We collect information from or about you in the following ways:
Information provided by you. Information provided by you when you create or update your account(s); when you are an esports player; while you use our social features and channels to communicate with others; when you use any of our services for purchases or financial transactions such as store purchases, in-game purchases, and/or prize processing; and while you are receiving customer service support.
Information we get or generate from your use of our games or services. We collect data related to: your game play and in-game activity, the services that you use and how you use them, and your devices and activities when you install or access our services.
Information collected from external sources. We may receive information about you and your activities from third parties when you link to external accounts (such as Facebook, PlayStation, XBOX or Twitch) and from advertisers or service providers about your experiences or interactions with them. We might also obtain information from public sites on the internet, such as Twitch, Instagram and YouTube, to mention a few.
We treat all information associated with your account as personal information. Blizzard collects the following categories of data depending on which product(s) or service(s) you are interested in or interacting with. We usually retain data for only as long as necessary to provide you with products, services and an immersive entertainment experience. Exceptions are noted below.
| Data Category | Description |
|---|---|
| ACCOUNT DATA | Player Account Data refers to information that is provided and generated when a player creates his or her account. Most of this data is retained within our secure networks for as long as you play our games and is available to the player by logging into his or her account and can be updated by the player in the account settings section.
Examples: Account name, BattleTag, name, email address, preferred language, date of birth, SMS number, home address, shipping address, opt-in detail(s), account links. |
| CUSTOMER SERVICE | We also use the information we collect while assisting players through our customer support services to investigate and address players' concerns and monitor and improve our services. Information we generate and use to address your concerns are held up to 3 years. Information you submit as part of our authentication process are kept only for a few days. Information related to account restrictions and penalties are kept forever to protect our customers and business.
Examples: Issues raised, case history, restrictions history, contact details, contact method. |
| SOCIAL DATA | Blizzard uses the information we collect from players' actions to enable communications between our players in multiple ways, such as chat, forums and online gaming (e.g., Fireside Gatherings in Hearthstone). Forum content is kept for up to 3 years.
Examples: Forum content (version, allocation, locale, time zone, access groups, game accounts, posts), Fireside Gatherings details, chat groups, chat logs. |
| TRANSACTIONS | We collect transaction details related to the licensing and purchases of our products and services and also the contests and competitions we sponsor.
Examples: Order details/history, subscriptions, chargebacks, refunds, gifts, payment detail, shipping details. |
| ACTIVITY DATA | When a player interacts with our services, we collect server logs. Server logs are retained between 90 days and 1 year, unless they are related to escalation of customer issues, in which case we keep them up to 3 years.
Examples: IP address, access dates and times, activity region, activity logs. |
| DEVICE DATA | We may collect and keep information about the devices used to access our services for as long as you use them.
Examples: Hardware models, operating systems and versions, unique device identifiers. |
| COMMUNICATIONS | Blizzard may use the information we collect from players or partners to communicate with our players about our current and upcoming products, services, promotions, studies, surveys, news, updates and events. Blizzard may also use this information to promote and process contests and sweepstakes, fulfill any related awards, and serve you relevant ads and content about our services. Data gathered for a specific occurrence, such as surveys and giveaways, are held no longer than 90 days.
Examples: Name, email address, survey details, purchase/license history, activity history, email activity, Facebook and Twitter handles. |
| LEGAL RECORDS | We keep records as a support for any actual or anticipated legal matter for up to 7 years.
Examples: Case file. |
| TOURNAMENT/MATCH DATA | Licenses details between Blizzard and tournament organizers. We keep some information for as long as you allow us to and some for up to 2 years for legal and administrative reasons.
Examples: Tournament information, tournament organizer details. |
| GAME DATA | Game data is generated while a player plays our games. We keep records of players' game licenses, progress, history, stats, in-game purchases and interactions with other players for as long as you interact with our games.
Examples: Purchased item, unlocks, social, progression. |
Blizzard collects and uses your data for the following purposes:
Gameplay Experience. Creating the well-designed, highly enjoyable entertainment experiences you can find within our epic games! This includes:
Player's Account, Parental Controls and Security. Players of most of our games use a Battle.net account to house assets, communicate with friends and learn about our games and services. Parents of our younger players may set parental controls to monitor and control their children’s gaming. This includes:
Business optimization and service development. We conduct troubleshooting, research, analysis and product and service development to provide you with the best gameplay experiences and services. This includes:
Global Customer Service. We provide you with personalized support to investigate and address any possible difficulty you might experience with our games, your account or your purchases. This includes:
Business Operations. We process orders for our products, tournaments and services. This includes:
Social Features. We enable communications and experience sharing between our players. This includes:
Communications with our players. We communicate with our players about products, services, promotions, studies, surveys, news, updates and events. Blizzard may also use the information to promote and process contests and sweepstakes, fulfill any related awards and serve you relevant ads and content about our products and games. Specifically, we use your data for the following marketing purposes:
Unethical Behavior Prevention. One of our core values is: Play Nice; Play Fair. We devote resources to minimize fraud, cheating and abusive behavior. This includes:
Legal proceedings and requirements.We may use the information we collect to investigate or address claims or disputes relating to your use of Blizzard’s services or as otherwise allowed or required by applicable law. This includes:
Some of Blizzard’s products, services and features require that we share information with other users, our partners and service providers, or for legal reasons or in the event of a dispute.
