Privacy policy

Your little town lives on your PC. This page explains what Doodlefolk keeps, what leaves your computer, and why.

Effective 16 October 2026. It covers the Doodlefolk game on Steam (app 5389300) and this website.

Who we are

Doodlefolk is made by BinaryForge, a small studio in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. We handle personal information in line with Canada's Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA). Write to support@binaryforge.ca with any privacy question.

What stays on your PC

Doodlefolk saves everything it needs in ordinary Windows folders. Nothing in this section is sent to BinaryForge.

%APPDATA%\Doodlefolk

Your town and its residents, relationships, diaries, reminders and settings (settings.json); named casts; mods and checked copies of Workshop mods; your meme folder; the photo album; up to six automatic town backups (512 MiB at most); and Steam Cloud working files. If a second Steam account plays on the same PC, its town is kept separately in %APPDATA%\Doodlefolk-Steam, in a folder named after that Steam account number.

%LOCALAPPDATA%\Doodlefolk

The error log (logs\doodlefolk.log, with one older copy once it passes 128 KiB), Studio's browser cache, window-position checkpoints, your desktop drawings, the encrypted Twitch sign-in if you use it, and records that link Steam accounts to towns.

Pictures\Doodlefolk

Photos, GIF and MP4 highlights and family-tree or history exports that you choose to save.

To remove your data from a PC, quit Doodlefolk and delete these folders.

Steam

Doodlefolk is sold and updated through Steam. Valve runs Steam under the Steam privacy policy. When you play the Steam version, the game uses these Steam features:

• Your Steam account. The game reads your Steam account number to pick the right town and Cloud save. It may appear in local folder names. Your Steam name is not saved.
• Achievements and stats. Stickers your town earns unlock matching Steam achievements. The game also keeps five counts with Steam: fish caught, festivals held, focus minutes, requests done and songs sung. Daily limits are applied before anything is sent. Steam may show us totals across all players, such as how many players have an achievement.
• Weekly community goals. The "This week, together" goals read the combined totals of all players from Steam about every ten minutes. Your own capped counts are the only thing the game adds.
• Steam Timeline. The game tells Steam whether the town is playing or paused. It also adds markers for moments such as a new sticker or a town milestone, which can include names you gave your doodles. Steam keeps these markers with its game recordings.
• Steam Cloud. If Steam Cloud is turned on in Steam, the game syncs one portable save file to your Steam account. The details are below.
• Steam Workshop. The game takes part only when you browse, subscribe or publish (details below).

The Steam version does not use Steam rich presence, friends lists, leaderboards or online connections between players.

What Steam Cloud syncs

The portable save holds:

• your current town and named casts: residents, their relationships, skills, diaries and collections, pets, items, clubs, memorials, town history and scrapbook entries;
• your progress: saved resident library, songs, quests, hats, discoveries, fish records, stickers and focus totals;
• gameplay and presentation preferences, such as theme, sounds, calm mode and simulation rules;
• your Steam account number, plus a random device number and a revision number. These are used to spot conflicting saves.

Text you write, such as town, resident and pet names and diary lines, travels with the save.

These always stay on the PC:

• sign-ins and feature approvals;
• screen, window, graphics and power settings;
• screen-awareness and input settings, memes and quiet hours;
• focus tasks and reminders;
• logs, backups, photo files, mod files and the browser cache.

To stop syncing, turn off Steam Cloud for Doodlefolk in Steam.

Steam Workshop

Publishing only happens when you choose a mod pack and press publish. The game then sends Steam:

• the checked pack files;
• the title, description and preview image you chose;
• a "Mod" tag and the pack's ID.

Unless you pick Public, the game does not ask Steam to make a new item public. A published item can be seen by anyone with access to it under Steam's rules, together with your Steam profile as its author.

When you subscribe to an item, Steam downloads it. Doodlefolk then checks it and copies it into its own mods folder before using it.

Optional extras that use the internet

The town itself works offline. Two extras connect to services other than Steam, and only after you turn them on.

Twitch chat

For streamers. You sign in with Twitch's device-code login, and the game asks only for permission to read chat (chat:read). It connects to your channel's chat and reads, for each message:

• the sender's name, display name and name colour;
• the message text;
• moderator and broadcaster badges;
• Twitch's user and message IDs;
• moderation events such as cleared messages.

It never posts in your chat. Viewers can appear as visiting doodles while you stream; they are not saved as residents of your town. Your channel name is saved in your settings.

