Arkasa Server - Privacy Policy

Effective Date: August 26, 2026 Version: 1.1

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Introduction

This Privacy Policy explains how Didier De Ridder, trading as Arkasa ("we", "us", "our"), collects, uses, stores, and protects your personal data when you use the Arkasa gaming server ("Server", "Service").

We process personal data in accordance with:

• EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)
• Belgian Act of 30 July 2018 on the protection of natural persons with regard to the processing of personal data

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Data Controller

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What Data We Collect

Account and Identity Data

• Steam ID / Epic Games ID
• Discord ID and username
• In-game character names
• Email address (for purchases and support)
• Account creation date

Connection Data

• IP addresses
• Connection timestamps
• Session duration
• Geographic location (country/region)

Gameplay Data

• In-game actions and events
• Chat messages (global, tribe, whispers)
• Commands used
• Player statistics (playtime, kills, tames, etc.)
• Tribe membership and alliances
• Building and territory claims

Transaction Data (for purchases)

Purchases run through Tip4Serv. The only purchase data that reaches us is what the shop dashboard shows the operator:

• The username you entered at checkout, and your Tip4Serv user ID
• Your email address
• Your EOS ID, so the purchase can be delivered in-game
• Your Discord ID and Discord username, where you linked them
• What you bought, the amount, and the currency
• Which payment provider was used (PayPal or Stripe), and that provider's transaction reference
• The date of the purchase
• Your loyalty point balance
• Your IP address, and the country and region it points to. This is how the correct VAT rate is worked out, and it is visible to us on the order

We never receive your card number or any part of it. Card details are handled by Stripe or PayPal and are never visible to us.

Communication Data

• Support tickets and correspondence
• Discord messages sent in public server channels
• Appeal submissions

We do not monitor or log direct messages (DMs) between users unless reported via the ticketing system.

Technical Data

• Which platform you connect from (Steam or Epic Games)

We do not receive crash reports or error logs from your game client. Those go to Studio Wildcard and to your game platform, not to us.

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Where Your Data Actually Lives

These are the places your data ends up. We have tried to make the list complete, but a running server produces technical records nobody sits down and designs — a proxy writes a line, a plugin opens its own log file. If you ask us what we hold about you, we look at the actual machine rather than at this table.

Note on the market and vote pages: these show in-game names publicly on the website. If you do not want your shop or your name shown there, email arkasaserver@gmail.com and we will remove it.

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Legal Basis for Processing

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How We Use Your Data

Service Provision

• Authenticate your identity and manage your account
• Deliver in-game features and purchased items
• Process and fulfill transactions
• Provide customer support

Security and Enforcement

• Investigate reports of cheating, hacking, and exploits
• Enforce server rules and community guidelines
• Investigate and resolve disputes
• Ban violators and maintain ban lists

Legal Compliance

• Comply with Belgian tax law (VAT)
• Respond to lawful requests from authorities
• Maintain records as required by law

Communication

• Send service-related announcements
• Notify of rule changes or Terms updates
• Respond to inquiries and support tickets

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Data Retention

What we can and cannot delete on request

If you ask us to erase your data, we want you to know in advance what that actually achieves.

We can:

• Remove the lines mentioning you from the game server log files.
• Delete your player profile and tribe records, and destroy your structures and creatures in-game.
• Remove your shop and your name from the market and vote pages on this website.
• Delete your support emails and Discord tickets.

We cannot:

• Edit a backup. Backups are whole-server snapshots and cannot be opened and changed line by line. Your data disappears from them when that backup is overwritten, which is within 3 days.
• Promise that every trace inside the binary world save is gone. Structures and creatures are destroyed and profiles are removed, but the save file is not a document we can edit line by line.

This is the normal limit of a game server, not a refusal. Tell us what you want removed and we will say what we did.

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Data Sharing

We Share Data With:

Tip4Serv has two roles, and which one applies depends on what is being done. When it stores your EOS ID and email so a purchase can be delivered in-game, it acts on our instructions. When it takes the payment, it decides for itself what it must record, because financial and anti-fraud law requires that. Its own Privacy Policy covers both, including the providers it uses behind the scenes.

