Portal Frontier

We never see your home

This game asks to scan the inside of a room you live in. That is a serious thing to ask, so here is exactly what happens to it — not a summary of a policy, but the actual behaviour of the software.

The short version

The scan stays on the phone. A floor plan of boxes leaves it.

What the server receives: a list of walls and objects, each with a size and a position; the outline of the floor as a polygon; and how high the floor sat. About ten kilobytes — smaller than a photograph, and it is not one.

What the server never receives:

Why it is built this way

Because a promise nothing enforces is not a promise

This is not a policy sitting on top of a system that could do otherwise. The game was designed around it: the server holds boxes because boxes are all it was ever given, and the parts of it that would need a picture of your room were built not to need one.

A test fails the build if a camera frame, a mesh or a spatial map ever appears in an outbound request. The claim is worth exactly what enforces it, and this is what enforces it.

It has a cost, and it is worth naming: because we will not act as a courier for spatial maps, players sharing a room hand them to each other directly, and co-op therefore only works when everyone is on the same local network. We accepted that rather than the alternative.

What is stored, and for how long

The room registry

A room you upload is kept so that the arena can be rebuilt without rescanning, and — if you agree to it separately — so that it can be used to test that the game works in rooms of different shapes.

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