Datenschutzerklärung · Art. 13 GDPR
The controller within the meaning of Art. 4(7) GDPR is:
Julius-Maximilians-Universität WürzburgThe researcher responsible for this specific study is:
Julien FroidefondYour data is pseudonymous, not anonymous. We do not ask for your name or your email address, but everything we store is linked to your Steam ID, and a Steam ID points at a public profile. Under the GDPR that makes it personal data, and you keep the full set of rights described in section 8. We want to be straightforward about that rather than overstate how anonymous the study is.
| Data | Source |
|---|---|
| Your Steam ID | Transmitted by Valve when you sign in with Steam (OpenID). We never see your Steam password. |
| Your public AoE2 player profile: in-game name, country, ELO ratings, match counts, win rates, and metrics we derive from them | Public match records for Age of Empires II, retrieved in advance from the community API at data.aoe2companion.com |
| Your survey answers, plus how long you took to complete the survey | You, when you fill in the questionnaire |
| A login token stored in your browser | Created at sign-in so the site knows you are logged in (see section 6) |
The purpose is academic research into how Age of Empires II players' individual characteristics relate to their in-game behaviour and performance. Results are published only in aggregated, statistical form; no individual participant is identifiable in any publication.
The legal basis is the performance of a task carried out in the public interest, Art. 6(1)(e) GDPR in conjunction with Art. 4 BayDSG and Art. 2(6) BayHIG: research is part of the statutory remit of Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg. Processing for scientific research purposes is further governed by Art. 89(1) GDPR and Art. 25 BayDSG.
Taking part is still entirely voluntary. The box you tick before starting the survey records that you have read this notice and agree to take part — it documents your informed, voluntary participation rather than serving as the legal basis for the processing.
Participation is entirely voluntary. You may stop at any point, and you do not have to answer any question you would rather skip. Choosing not to take part, or stopping partway, carries no disadvantage of any kind for you.
You can object to the processing at any time under Art. 21 GDPR and ask us to delete your response, without giving a reason, by emailing julien.froidefond@uni-wuerzburg.de and telling us your Steam ID. Because your response stays stored under your Steam ID (see section 9), we can always find and remove it. What cannot be undone is analysis already published: results released in aggregated, statistical form are not recalculated, though no individual is identifiable in them.
This site sets no advertising or analytics cookies. There is no Google Analytics, no Matomo, no tracking pixel, and no social media tracking. Fonts are served from our own server, so no data goes to Google when you load the page.
We store exactly one item in your browser's local storage, called aoe2_token.
It is the token that keeps you signed in after you authenticate with Steam. It is strictly
necessary for a service you explicitly requested, so under § 25(2) TDDDG it does not
require consent. Signing out or clearing your browser data removes it.
Signing in sends you to Steam's own login page. Valve, based in the USA, learns that you authenticated with this site. We receive only your Steam ID in return. This is governed by Valve's own privacy policy.
This site runs on infrastructure rented from Railway Corp., a company based in the United States, and is deployed in Railway's EU West region (Amsterdam, Netherlands) — so your responses are stored on servers inside the European Union. Railway acts as our processor under a data processing agreement pursuant to Art. 28 GDPR and may handle the data only on our instructions.
Because Railway is a US company, its staff can in principle reach the systems holding the data from outside the EU. Under Chapter V GDPR that possibility counts as a transfer to a third country, and it is covered by the European Commission's standard contractual clauses, which form part of our agreement with Railway. The data itself is stored in the EU.
Beyond this, your data is not sold, not passed to advertisers, and not shared with any third party for non-research purposes.
Under the GDPR you have the right to:
To exercise any of these, email julien.froidefond@uni-wuerzburg.de or the data protection officer. Some of these rights may be restricted where processing is carried out for scientific research purposes under Art. 89(2) GDPR and Art. 25 BayDSG.
You also have the right to complain to the supervisory authority:
Der Bayerische Landesbeauftragte für den DatenschutzWe keep the research dataset for up to ten years after the end of the study, in line with the DFG guidelines on good scientific practice, so that published results remain verifiable. After that it is deleted.
Your responses stay stored under your Steam ID for that whole period. We want to be clear about what that means: the dataset remains pseudonymous rather than anonymous for the full ten years, so it stays personal data and every right listed in section 8 continues to apply to it throughout — including your right to have your response deleted.
Your responses are not used for automated decision-making or profiling with legal effect within the meaning of Art. 22 GDPR. The personalised results page you see after completing the survey is a descriptive summary of your own public gameplay statistics, shown to you alone.
Version 1.0, 18 August 2026.