Your Twitch sign-in is encrypted with Windows' per-user protection and kept in %LOCALAPPDATA%\Doodlefolk. It is never put in your save, backups or Steam Cloud. Disconnecting deletes it and asks Twitch to revoke it. Twitch's handling is covered by the Twitch privacy notice.

Internet memes

Off by default, and it also needs pranks to be on. When it is on, the game downloads blank meme template pictures from i.imgflip.com with a plain request, without cookies, so Imgflip sees an ordinary download from your internet address. Captions are made on your PC.

The game does not check a BinaryForge server for updates; Steam handles updates. Links in Studio, such as the Steam page or community discussions, open in Steam or your web browser only when you click them.

Your screen, sound and microphone

Some features let your doodles notice what is happening on your desktop. Apart from Gaming Pause, each one is off until you approve it in setup or Studio, and they all stop while the town is paused. What they notice is used on the spot and is not sent anywhere.

• Stand on text, react to words and point out links. These use Windows UI Automation to read the visible text, link names and web addresses in the window in front, plus window titles. Password fields are skipped. A link opens in your browser only if you click a doodle's offer.
• Music and video reactions and beat dancing. These use the volume level of each app's audio and the app's name. They do not record the sound itself. "Follow my music" (off by default) reads the track details Windows shows for media players and does not save them.
• Typing, away and notification reactions. These use only the time since your last key press or mouse move, and whether a Windows notification is showing. The keys you press are not read.
• Download reactions. These watch your Downloads folder for new file names.
• Talk out loud. This uses the speech recognizer built into Windows with your default microphone. If you speak or type to a doodle, a short note of it (up to 50 characters) may go into that doodle's diary. Diaries are part of your save and Steam Cloud.
• Gaming Pause. This hides the town while you play. New players start with it pausing for fullscreen apps. It checks the size of the window in front and which program owns it; for apps you pick, it may also check the window type and app ID. It never reads window titles or contents. Your list of chosen apps is saved on your PC.
• Developer hooks. These are off by default. They listen only on your own computer (127.0.0.1) for signals from your own tools.

Photos and highlights are drawn from the game's own picture of the town. They do not capture your desktop or other windows.

Problem reports

If something goes wrong, Help → Report a problem lets you copy a short summary or save a diagnostics ZIP. You choose where the ZIP is saved. It contains:

• the game version and build, the .NET version, the Windows version, CPU architecture and WebView2 version;
• recent error types, error codes and the names of the game's own functions involved;
• a short read-me.

Error messages and file paths are left out. So are your settings, saves, screenshots, anything you wrote, sign-ins, Steam IDs and hardware IDs.

The game never uploads a report. It only goes somewhere if you attach it yourself, for example to a post in Doodlefolk's Steam Community discussions (which are public) or an email to support@binaryforge.ca. The full error log stays in %LOCALAPPDATA%\Doodlefolk\logs. It can contain file paths from your PC and is not included in the ZIP.

What we do not do

• No accounts with BinaryForge. You don't sign up with us to play.
• No analytics, telemetry, advertising or third-party crash reporting in the game. We do not sell or rent personal information.
• No online play. Town visitors are local characters, and friends cannot visit each other's towns.
• No generative AI runs in the game, and nothing you do is sent to an AI service. All dialogue is built in. As the Steam page notes, some content was made with the help of generative AI tools during development.
• The game does not ask for anyone's age, birthday or contact details.

This website

The website remembers your Paper or Chalk theme in your browser's local storage. It has no accounts, marketing cookies, email sign-ups, third-party video embeds or analytics scripts.

Cloudflare hosts the site. It processes connection information, such as IP addresses and request details, to deliver and protect it; see Cloudflare's privacy policy. Steam links carry campaign labels showing where on the site a link was placed. If you arrived with campaign labels of your own, those may be passed to Steam instead. The site does not add names, emails, account IDs or per-visitor identifiers to those links.

Your choices and rights

• You can turn off any optional feature in Studio, disconnect Twitch, turn off Steam Cloud in Steam, or delete the folders listed above.
• Under PIPEDA you can ask what personal information we hold about you, and ask us to correct it. In practice this is usually only emails you have sent us; we use those to reply and keep them only as long as needed to help you.
• For information held by Valve, Twitch, Imgflip or Cloudflare, contact them under their own policies.
• If you are not satisfied with our answer, you can contact the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada.

Changes and contact

Doodlefolk is still in development. If a new feature changes what is collected or shared, we will update this page and its effective date before that feature is released.

Questions: support@binaryforge.ca · BinaryForge, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.