Privacy Statement

Last updated: 3 September 2026

Cobra Royale collects only what is needed to run accounts, gameplay, payments, security and support. This page says what that is in plain terms, including the things that are easy to leave out.

Who We Are

Cobra Royale is run by Joe Taylor, trading as Cobra Royale. He decides what is collected here and why — the data controller, in the language of the law — and he is also the person accountable for online safety. There is no company: this is one person, and the mail below reaches him.

Write to [email protected] about anything on this page, including any of the rights below. Post reaches him at:

Joe Taylor, trading as Cobra Royale
Unit 72670, PO Box 4336
Manchester
M61 0BW
United Kingdom

He is registered with the Information Commissioner's Office as a data controller under registration number ZC237739. You can check it on the ICO's public register of data protection fee payers.

What We Record

• Account details — email address, display name, how you sign in and coin balance.
• Gameplay — each game you start, which map, the match code, how long you survived, how long your snake grew, how many snakes you defeated and what ended your round. Wins are also recorded for the scoreboard.
• Your IP address, stored against each game you start. We use it to tell players apart when they are not signed in, to investigate abuse and cheating, and to enforce rate limits.
• Your country code, supplied by our network provider from your IP address. We keep only the two-character country code, not precise location, and use it to understand where the game is played.
• Two settings from your device — whether music and sound effects are switched on when you join a game. We use this only to decide what to work on; everything else you configure stays in your browser.
• Purchases — what you bought, when, and the reference our payment provider gives us. We never receive or store your card details.
• Your coin history — every coin in and out, so a balance can always be explained: wins, purchases, revives, and the note against any coins we gave you. A refund takes back the coins it paid for whether or not they are still there, so a balance can end up short — and where it is 500 coins or more short, play pauses a week after the refund unless it is settled first. We tell you inside the game while that week is running, with the date and the amount, so the pause is never the first you hear of it. A refund can arrive from Apple, Google or a bank without our being involved at all, and a parent can undo a purchase a child made, so a pause is not a judgement about you. Buying back the missing coins clears it and play starts again straight away, or write to [email protected] and we will look at it with you.
• What you have unlocked — which skins and accessories you own and what each cost.
• Season passes — which passes you have bought and what each cost in coins, and which season rewards you have taken: the season, the tier, whether it came from the free or the paid track, and what the reward was. How far through a season you are is not stored at all; it is added up from your rounds each time the screen is opened.
• Support mail — the address you write from, the subject and the message.
• Passkeys, if you set one up — the public half of its key pair and the credential id your device minted for it, the name you gave it, roughly what kind of key it is and how it reaches us, whether it is backed up to your device's keychain, and when it was added and last used. Your fingerprint or face never leaves your device and never reaches us, and neither does the private half of the key: a passkey proves who you are by signing something, and all we can do with what we hold is check that signature. We also keep a random id that stands in for your account when your device is asked for a key — it is deliberately not your account id and not your email, so the value your device stores names nobody.
• Sign-in activity — when each session started and when it lapses, when a verification mail was sent and followed, and when a password recovery link was requested, expired or used.
• Which build you were running, so we can tell an old client's bug from a new one's.
• What kind of device you played on — the model, who made it, the operating system version, whether it is a phone or a tablet, how much memory and how many processor cores it has, the size, pixel density and refresh rate of the screen, which instruction set it runs, and how smoothly the game drew each round. We use this to find out which hardware the game runs badly on. It describes a kind of device, not yours: two people with the same phone produce the same record. We do not collect any device identifier — no advertising id, no vendor id, no id we made up — and we do not collect the name you have given your phone.
• Parties — when you start or join a party for Team Deathmatch, the share code, your display name and your seat are held in the server's memory for the life of that party only. They are never written to the database and they are gone when the party ends or the server restarts.

We also count how the game is being used — how many rounds of each mode are started and finished, how many people are playing or waiting in a lobby at a given moment, how long rounds last, and how many sign-ins happen with each provider. These are plain counts with no name, account, party, match or IP address attached to them, so they cannot be traced back to you and are not included in a data export for that reason.

We also keep a record of every death in every match — the display name of the snake and of whoever ended it — to balance the game. It is kept for 13 months and is not attached to an account, which means we cannot reliably find your rows in it: see Your Rights.

When a round ends you can tell us how it went — a score out of five, whether something went wrong with it, and a note in your own words if you want to add one. We keep that for 180 days so we can see whether the game is getting better or worse, and so a laggy or broken round reaches us from the person it happened to. Nothing about who sent it is recorded: no account, no session, no IP address, no device, not even which match it was about. That is deliberate, and it has a cost we would rather be plain about than hide — because there is nothing in it to find you by, it cannot be handed back in a data export or removed on request. It goes to us and is never shown to another player.

Who Else Sees It

• Google reCAPTCHA protects the sign-up, sign-in and password recovery forms. Google receives your IP address and interaction data from those pages and is governed by its own privacy policy. If you block it, you can still sign in to an existing account.
• Stripe processes web payments if you buy coins. You enter your card details on Stripe's own checkout page; they never reach us.
• Apple processes purchases made through the iOS app using Apple's In-App Purchase service. We receive the transaction identifier and product information needed to deliver coins and handle refunds; we do not receive your Apple payment details.
• Google Play processes purchases made through the Android app using Google Play Billing. We receive the purchase token and product information needed to verify the purchase, deliver coins and handle refunds; we do not receive your Google payment details.
• Google or Apple, if you choose to sign in with them, confirm who you are and return a limited profile.
• Apple and Google deliver notifications, if you switch any on. A notification cannot reach a phone any other way — only Apple can wake an iPhone and only Google can wake an Android device — so turning one on means your device gets a token from them, and we send our message to them to pass on. The message itself never contains anybody's name: everyone told the same thing is told it in the same words. Turn every notification off and no token is kept and nothing is sent.

