Effective 2026-10-23. Questions: on the Discord.
In short
- There are no accounts and no sign-in. The servers keep nothing about you after you disconnect, apart from their logs (below).
- The servers keep what a race needs in memory only, while it runs.
- Chat isn’t stored or logged.
- Your settings, replays and logs stay on your PC.
What other players see
Your name, your tag (like NAME #4F2A), your machine and its colours, your ping in the lobby, your place and times
in a race, and your chat lines. The lobby server’s public status page shows names, machines and colours in the
lobbies and races running.
What the servers keep
- The lobby server keeps the lobbies, votes, names, tags and machines in memory while you’re connected. A restart empties it. It stores no results.
- Your tag comes from a random key the launcher keeps on your PC. The server works the tag out from it each time you connect and doesn’t keep the key.
- Chat is passed to the other players in your lobby and then forgotten: it isn’t stored or logged by the server. The launcher keeps the last 200 lines of a visit in memory and writes none to disk.
- Your IP address is used to connect you. To limit abuse, the server counts joins per address in memory, for a few minutes.
- Race servers pass every player’s controls along and compare checksums. They keep a race’s controls in memory while it runs, so a player can rejoin, and forget the race when it ends.
- Moderation: kicks, bans and mutes are kept by tag, in memory only; a restart lifts them. A chat line refused by the filter is logged with the sender’s name and tag and the word that matched, not the line.
- Logs: the servers write operational logs (connections, races, errors) at our host, Fly.io. Fly.io keeps them for a limited time, and they can include IP addresses.
What stays on your PC
The launcher keeps its settings, your replays, its logs and a line of figures per online race (race-summary.txt)
in the data folder of your Piconet folder. None of it is sent anywhere. A replay leaves your PC only if you send
the file to someone.
Discord
When Discord runs on your PC, the launcher shows what you’re doing in Piconet on your Discord profile (in a menu, a lobby, a race, practice or a replay). It talks to the Discord app on your PC only. Turn it off in Settings, Online, Show on Discord. Discord’s own privacy policy applies to what Discord shows.
This website
This site sets no cookies and has no analytics or trackers. Its fonts load from Google Fonts, which receives your IP address. The site is served by Fly.io, which logs requests, including IP addresses, for a limited time. There is no content delivery network in front of it. The download comes from our file storage at Tigris, which logs requests in the same way.
Changes
If this page changes, the date at the top changes with it.