Privacy

Account information

An account stores your display name, email address, password hash, join date, and account preferences. Passwords are hashed rather than stored as readable text. Your email address is not displayed on your public profile.

If you sign in with Google, Google tells the site your email address, your name and an identifier for your Google account. The site keeps the identifier with your account to recognise you next time and offers your first name as a display name, which you can change; an account you make this way has no password until you set one with Forgot your password.

Your profile name, biography, location, website, signature, community activity, and join date are public when you provide them. Avoid adding personal information you do not want to publish.

Email

The site emails your sign-in address: a password link when you ask for one; membership you buy, are given or win, a membership ended early, and reaching Captain; and, unless you turn them off, urgent game notices from your worlds and the other notifications you choose by email, reminders a week before your membership ends and when it has ended, and about your airlines after a week and a month away from the site, and before a world winds one down for inactivity. Each reminder and notification email has a link that stops them without signing in, and Notification settings turns each on or off. Requests to Contact the team are emailed to the team. Email is sent through SMTP2GO, which handles the addresses and messages to deliver them.

Community content

Forum posts, forum images, likes, and airline dispatches are public. The site stores discussion follows and reading history to provide notifications and unread indicators. Editing a post preserves earlier text in its edit history. Removing a post hides its content from public view; it does not erase it from storage.

Chat messages in General can be read by anyone, and those in a world's channel by everyone who can see that world. While you have the site or game open, other people see that you are online and which world's game you have open, unless you choose to appear offline in chat or in Settings. Administrators can still see members who appear offline. Deleting a chat message removes it from view; the team can still see it. Which messages you have read in a channel is kept in your browser, and in a direct conversation on the site, so every device you use knows. Emoji reactions show who reacted.

Uploaded chat images are visible to the same people as their messages after approval. While checking or held for review, only the sender and team can see the image and caption. The site stores a resized still image with embedded metadata removed. Held or deleted image files are erased after 90 days; moderation records retain their hashes.

GIFs in chat come from KLIPY. When you open GIF search, your browser sends KLIPY what you search for and an identifier made for you that does not reveal your account, and loads the results from KLIPY; a GIF in a message is loaded from KLIPY by everyone who sees it. KLIPY's own privacy policy covers what it does with those requests.

If you turn on browser notifications in a browser, it gives the site an address at its push service (Google's for Chrome and Edge, Mozilla's for Firefox, Apple's for Safari), which is kept while you stay signed in on that browser. When there is something you chose to hear of that way, such as a mention, a direct message or a notice from your game, the site sends the notification there: for a message the writer's name, the channel and the message, and for a notice its title, text and world, encrypted so that only your browser can read it. The push service sees when a notification is sent to your browser, but not what it says. Signing out or turning the notifications off stops them.

Direct messages in chat are shown only to their two members. The team sees reported messages and can review uploaded images with their captions in the moderation log. Operating the service still involves access to stored data, so direct messages should not be treated as end-to-end encrypted communication.

Reports and support requests go to the team. They may include your account identity and, for support, the contact address you submit. Moderation actions are recorded.

Public chat messages and forum posts are sent to OpenRouter, which has a decision model from OpenAI judge how far they break the community rules. The team keeps each judgement with what was sent, to check and tune the reviewer. With each goes the name you post under, how long you have been a member, how often you have been moderated in the last 90 days and, for chat, the few messages before it. Profiles and direct-message text without an image are not sent on their own. OpenRouter's and OpenAI's privacy policies cover what they do with what they receive.

Uploaded chat images, including in direct messages, are sent through OpenRouter to the moderation provider with their captions and up to six earlier messages for context. A refusal or failed review keeps the upload hidden for the team. The team can inspect image decisions and replay them while the image is retained.

Activity

The site counts the days you use it while signed in, and the game sends, about once a minute, how long it has been in front of you and in use, and in which world. These counts are kept with your account. Administrators see each member's, to know how many people play and for how long. The team may publish totals across members, such as how many people played in a day or a month and how many hours they played, overall or in a world; what it publishes never names a member or gives one member's figures. When you were last on the site also decides when reminders about your airlines are sent, and when a world that never ends winds down the airlines of a player who has been away.

Game recordings

While you are signed in and playing, the game records what happens on its screen: the pages and figures shown, where you move and click, what you type into its forms, and pictures of the map. The game's own errors and the actions you send are marked in the recording. It does not record other tabs, other sites or anything outside the game. Each recording also stores your browser's name and your IP address.

Recordings are for fixing problems you report and for checking fair play, such as in tournaments. Only administrators can watch them. They are deleted after 30 days, except that recordings from the two days before you contact the team, and recordings from worlds that keep them for competitions, are kept for a year, and administrators can keep a recording for longer while they review it.

Fair play

With each game action, the game sends how its screen was used since your previous action: where each tap or click landed on the button it hit, and how many pointer moves, hovers, scrolls, key presses and screens there were, with your window's size. It never sends what you typed. The site keeps these with each action and your browser's name for 30 days. A decision model reached through OpenRouter reads your latest actions with them, the timing of your play, how long you have been a member, your browser's time zone and your earlier checks, to judge whether you or automation took them; the team keeps each judgement. If it may be automation, the game asks you to pass a Cloudflare Turnstile check, which reads signals from your browser under Cloudflare's privacy policy.

Cookies and browser storage

The site uses an essential session cookie to keep you signed in, lasting up to 30 days. Signing out ends that session. Account settings let you end sessions on other devices. Session tokens are stored as hashes on the server.

If you arrive by clicking a Gate & Globe ad on Google from outside the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom and Switzerland, a cookie keeps the click's identifier from the link for up to 90 days, and an account you make in that time keeps it. The site tells Google Ads, by that identifier alone, when the account was made and when it founded its first airline, so Google can count which ads bring players. Nothing else about you, such as your name or email address, is sent.

The editor uses session storage in your current browser tab to retain unfinished text. Closing the tab clears that browser storage. A file attachment is not kept as part of that draft.

Payments

Membership and advertising credit are paid through Stripe Checkout. Your card details go to Stripe, not to Gate & Globe; Stripe's privacy policy covers what it collects. The site records each payment's amount, what it bought, Stripe's reference for it, and whether Stripe has confirmed it. Your membership history, including grants and ended memberships with their reasons, is kept with your account.

Advertising

An advertiser account stores its name, ads and their images, bids, placements and credit ledger. Ledger entries are permanent, as accounting records. Ads are public while they run.

When the site shows an ad, it records which ad was served and whether it was viewed or clicked, but not who saw it. Advertisers see only totals. Clicking an ad takes you to the advertiser's site, whose own privacy practices apply.

Hosting and requests

The hosting and proxy services process requests and may retain operational logs, including IP addresses, to run and secure the site. If the site's Cloudflare analytics integration is enabled, it also processes site-performance information.

Questions and account requests

Gate & Globe is run by foleybridge.software, based in Texas, USA, which is responsible for the information the site stores. Use Contact the team for a question about your information, or to request an account correction or deletion. Do not include your password. If you are signed in, the request is associated with your account.