Stage Winner is free to play. The deal is simple: you register a team, we send you the daily stage and the occasional word from the partners who keep it free. Everything that involves is set out below, in plain English.
This policy applies to stagewinner.com and to the emails we send you. It is written to meet the Australian Privacy Principles under the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) and, for players in the United Kingdom and the European Economic Area, the UK and EU General Data Protection Regulation.
Stage Winner is operated by Empire Concepts Pty Ltd (ACN 110 696 574, ABN 35 110 696 574), an Australian company. Where this policy says we, us or our, that is who it means. Empire Concepts is the data controller for the information described here.
For anything to do with your information, including a request to see it, correct it or delete it, write to podium@stagewinner.com. We answer every message from a real person, not a ticket queue.
Squad mates can see your display name, role, admin status, race results and Bus Chat messages. They cannot see your email address, consent choices or private account details.
If you join a squad, we save its name, home country and timezone, your membership, roles and admin status, and tour results. Public squad listings and classifications can show your squad name and country. Your email address is not shown to other players.
Bus Chat messages are saved for your squad members to read. Squad admins can see message reports and remove messages. Dingo can use your squad’s messages and results in its private Dispatch. This release selects relevant chat excerpts within the squad; it does not send chat to an external AI service.
You can delete your own messages for everyone. Deleted text is removed from the chat and from reopened Dispatches; copies or screenshots other members already made cannot be recalled. Leaving a squad ends access to its chat, but past tour results and messages you have not deleted remain in its history.
Invite links expire after seven days and an admin can cancel them earlier. Anyone with a valid link may claim an available place. Email and text invite buttons open your own messaging app; Stage Winner does not read your contacts or send those invitations itself.
We save private messages, squad offers, read status, blocks and reports. Messages show your current display name and team to the other player, never your email address. These messages are not public and are not used in Dingo’s squad Dispatch. We may review reported messages to handle abuse.
You can remove messages you sent from both players’ inboxes. Copies or screenshots already made cannot be recalled. Blocking a player stops messages and squad offers between you. Squad offers last 7 days and do not reserve a place. Official Dingo notices are labelled and may announce game updates or competitions inside the game. They do not change your email preferences.
Like any website, our servers keep short lived technical logs of requests, which can include your internet address, the rough region it maps to, your browser type and the time. We use these to keep the game running, to spot faults and to stop automated abuse of the leaderboard. They are not used to build a profile of you and they are not combined with your results for marketing.
No passwords. No payment details, ever, because nothing here is for sale. No precise location. No contact list, no photos, no access to anything else on your device. We do not ask for health, beliefs or other sensitive information. Please do not post sensitive information about yourself or anyone else in Bus Chat.
We do not sell your details and we never hand your email address to a partner or a sponsor. When a partner has something to say, the message comes from us, to you, and one click stops it for good.
| What for | What it uses | Legal basis |
|---|---|---|
| Running the game and showing the leaderboard | Team, name, country, results | Performing the deal you signed up to |
| Signing you in and keeping your team yours | Email, verification code | Performing the deal you signed up to |
| The daily stage email | Email, language | Your consent, given at registration |
| Messages from a partner or sponsor | Email, language, country | Your consent, given at registration |
| Understanding the audience as a whole | Country, language, age bracket, sex, counts of play | Our legitimate interest in running a viable free game |
| Keeping the game fair and secure | Technical logs, results | Our legitimate interest in preventing abuse |
What we show a sponsor is counts and percentages about the audience as a whole. For example, how many players are in Belgium, or what share play in French. A sponsor never sees a person, a row, a name or an address.
Squad names, countries and classification results are public. Your current squad name can appear beside your result.
The leaderboard shows your team name, your first name, your country's flag, your chosen tactic and your finish. Anybody who plays the game can see it, and so can anybody you share a result with. It never shows your email address, your age bracket or your sex.
Pick a team name and a first name you are happy to have in public. You can change either of them at any time in My team, and the leaderboard updates.
We keep the number of companies involved deliberately small. We use:
Each of these processes information only on our instructions and under a written agreement, and none of them is permitted to use it for their own purposes. We are happy to name them if you ask, and we will tell you before we change one in a way that affects this policy. We do not publish the full technical detail of how the game is built, because that would help the people we are defending against, not the people we are protecting.
The only other circumstances in which your information leaves us are where the law requires it, where it is needed to establish or defend a legal claim, or if the game itself were ever sold or transferred, in which case you would be told before anything moved.
Registrations and results are stored in Australia, in a private database that is not readable from your browser and not open to the public internet.
Two things can involve an overseas transfer. Our email delivery provider may process the address and message content on servers in the United States and the European Union in order to deliver it. Our advertising provider operates globally. Where information is handled outside Australia we take reasonable steps to ensure it is handled consistently with the Australian Privacy Principles, and for players in the United Kingdom and the European Economic Area we rely on the standard contractual clauses approved for that purpose.
The game also keeps a small note in your own browser, called local storage, so that you stay signed in on that device and can see your own past results. It never leaves your device unless you race. Clearing your browsing data removes it. We do not set a tracking cookie of our own.
We take security seriously and we would rather tell you what we actually do than make a promise nobody can keep.
No system anywhere is guaranteed against every attack, and we will not tell you otherwise. If a breach ever occurred that was likely to cause you serious harm, we would notify you and the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner as the law requires, and we would tell you plainly what happened.
If you run out of re-spins you can choose to watch a short ad for 2 more. You never have to. When the ad comes from a sponsor of ours it is served by us and nothing about you is collected. When it is served by Google Ad Manager, Google may set its own cookies and collect its own information under Google's privacy policy, which is outside our control. Nothing you gave us at registration is passed to them.
| What | How long |
|---|---|
| Your registration and email address | While your team is active, and for 24 months after your last race, unless you ask us to delete it sooner |
| Your results and leaderboard entries | While your team is active. If you delete your account they are either removed or detached from you and kept only as an anonymous count |
| Verification codes | Minutes. They expire and are discarded |
| Technical server logs | A short rolling window, then overwritten |
| Unsubscribe records | Kept indefinitely, because it is the only way to be sure we never email you again |
Whatever country you are in, you can ask us to:
Write to podium@stagewinner.com. We do not charge for any of this. We will reply within 30 days and usually a great deal faster, and we may need to confirm you control the email address before we act, which protects you rather than us.
Tell us first at podium@stagewinner.com and give us the chance to fix it. If you are still not satisfied you can complain to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner at oaic.gov.au. If you are in the United Kingdom or the European Economic Area you may instead complain to your own national data protection authority.
Stage Winner is not aimed at children. You must be 16 or older to register a team. We do not knowingly collect information about anyone under 16, and if we find that we have, we delete it. If you are a parent and believe your child has registered, email us and we will remove it.
If we change this page in a way that matters, we will say so in the daily stage email before the change takes effect, and the date below will tell you when it was last revised. Continuing to play after that means the revised policy applies.