resend them when you request recovery. These transactional messages are sent through Postmark and include your licence keys and purchase reference. We store delivery status, attempt counts, message identifiers and timestamps to manage delivery and retries. Open tracking and link tracking are disabled for these messages.

Recovery requests store a hash of the submitted email address and a request time to limit repeated requests to one per hour. This protects the recovery service against abuse. Recovery only sends keys to the email address associated with the purchase. If a licence or device check prevents access incorrectly, contact us for help.

Cookies and information on your computer

When you begin checkout, we set an essential cookie named zr_purchase. It links that browser to your purchase so you can retrieve your licence and downloads. It expires after seven days. The server stores a hash of the session token. Deleting or blocking the cookie can prevent access to the purchase-complete page for that order.

This storefront does not include advertising or analytics trackers. Paddle may use cookies and similar technologies in its checkout for payment processing and fraud prevention; see its privacy notice for details.

The game also saves your licence key, signed offline-access token and a time-check record locally on your computer. These support offline play and licence validation. Deactivating the computer removes these local activation files; saved games remain on your computer.

Service providers

Vercel hosts the website and APIs; Neon stores purchase, licence, device and delivery records; Cloudflare provides download storage, delivery, domain services and support-email forwarding; and Postmark sends purchase and recovery emails. Support messages are forwarded to and handled in Gmail, provided by Google. These services receive the information needed for their respective functions. Paddle handles payments as merchant of record and processes payment information under its own privacy notice.

International transfers

Our providers process information in the United States and other countries where they and their subprocessors operate, as well as the UK and Europe. These countries may have different data-protection laws. Transfer mechanisms in the providers’ published data-protection terms include adequacy arrangements, where applicable, and approved contractual safeguards, including Standard Contractual Clauses with the UK Addendum for restricted UK transfers.

You can read the relevant safeguards in the Vercel data-processing terms, Databricks/Neon data-processing terms, Cloudflare data-processing terms and Postmark data-processing terms. Google describes its adequacy and contractual transfer mechanisms in its data-transfer framework notice. The mechanism applicable to a transfer depends on the provider, destination and service. Contact us for further information or a copy of the relevant safeguards.

How long information is kept

We determine retention by the purpose of each record, whether your licence remains active, unresolved support or payment issues, and applicable legal record-keeping and claim periods. There is no single deletion period for all information.

Purchase and licence records: we keep the information needed to verify ownership, deliver downloads and recover your licence while we provide those services. After a refund or the end of the relationship, records may still be needed to record revocation, resolve a dispute, prevent duplicate fulfilment or meet a legal obligation. Any continuing retention is assessed against those purposes.

Device records: an active device record is kept while that computer occupies a licence slot. Successful deactivation removes that device’s registration from the active database. Local offline-access tokens expire 60 days after their last successful issue or renewal; their expiry does not itself delete other purchase or activation records.

Checkout and recovery: the purchase cookie and associated access claim are valid for seven days. The recovery-request limit lasts one hour. These are access and rate-limit periods, not automatic database-deletion deadlines. Retention of expired claims and recovery-request hashes is assessed by whether they are still needed to investigate delivery issues, link a transaction or prevent abuse.

Delivery, support and security: payment events, email-delivery records, support correspondence and operational logs are retained according to whether they are needed to complete or investigate delivery, resolve your enquiry, prevent abuse or handle a dispute. Records no longer needed for these purposes are subject to deletion or anonymisation; our application does not currently apply an automatic age-based purge to these database records.

Postmark’s published default retention for message content and activity is 45 days, although account settings can change that period. It retains suppression records, such as bounced or unsubscribed addresses, for longer to prevent unwanted delivery. See Postmark’s retention information. Provider logs and backups follow the relevant provider’s retention arrangements, so deleting an active record does not necessarily immediately remove every backup copy. Paddle retains its own payment records under its privacy notice.

You can ask us about retention of a particular record or request deletion using the contact details above. We will explain if information must be kept for an ongoing service, legal obligation or other applicable exception.

Your rights

Depending on applicable law, you may request access to your information, correction, deletion, restriction of processing or a portable copy. These rights are subject to legal conditions; for example, we may need to keep records required by law.

Your right to object: you may object to processing based on legitimate interests by contacting us at the address above.

Contact us using the details above to make a request. We may need to verify your identity. You can complain to the UK Information Commissioner’s Office or your local data-protection authority.

Updates

We will update this page when our processing changes and show the revision date above. See also our terms of service and refund policy.