OpenTTD's survey is opt-in: it will not send any data unless you explicitly say you want to participate. If you participate, the game will send a survey result whenever you leave a game, whether by loading another, going to the main menu, exiting the game, or if the game crashes.

The survey has been designed around a few ground rules:

• No personal data and no data to track a specific user.
• The user is in control: you can opt-out at any time, and review the survey result at any time (via "Game Options" in-game).
• Minimize how often we send survey results.

With this in mind, we collect the following information of every game:

• The settings as they are at the end of the game.
• The NewGRFs used by the game.
• The companies, whether they are human or AI, and in case of AI: what script was running. Additionally, how many vehicles and infrastructure each company has.
• How long the game has been running.
• Basic information about your OS / CPU.

This information is used on this website to show statistics about how OpenTTD is used.

As mentioned in the last section and introduction, the survey is designed to be privacy friendly. This means the following:

• We do not track users. With this we mean that no information is collected that can be used to track a specific user. Everything is as generic as possible.
• Results are only published when sufficient surveys (N > 100) have been collected. If the sample size were too small, it might be possible to identify a single user.
• We do not store any information other than the survey results. This means we do not store IP addresses, or any other information that can be used to identify a user, next to the survey results.

To prevent abuse of this system, there are several measures in place. For example, you cannot send a survey result more than once every minute. This is done based on the IP address, and handled by a separate system than the one that handles the survey results. Your IP address is never stored with the survey results.