We do not sell your data, and we do not use it for advertising.

Cookies

One secure, http-only cookie keeps you signed in. Your snake, settings and audio preferences are kept in your browser's own storage rather than on our servers. There are no advertising or tracking cookies.

Retention

• IP addresses attached to gameplay are kept for 90 days, then deleted.
• Gameplay records without an IP are kept for 13 months so we can see how the game changes over a year.
• Device and performance records are kept for 90 days, then deleted. They answer a question about the version of the game running now, and a version is replaced within weeks.
• Feedback about a round — the score, what went wrong and any note — is kept for 180 days, then deleted. It is a question about a version of the game, and a version is replaced long before that.
• Notices in your in-app inbox — party invitations, purchase receipts, refund notices and cosmetics you were given — are kept for 90 days, then deleted, whether or not you have read them. An unread notice is not a message still waiting to be delivered; by then it is a record of something that happened last quarter. A receipt you may want after that is in your purchase history, which is kept for longer.
• Account details, coin history, unlocks, season passes and season rewards are kept while your account exists.
• A passkey is kept until you remove it, or until your account goes. Setting one up or signing in with one leaves a two-minute record of the challenge we issued, which is destroyed the moment it is used.
• Support mail is kept until we have finished with it, which may be after your account has gone — see below.
• Purchase records are kept for six years after your account goes, because tax law requires it. That includes the email address the payment provider recorded, so a refund can still be matched to you.
• Sign-in sessions expire after 14 days.
• Our own server logs — the record of what the software did, which is how we find out why something broke — are kept for 30 days, then deleted. We do not write your name, your email address or your IP address into them, and a test fails our build if any line would; but they do carry account identifiers, and an error report your app sends us is recorded as it arrives. So a line saying that an account did something, or that something went wrong for it, can outlive that account by up to a month. The logs are held outside the database, which is why deleting your account does not reach them and a data export does not include them.
• Password recovery records are deleted one day after their two-hour link expires.

Keeping It Safe

Passwords, session cookies, verification links and password recovery links are stored only as one-way hashes, never as text we could read or reuse from a database backup. The message you write in a support request, and any reply we write back, are encrypted where they are stored, so a stolen copy of our database does not contain them in readable form — the key is held separately and is not in the database or its backups. Traffic to the site and the app is encrypted in transit.

Your Rights

Getting a copy of your data

You can download everything we hold about you, yourself, without asking us and without waiting. In the app, open the account sheet from the lobby and use Download my data, which hands the file to the iOS share sheet so you can save or send it where you like; on this site, use the button below while signed in. Either way you will be asked for your password first, because the file contains everything.

You get a JSON file: your account, how you sign in and the passkeys you have set up, every game and round, the devices you played on, your wins, your coin history, your unlocks, your season passes and the rewards you have taken, your purchases and any support mail you sent. It also lists what we hold and why, including the things deliberately left out and the reason. If you signed in with Google or Apple you have no password here, so your session is the only proof we can ask for and the button will not ask for one.

It never contains anything about other players, even from matches you played together — their names and results are their data, not yours. For the same reason we cannot include the death records described above: they carry a display name rather than an account, and display names are not unique, so picking out “yours” would mean handing you a stranger's.

If you would rather ask us, or you want data corrected, write to [email protected] and we will respond within 30 days.

Deleting your account

You can delete your account yourself, immediately. In the app, open the account sheet from the lobby and tap Delete account; on this site, open the account drawer and use Delete my account.

Deleting removes your account, your sign-in, your passkeys and your sessions, your unspent coins and coin history, your unlocks, your season passes and the rewards you took, and the device records above. It cannot be undone.

Some records stay, and it is worth being exact about which:

• Entries on the winners board stay, so we do not silently rewrite a leaderboard other players competed on. Your name comes off them.
• Games and rounds stay in our totals, with no name, no IP address and nothing linking them to you or to each other.
• Purchase receipts stay for the six years tax law requires, including the email the payment provider recorded, so a refund can still be honoured.
• Death records stay for 13 months, because they are not attached to an account and we cannot find yours to remove.
• Feedback you gave about a round stays for 180 days. Your account was never attached to it, so there is nothing in it for us to find.
• Support mail you sent us stays, with your account no longer attached to it, in case you are still owed an answer or a refund. Write to us if you want it removed as well.

Deleting clears our live database immediately. We also take hourly database backups, kept for 48 hours, and daily backups kept for 30 days, and we keep a standby copy of the database on a second server for disaster recovery. The standby is rebuilt every hour from the newest backup, so a deletion reaches it within the hour; the backups themselves are not rewritten, so your records remain inside them until they expire on the schedule above. That means a deletion is fully complete after 30 days at the latest. Backups are never used to restore an account that was deleted.

Playing without an account

If you play signed out we still record the game, your IP address and your country, under the same windows above. Because there is no account, there is nothing to sign in to and no way for us to be sure which of those records are yours — so we cannot hand them back or delete them on request. Write to [email protected] if you need them removed and we will do what we can with what you can tell us.

Children

Cobra Royale is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly create accounts for them. If you believe a child has an account, write to us and we will remove it.

Complaining

If you are unhappy with how we have handled your data, tell us first — write to [email protected] and we will look at it properly.

You do not have to come to us first, and you can go to the regulator whether or not you do. In the UK that is the Information Commissioner's Office. They take complaints at ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint, or on 0303 123 1113. Complaining to them costs nothing and does not affect anything else you can do.

Contact

For privacy questions, contact [email protected].