We Do NOT:

• Sell your personal data
• Share data for third-party marketing
• Share data with advertisers
• Transfer data to countries without adequate protection (without safeguards)

Legal Disclosure

We may disclose data when required by law, court order, or lawful request from Belgian or EU authorities.

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International Data Transfers

The website, the game servers, and the backups all run on our own machines at Hetzner in Germany, inside the EU.

Choosing a service and handing your data to it is our decision, so it is our responsibility. Below is each recipient, whether it acts on our instructions (a processor) or for its own purposes (a controller in its own right), and what carries the data if it leaves the EU/EEA.

Where our paperwork stands. For the recipients that act on our instructions, a data processing agreement is required. We rely on the standard terms each provider publishes, and we are working through signing the agreements that are still outstanding. We have not carried out formal transfer impact assessments.

The support inbox. arkasaserver@gmail.com is an ordinary Gmail account. That means Google is not acting on our instructions for the messages sitting in it, and we cannot put a processing agreement in place for it. If that matters to you, contact us through Discord instead, or ask us to delete a message once it has been dealt with.

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Your Rights Under GDPR

You have the following rights regarding your personal data:

Right to Access

Request a copy of all personal data we hold about you.

Right to Rectification

Request correction of inaccurate or incomplete data.

Right to Erasure ("Right to be Forgotten")

Request deletion of your personal data (subject to legal retention requirements).

Right to Restriction

Request limitation of processing in certain circumstances.

Right to Data Portability

Receive your data in a structured, machine-readable format.

Right to Object

Object to processing based on legitimate interest.

Right to Withdraw Consent

Withdraw consent at any time, where processing is based on consent. For website analytics this takes one click: Cookies in the footer of any page.

Right to Complain

Lodge a complaint with the Belgian Data Protection Authority.

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How to Exercise Your Rights

Submit requests to:

• Email: arkasaserver@gmail.com
• Subject: "GDPR Request - [Your Right]"

Include:

• What you want us to do
• Something that tells us which player you are: your in-game name, your Steam, Epic or EOS ID, or your Discord name

That is normally all we need, because those are the identifiers our records are keyed to. Do not send us a copy of your passport or identity card. We do not want it and we will not keep it.

If your request would expose or delete someone else's data when we get it wrong, we may ask for one extra thing that only you could know — for example the transaction ID of a purchase, or a message from the Discord account in question. We ask for the least that settles it.

Response Timeline:

• We reply within one month of receiving your request.
• If the request is complex, or you have sent several, we may extend that by a further two months. We will tell you within the first month that we are extending, and why.
• There is no fee, unless a request is clearly unfounded or repetitive.

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Data Security

Arkasa is a small sole-trader-operated community server. There is no security department here, so we describe only the measures we actually take:

• The website is served over HTTPS, with certificates issued automatically by Let's Encrypt.
• Server software and operating systems are kept up to date.
• Administrative access to the game servers and the website is limited to the operator and the senior staff who need it, each with their own credentials.
• Payment data is handled entirely by Tip4Serv and its payment providers. We never hold it.

We do not claim to run encrypted storage, intrusion detection, formal staff security training, or signed confidentiality agreements. If that changes, this section changes with it.

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Data Breach Notification

In case of a personal data breach:

To Authorities:

• Notification to Belgian GBA within 72 hours (if required)

To Affected Users:

• Notification without undue delay if there is a high risk to your rights and freedoms.
• We contact affected people directly — by email where we have your address, otherwise by Discord direct message. A public announcement is not a substitute: it tells the whole server that something happened to you, which can make the harm worse rather than smaller.
• We post a public notice as well only when the breach affects everyone, or when we genuinely cannot reach people individually.

Notification includes:

• Nature of the breach
• Likely consequences
• Measures taken
• Contact point for information

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Children's Privacy

Minimum Age: 16 years, matching the PEGI 16 rating of ARK: Survival Ascended.

We do not knowingly collect data about anyone under 16. If we discover such data, the account and its data are deleted.

Parental Rights: Parents or guardians may contact us to:

• Request information about data collected from their child
• Request deletion of their child's data
• Exercise rights on behalf of their child

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Cookies and Tracking

Website (www.arkasa.gg)

The website has no accounts and no login, so it sets no cookies of its own.

