This page details any data collected and send by the components of Special K to our backend services, what we use the data for, and for how long we store the data.
To opt out of any future automated diagnostics and telemetry submission, set Diagnostics to None in Special K Injection Frontend (SKIF) -> Settings -> Advanced.
As of March 2024, Special K does not collect any general diagnostics or telemetry from users beyond what is necessary to allow Special K’s Steam enhancements to function properly.
To facilitate comparing achievements with friends when playing a Steam game, by default Special K transmits your personal Steam account ID as well as the game ID of the current game to our backend services in the United States. This data is sent through two separate encrypted HTTPS requests to our servers, with no identifying attribute shared between them other than your IP address which is required to make the HTTPS request. The data is then proxied to the Steam servers to retrieve information about the game as well as the achievements of your friends through the Steam Web API.
The purpose of this is to improve the compatibility of Special K’s Steam enhancement features with games that do not expect to receive this kind of data through the local Steamworks API of the Steam client.
Any data retrieved is cached for one and a half hour (1.5 hours) on our servers to prevent excessive repeated queries to the Steam servers if you were to restart the game within that time period. After this time the data is removed from our servers.
If you have a public Steam profile the backend retrieves achievement stats for the game from your friends whom themselves also have public profiles. For people with private or friends only profiles, no achievement stats will be retrieved.
Your IP address is not stored on our servers, nor is any identifying attribute that can correlate a game to the user playing it.
Metadata of the cached data (e.g. number of times a game has been looked up) is also used to populate https://backend.special-k.info/ to give visitors an insight into which games the Special K community is currently using the framework with.
Users can opt out from this functionality for all games by disabling Steam enhancements through a shared master config.
The Special K Injection Frontend (SKIF) desktop app does not send any data to our backend services as all game detection and parsing is performed solely on the local machine.
To enable its features the app reads the Windows registry and various files related to the supported platforms (e.g. game manifest files belonging to Epic, Steam, and Xbox/Microsoft Store) to detect and list installed games as well as provide shortcuts to save locations for Steam games, though as previously mentioned none of this data leaves the system.
The built-in updater and list of patrons relies on anonymous public access to the CDN we use, and we do not gather any data related to such connections.
Game covers for Epic, Steam, and the Xbox/Microsoft Store are downloaded through direct connections to the aformentioned platforms’ backends, and as such is purview to their respective privacy policies.
Disable Steam enhancements through a shared master config to prevent Special K from sending any data related to the Steam enhancement features to our backend servers.
To opt out of any other automated diagnostics and telemetry submission in Special K or the injection frontend SKIF, set Diagnostics to None in Special K Injection Frontend (SKIF) -> Settings -> Advanced.