Privacy

What this site and this launcher know about you, in plain terms.

Last updated 24 September 2026

The short version

There are no analytics, no advertising, and no third-party tracking scripts on this site. Not a lighter kind — none.
We never see your Steam password. Signing in goes through Steam and hands us one thing: your public Steam ID.
You do not need an account to browse servers or to use the launcher. Signing in is only for claiming a server you run.
The launcher keeps your favourites, history, settings and its copies of your DayZ profile on your own PC and never uploads them.
We do not sell anything about you, and there is nothing to sell — no email address, no name, no payment details.

Who we are

House of D ("HOD", "we") runs this site, the public server API behind it, and the HOD DayZ Launcher. We are a DayZ community, not a company with a data department. Questions about anything on this page go to houseofdgames@gmail.com.

If you never sign in

Then the only thing we hold about you is an ordinary web server access log — the same thing every website on the internet has. Nothing is stored in our database, and no cookie is set at all.

The server list itself is public information about game servers, not about players: addresses, ports, names, player counts, maps and mod lists, collected from Valve's public server list and by querying servers directly. It contains no personal data and it is available to anybody at /api/servers.

If you sign in through Steam

Sign-in uses Steam OpenID. You type your password on Steam's site, never on ours — we cannot see it, and we never ask for it. What comes back is your SteamID64, and nothing else.

With that ID we then ask Steam's public API for the two decorations you see on the dashboard:

Steam ID (SteamID64): Your public numeric Steam ID. This is the account key for everything below.
Persona name: Your public Steam display name, so the dashboard can greet you by it.
Avatar URL: A link to your public Steam avatar image.
First and last sign-in: Two timestamps.

All of it is already public on your Steam profile. There is no email address, no real name, no friends list, no game library, no playtime, and no way for us to ask Steam for any of that.

If you claim a server

Claiming a server records a little more, because a claim has to be auditable:

The claim: Which server you claimed, your Steam ID, the one-time HODL-… token, whether it succeeded, how many attempts it took, and when.
The listing: Once verified: your Steam ID as the owner, plus whatever you write into the listing — display name, description, banner, website, Discord link, tags.
Sponsored placement: If a server is given a featured slot, the slot's dates and an internal note about who granted it.

Failed and expired claims are kept on purpose. When two people insist the same server is theirs, that history is the only way to work out what happened.

Anything you type into a listing is published — it appears on this site and in the launcher for everyone. Do not put anything in a listing that you would not want public, including in the internal-sounding fields.

Cookies

Two, both set only after you sign in, both first-party, neither used for tracking. There is no advertising cookie and no analytics cookie, which is why this site has no cookie banner to click past.

hodl_web_sid: Your session. Holds your Steam ID and an expiry date, signed so it cannot be edited. HttpOnly, Secure, SameSite=Lax. Lasts 14 days.
hodl_web_csrf: A random value that protects against another site making requests as you. It identifies nothing and is new on every sign-in.

Signing out clears both immediately.

What the launcher stores on your PC

In %APPDATA%\hod-dayz-launcher. It stays there. None of it is uploaded, and there is no endpoint here that would accept it:

Favourites — the servers you starred, with the name and ports we knew last time.
History — servers you launched, when, and how many times. Clearable from the launcher.
Settings — sort order, page size, filters, your in-game profile name, a DayZ profile folder if you chose one instead of the default, whether the launcher may check your servers in the background, and whether Discord presence is switched on.
A cached copy of the server list, so the launcher opens instantly and still works if this site is down.
Copies of your DayZ profile — since 0.1.5 the launcher copies your keybinds, video settings and character list before every launch, and keeps the last ten, so a bad update is recoverable. These are copies of files DayZ already wrote on your machine. They stay on it. There is no endpoint here that would accept them, and restoring one is something you ask for from Settings.
From 0.1.6 those files are copied from Documents\DayZ — the same folder the official launcher and DZSA use — rather than from a folder the launcher made for itself. Your logs and your mods' own settings live separately in %LOCALAPPDATA%\DayZ and are not copied: they can run to hundreds of megabytes, and a backup that big before every launch would be worse than the problem it solves.

Deleting that folder deletes all of it, including those profile copies. Uninstalling deliberately leaves it alone, so that reinstalling does not cost you your favourites.