Nothing non-essential loads until you say yes. On your first visit a banner asks whether Google Analytics may run. Analytics does not load, and no analytics cookie is written, unless you press Accept. Declining is a single click on the same banner, exactly like accepting.

Changing your mind: click Cookies in the footer of any page. The same banner reappears and you can switch your answer. Choosing Decline also deletes the Google Analytics cookies that were already on your device, so withdrawing genuinely stops the tracking rather than just hiding the question.

What analytics tells us: how many people visited, which pages they opened, roughly which country they came from, and whether they clicked through to Discord or copied a server IP. Your IP address is shortened by Google before it is stored. We never see who you are from this.

No other third party is contacted. The fonts are served from arkasa.gg itself, not from Google Fonts. The Discord member list on the home page sits behind a button: it is an iframe on discord.com, so it would hand Discord your IP address, and it therefore stays unloaded until you click Show the member list.

In-Game

No cookies. Data collected through game server logs.

Discord Data Processing

We process Discord messages and related data only to the extent they are accessible to us as server administrators and strictly necessary for:

• Server moderation and enforcement of our Community Guidelines
• Providing technical support and resolving disputes
• Maintaining server security and preventing abuse

Legal basis: This processing is based on our legitimate interest (Art. 6(1)(f) GDPR) in maintaining a safe and functional community environment, and where applicable, contractual necessity (Art. 6(1)(b) GDPR) for support services.

Scope limitation: We do not systematically monitor all server communications. We only access and process messages when:

• Reported by users or automated moderation tools
• Relevant to an active investigation
• Required for enforcing server rules or Discord's Terms of Service

Data retention: Messages processed for moderation purposes are retained only as long as necessary for the specific purpose (typically up to 90 days, unless needed for ongoing investigations). Security-related logs may be retained longer if required for legal compliance.

Your rights: Discord users maintain full control over their messages through Discord's own privacy settings and data export/deletion tools. For requests specific to our server administration, contact us at arkasaserver@gmail.com with subject "Discord Data Request".

Who is responsible for what. Discord Netherlands BV (Discord Inc. outside the EEA) is the controller for the Discord platform itself: your account, your message history, and everything Discord does with it. We have no say in that.

But we are the controller for what we decide ourselves, and that includes:

• the moderation decisions our staff take, and the notes we write about them
• how long we keep a support ticket after it is closed
• our ban list, and who goes on it

Those are our choices, not Discord's, and this Privacy Policy governs them. Requests about them come to us at arkasaserver@gmail.com. Requests about your Discord account itself go to Discord.

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Automated Decision-Making

Arkasa does not make solely automated decisions that produce legal effects or similarly significant effects on you. Every ban, kick, refusal and rule decision is made by a person.

Plenty of things on the server do run automatically, and it would be wrong to pretend otherwise:

• purchases are delivered to your character by an automated process
• ARK plugins act on their own — decay timers, timed boosts, kits, the trading mod
• votes are counted and rewarded automatically
• Discord's own moderation tooling can filter or remove a message; that is operated by Discord

None of these judge you. They apply a rule you already know about, and a person decides anything that carries a consequence.

Your Rights: If an automated process gets something wrong, or you want a human to look at a decision that affects you, email arkasaserver@gmail.com and a person will review it.

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Changes to This Policy

We may update this Privacy Policy periodically.

Notification:

• Material changes are announced in our Discord, and by email where we have a valid email address for you. Most players have never given us one, so Discord is the channel that actually reaches the community.
• At least 14 days notice before changes take effect
• Updated version posted on www.arkasa.gg, with the version number and date at the top

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Contact and Complaints

Contact Us

Supervisory Authority

Belgian Data Protection Authority (GBA/APD)

• Website: www.dataprotectionauthority.be
• Email: contact@apd-gba.be
• Address: Drukpersstraat 35, 1000 Brussels, Belgium

You have the right to lodge a complaint with the GBA if you believe your data protection rights have been violated.

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Summary Table

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Last updated: August 26, 2026 Version: 1.1