Privacy
How EMPIRES handles your information. Last updated 31 October 2026.
What we keep
- Your account: your player name (and former names), a scrambled copy of your password, the email addresses you link, and your profile description and colors.
- Your play: your games, orders, ratings, coins and what you buy or win with them, badges and cosmetics.
- Messages: what you post in chat and in direct messages. Moderators can review messages, including direct messages, to keep the game safe; every time an admin reads a direct message conversation it is logged.
- Security: a scrambled fingerprint of the connection you sign in from, never the IP address itself (see below).
- Activity: when you visit, for how long, and which pages of the site you use, so we can see which parts of the game get played.
We use this only to run the game. We do not sell it. It is stored on our server, which is hosted by Render in the United States. If email verification is on, verification and password emails are sent through an email delivery service.
Your IP address
We do not store your IP address, and nobody running or moderating EMPIRES can see it. When you sign in, the server turns it into a fingerprint with a one-way scramble keyed by a secret, keeps only that fingerprint, and throws the address away. A fingerprint cannot be turned back into an address; all it can show is that two accounts signed in from the same connection, which helps admins spot banned players returning. Schools and households often share a connection, so a match is only ever a reason to look, never proof. Like any website host, Render may keep standard access logs of the requests it handles.
Your browser
The site keeps your sign-in and preferences (theme, layout, graphics settings) in your browser's local storage. EMPIRES itself sets no tracking cookies.
Advertising
The lobby can show ads served by Google AdSense. Google and its partners use cookies to show ads based on your visits to this and other websites. You can turn personalized ads off in Google's ad settings, and read how Google uses information from sites that use its services. Players in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom and Switzerland are asked for consent before personalized ads are shown.
Your choices
You can change your name, description and linked emails in Settings. To have your account and its data deleted, ask an admin in game.