What Flare knows about you

Flare is a small site run by one person. This page describes what the software stores and what it does with it. It is a description, not a policy: it makes no promises beyond what the code already does.

Signing in

Flare signs you in through Steam. Steam tells Flare your SteamID64 and nothing else. Flare then asks Steam for your persona name, avatar, profile link, country, and the list of games you own. If your Steam profile is private, Steam says less, and Flare treats what it did not learn as unknown rather than as absent.

Flare never sees your Steam password. It has no way to act on your Steam account.

What you tell Flare

Your timezone, read from your browser and overridable by hand. Your languages and the rough hours you are free, both of which are shown to other people and neither of which is ever used to filter you out of a match. An email address, if you want one, so that a flare you posted three weeks ago can reach you when it fills.

What other people see

On an open flare, other people see your avatar and your persona name. They do not see your profile link or your SteamID64.

When a roster fills, everyone on it sees everyone else's Steam profile and can add each other. That is the point of the site. It happens only on a full roster, and only for the people on it, because a standing flare is public and lives for weeks: if profile links were shown from the start, Flare would be publishing a list of Steam accounts belonging to people who have just announced they will play with strangers.

You can choose to show your profile link earlier. It is off unless you turn it on.

Who else it reaches

Valve. Every time Flare reads your profile, your library, or your achievements, it asks Steam, and it has to tell Steam whose data it is asking for.

Resend. Your email address and the message, when a flare matches or when you are verifying an address. Only then.

Railway. The site and its database run there.

That is the whole list. There is no analytics, no advertising, and no third-party script on any page. Nothing is sold.

Leaving

You can download everything Flare holds about you, and you can delete your account, from settings.

Deleting removes your profile, your library, your notifications, and your cached achievement history. Flares you created that nobody joined go with them.

Flares that other people were on keep the slot you filled. Your name, your avatar, and the link to your Steam account are removed from it, and what remains is that a fourth person was there. A flare belongs to everyone who was on it, and erasing your slot would rewrite three other people's record of an evening they spent. Nobody can follow that slot back to you.

If you sign in again afterwards, that is a new account. Nothing from before comes back.

What is missing

Flare has no terms of service, no stated retention limit for accounts nobody returns to, and no way to block another user. Those are real gaps, they are known, and this page would rather say so than pretend otherwise.

Last checked against the code at v2.4.0.