1. With partners and service providers. Blizzard may provide information to its vendors, consultants, marketing partners, research firms and other service providers or business partners. For example, we may provide information to such parties to help facilitate event ticket sales, conduct surveys on our behalf and process payments for our products and/or games.
| Third Party Category |
|---|
| Cloud Services |
| Data Enrichment Services |
| Disaster Recovery Cloud |
| E-Commerce Services |
| Language Translation Services |
| Partners |
| Payment Management Services |
| Research Groups |
| Security & Authentication Services |
| Surveys |
| Ticketing Services |
| Tracking and Analytics Services |
| Tracking and Optimization of Advertising |
| Warehouse & Logistics |
2. With other players and/or the general public. Information may be viewable by your friends, people in games, or the public in general if you play our games, use certain features in our games, use certain features on our platforms (such as chat applications in game or on the Battle.net platform) or make posts in the forums.
3. With subsidiaries and affiliates. We share information with our subsidiaries and affiliates to help us provide our services or conduct data processing on our behalf. For example, Blizzard processes and stores information at Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. in the United States and may store or process data at Blizzard Entertainment SAS in France.
4. For legal reasons or in the event of a dispute. Blizzard may share your information if we believe it is required by applicable law, regulation, operating agreement, legal process or governmental request. This includes sharing your information with law enforcement officials, government authorities or other third parties as necessary to enforce our Terms of Service, user agreements or other policies to protect Blizzard’s rights or property or the rights or property of others, or in the event of a claim or dispute relating to your use of our services.
| Data sharing type | Party name | What third party does with data we share? |
|---|---|---|
| Data disclosure | Department of Justice | Law enforcement / crime prevention |
| Department of Homeland Security | Law enforcement / crime prevention | |
| FBI | Law enforcement / crime prevention | |
| Secret Service | Law enforcement / crime prevention | |
| Immigration and Customs Enforcement | Law enforcement / crime prevention | |
| NCFTA | Law enforcement / crime prevention | |
| U.S. Marshals | Law enforcement / crime prevention | |
| All Local and State law enforcement | Law enforcement / crime prevention |
Blizzard and our partners, such as marketing partners, may use tracking technologies like cookies, beacons, tags and scripts. These technologies are used in analyzing trends, administering the websites, tracking users’ movements around the websites and gathering demographic information about our user base as a whole. We may receive reports based on the use of these technologies by these companies on an individual, as well as an aggregated, basis.
We use cookies for various purposes, including our shopping cart, maintenance of user settings (e.g. language preference) and authentication. Users can control the use of cookies at the individual browser level. If you reject cookies, you may still use our websites, but your ability to use some of the features or areas of our websites may be limited.
We may also use clear gifs in our HTML-based emails to let us know which emails have been opened by recipients. This allows us to gauge the effectiveness of certain communications and the effectiveness of our marketing campaigns. For this reason, these types of clear gifs are tied to personal data.
We, and third parties with whom we partner to provide certain features on our websites or to display advertising based on your web browsing activity, use Local Shared Objects such as Flash cookies and Local Storage such as HTML5 to store content information and preferences. Various browsers may offer their own management tools for removing HTML5.
An automated decision is a decision which is made following processing of personal data solely by automatic means, where no humans are involved in the decision-making process. Blizzard does not have any decision-making process regarding an individual without any human involvement.
To help protect the privacy of the data and personally identifiable information you provide to us and that we learn from you, we maintain physical, technical and administrative safeguards. We update and test our security technology on an ongoing basis. We restrict access to your personal data to our employees. In addition, we train our employees about the importance of confidentiality and maintaining the privacy and security of your information.
Some of Blizzard games have detailed person data available to you through a web link. To get a hard copy or printed version of those pages you must: 1) Change the destination to print the page as a PDF, 2) Please click on “More Settings” and then check the boxes for “Header and Footers” and “Background Graphics”, 3) Click “Print” button, 4) Name the file, 5) Print that file at your favorite printer.