Privacy

Who we are

Hot Drop is operated by Casey Foster as an independent project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Electronic Arts Inc., Respawn Entertainment, or Overwolf. For anything on this page, including deletion requests, write to [email protected].

What we collect

• Your email address and password, held by Supabase Auth on our behalf. We never see or store your password. The address is verified before the account can be used.
• A public handle you choose. Your profile lives at a public URL — anyone who knows the handle can read your matches. Do not pick one you want kept private.
• Match telemetry from Overwolf's Game Events Provider: placement, damage, kills, knocks, assists, the weapons you held, your rotation path, drop and death positions, your squad, the lobby roster, and the kill feed.
• A device identifier and a device key. The key is generated on your PC and never leaves it except as a bearer token to our own API. We store only a one-way SHA-256 hash of it. It is what proves your PC owns your username.
• When the app is open. While the recorder is running it sends a heartbeat to us about once a minute containing nothing but your device identifier, so the website can show whether your PC is recording instead of guessing. It carries no match data and nothing about what you are doing. It stops the moment you quit the app, and we keep only the most recent timestamp, not a history of your sessions.
• Other players in your lobbies. The roster includes their in-game names and platform identifiers. Those rows stay scoped to the match they came from. We do not build public profiles of people who have not installed Hot Drop, and there is no way to look someone up by name unless they are a Hot Drop user.
• Highlight clips you choose to upload, plus the title, description, and match you attach to each clip. Highlights are optional and public on your profile. Do not upload a video you do not have the right to share.

Screen capture, and when it happens

Apex frequently does not report your teammates' damage. If — and only if — you switch on “Read squad damage off the end screen” in the app, Hot Drop takes a screenshot when a match ends and reads the numbers off it with on-device OCR.

• This is off by default and can be turned off again at any time.
• It captures the Apex window when Windows makes that available, and otherwise your display, because exclusive fullscreen hides the window. If another window is in front, it can be in the frame.
• Frames are examined in memory and discarded immediately. No screenshot is written to disk or uploaded. Only the squad damage numbers, matched against names already in the match, are kept.
• OCR runs entirely on your PC. No image is ever sent anywhere.

A separate, also optional setting called “Improve queue detection with lobby capture” reads only the party area of the Apex lobby before matchmaking. Once the eventual squad is known, Hot Drop checks which teammates were already visible and keeps only the party size, those already-recorded squad identities, the detection source, and a confidence level.

• This setting is off by default and independent of end-screen damage capture.
• Lobby frames and OCR text remain in memory briefly and are then discarded.
• With this setting off or no readable frame, existing match telemetry may estimate a likely party size from recurring teammates.

Highlight recording, and when it happens

If — and only if — you switch on “Find and save private combat highlights”, Hot Drop uses Overwolf's recorder to keep a rolling replay buffer while Apex Legends is running. It records the Apex game picture without the cursor or other overlays. You choose whether audio is Apex only or all system audio, and whether your microphone is included.

• This is off by default and can be turned off again at any time.
• The rolling buffer remains local. Combat candidates and clips you save with the manual hotkey are written to your chosen folder and shown in the desktop review queue after the match.
• Nothing is uploaded until you press Approve & publish. Declining deletes the local video. Unreviewed candidates expire after seven days and the queue is capped at 20 clips or 2 GB; manual saves are never automatically evicted to make room.
• Approval uploads the MP4 to Cloudflare R2 and makes it public on your profile and attached match. A declined clip leaves only minimal decision metadata on this PC so we can tune detection; that metadata is not uploaded.

Email we send you

• Account email — confirming your address, and password resets. You cannot opt out of these; without them the account does not work.
• Product email — occasional notes about new features. This is off unless you tick the box when you sign up, you can change it any time on your account page, and every one of them has an unsubscribe link.

We do not sell or rent your address, and we do not send email on anyone else's behalf.

Discord

If you switch on “Post my matches to the Hot Drop Discord”, a card with your result is posted to a shared public channel after each match. It is off by default. Turning it off stops future posts; cards already posted stay in Discord's history and are governed by Discord's own terms.

If you connect your own Discord server, Hot Drop may also post the number of private highlights waiting after a match. That notice contains no review link and no video; only the player's desktop app can open the private queue.

Third parties

• Tebex processes subscription and lifetime payments. When you start checkout, we send your account identifier, IP address and an opaque checkout reference to Tebex. Tebex collects your billing and payment details on its hosted checkout. We retain checkout and payment references, subscription status and access dates to provide paid access; we do not store card details or full payment webhook payloads.
• Overwolf supplies the game events and may collect its own app-usage analytics, described in Overwolf's privacy policy.
• Apex Legends Status (apexlegendsstatus.com) is queried for your ranked tier and RP, which the game does not report to us. That query includes your EA/Origin account id, and is made by our server through their official API — never by the app on your PC.
• Supabase stores your email address and password hash and issues your login session. Match data is never sent to them.
• Railway and Cloudflare host and front this site and process request metadata such as IP addresses in the ordinary course of serving it. If you upload a highlight, Cloudflare R2 stores the MP4 and its browser-generated poster and delivers them to profile visitors.

What we do not do

We do not sell this data, use it for advertising, or share it with EA or Respawn, and we do not profile players who have not installed the app.

Data on your own PC

Captured events are written to %LOCALAPPDATA%\ApexTelemetry so nothing is lost when the network drops. Per-match archives are deleted after 90 days, the folder is capped in total size, and the tray menu has a “Delete local files now” item. Highlight candidates use the folder you choose and the separate seven-day/20-clip/2-GB limits described above. Uninstalling does not delete local data, so a reinstall does not lose your device key.

Retention and deletion

We keep your events until you delete them. “Delete my data” in the Hot Drop window erases every match, event, rank snapshot, roster row, and published highlight recorded under your account, across every PC sharing it, permanently and without asking anyone. You can also email [email protected] and we will do it for you.

You can remove an individual highlight sooner from Account → Highlights. Removing one deletes its profile metadata, MP4, and poster from Cloudflare R2.

Your rights

If you are in the EU, UK, or a US state with a comparable law, you have the right to access, correct, export, or erase your data, and to object to its processing. The delete button covers erasure instantly; for anything else, email [email protected]. Where consent is the basis for processing — screen capture, highlight video/audio, and Discord posting — you can withdraw it in the app at any time. Overwolf's built-in consent manager is reachable from the app and the tray menu.

Children

Hot Drop is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect their data. If you believe a child has installed it and sent us data, email [email protected] and we will remove it.

Changes

If this policy changes in a way that affects what we collect or who can see it, the app will say so on its next launch rather than quietly updating this page.