What the launcher sends to us

Two kinds of request, both of which look like an ordinary web request and carry no identifier we have created:

The server list. The launcher asks this site for the DayZ server list, because Valve's full list needs an API key and an API key cannot safely ship inside a public EXE. The request says nothing about you — not which servers you have favourited, not which one you are about to join.
Update checks. The launcher asks whether a newer version exists. That request carries the version you are on, which is what "newer" is measured against.
News and the leaderboard. From 0.1.6 the launcher asks this site for HOD's announcements and for the leaderboard shown on its Leaderboard tab. Both are plain reads that say nothing about you, and the leaderboard is fetched through this site rather than from the leaderboard server directly — so the launcher still only ever talks to one hostname, this one.

Like any request over the internet, both reach us with your IP address attached. We do not put it in the database and we do not build anything from it — see Logs below.

The launcher also talks to your local Steam client to work out what you have installed and to subscribe you to a server's mods. That is entirely on your machine, between the launcher and Steam. Mods are downloaded by your Steam client from the Steam Workshop; we never host, mirror or redistribute a mod file, and we are not told what you downloaded.

One change worth writing down, because it happens without you asking. Since 0.1.5 the launcher checks every 30 minutes whether the mods for your favourites and recently played servers have gone out of date, so that a mod which updated overnight is fetched before you press Launch rather than after the server refuses you. That check contacts those game servers directly and asks Steam about the mods — it does not go through us, and it tells us nothing. It does mean your machine reaches out to those operators on a timer rather than only when you are looking at the launcher, and they see your IP address the same way they would if you clicked their row. It never runs while DayZ is running, and both the checking and its notification can be switched off in Settings.

Two kinds of request, above, is now three — the news and leaderboard reads. It is still one hostname and still nothing about you.

Discord — off unless you switch it on

The launcher can show what you are playing on your Discord profile. It is off by default and there is a switch for it in Settings, because it is the one feature here that publishes something about you. In 0.1.6 the switch is present but disabled: the build carries no Discord application, so nothing can be sent at all until a later release configures one. It is described here because the code ships now.

With it on, and only while you are in a server, the launcher sends the server's name, its map and its player count to the Discord application already running on your PC. Discord then shows that on your profile to whoever your Discord settings allow. What happens to it after that is between you and Discord, under their privacy policy, not ours — none of it passes through this site, and we never see it.

With it off, the launcher does not open a connection to Discord at all. Turning it off while you are playing clears what is being shown immediately rather than at the end of the session, and closing the launcher clears it too.

Other people's servers

When you join a DayZ server, you are connecting to a machine that has nothing to do with us. What that operator logs about you, and what their community rules are, is between you and them. A server being listed here is not us vouching for how it is run.

One more honest detail: a claimed listing may point its banner image at a host of the operator's choosing. When your browser or launcher loads that image, that host sees your IP address, the same as any image on any web page. It is the price of letting operators use their own artwork, and we would rather write it down than leave it as a surprise.

Logs

The web server and the reverse proxy in front of it keep normal access and error logs: time, IP address, which URL was requested, the status code. They are used for spotting abuse and working out why something broke, they are not linked to Steam accounts, and nothing is profiled or exported from them.

No IP address is stored in our database. The only addresses in there belong to game servers.

How long we keep things

Your session: 14 days, then you sign in again.
A claim token: Expires an hour after it is issued.
Your profile row: Until you ask us to delete it.
Listings and claims: For as long as you own the server, plus an audit trail of claim attempts.
Server data: Dropped automatically once a server has not been seen for a day, unless somebody has claimed it.
Logs: Rotated by the server; short-lived, and not archived anywhere.

Deleting your data

Email houseofdgames@gmail.com from an address you can prove is yours, or message HOD staff on Discord from the Steam account in question, and we will:

delete your profile row — Steam ID, persona, avatar, sign-in dates;
release any server listings you own, so the servers stay listed but stop being attached to you;
delete your claim records if you ask for that too, once no ownership dispute is open on those servers.

You can also ask for a copy of everything we hold about you. It is a small amount of data and we will send it as plain JSON. Both are done by hand by a person, so allow a few days.

Nothing here is deleted by us for you automatically, and nothing is kept because it is valuable to us — there is no business model behind this data.

Children

This site is not aimed at children. Signing in requires a Steam account, and Steam sets its own minimum age. We do not knowingly keep data about anyone under 13; if you believe we have, email us and it will be removed.

Changes

If what the software does changes, this page changes with it, and the date at the top moves. There is no mailing list to notify — the honest summary is that if you care about this page, check the date on it.