← ForceBuy

privacy

this privacy policy applies to the ForceBuy download that runs on your machine. the web version at forcebuy.net has its own: forcebuy.net/privacy.

what data is collected?

none. ForceBuy has no account, no sync, no analytics, no crash reporting and no advertising. nothing about you, your machine or your inventory is sent anywhere by the app itself.

which connections does the app make?

only the lookups the app needs to do its job, and only to the sources you allow. steam is queried for the inventories and, once you connect the account, for the inventory and market history that goes with them. prices come from the daily lists of CSFloat, Skinport and Buff163 and from the steam community market. if you add a CSFloat API key or a Buff163 login, your own trades there are read and matched to your items, and your current CSFloat listings are shown. the CS2 catalogue is downloaded from the public ByMykel/CSGO-API dataset, and exchange rates come from the european central bank. every outbound request is a GET, so nothing you own, add or change is uploaded.

third parties

those services are operated by others and have their own terms and privacy policies. your ip address reaches them, as with any web request. steam sees the steam id, vanity name or profile url that you added. CSFloat and Buff163 see your key or login only if you entered one, and only on requests to their own site (csfloat.com, buff.163.com); without it they, Skinport and the catalogue source see only the technical requests they need to answer. the ecb sees a plain request for the daily reference rates. YouPin898 is not connected and makes no network calls.

your steam session

connecting an account is optional and pastes one cookie (steamLoginSecure) from a browser you are already signed in to. it is validated against steam once, checked against the account you pasted it into, and only sent to steamcommunity.com over https, never carried across a redirect. it is stored in a separate secrets.json file so a copy of the data folder or a cloud sync does not carry it along by accident, and it can be revoked from the same panel at any time. there is no password field and there never will be.

what stays on your machine?

the folder you pick during setup. it holds the database with your items, prices, holdings, history and dashboards, your settings, the steam session cookie and marketplace logins in their own file, cached images and catalogue, and the sync logs. defaults are %APPDATA%\ForceBuy on windows, ~/Library/Application Support/ForceBuy on macos and ~/.local/share/forcebuy on linux. everything is local and can be deleted by removing that folder.

who can reach the local API

the API binds to 127.0.0.1, so only programs on your own machine can reach it. two checks in front of every request make sure a web page you have open cannot be turned into a way in: cross-origin requests are answered only for pages served from this machine, and requests whose Host header names something other than localhost are refused, which is what stops DNS rebinding. binding to anything else via FORCEBUY_HOST is only for people who know why they are doing it.

changes

if a future version processes data differently, this page will be updated before it does.

contact

questions about privacy? [email protected]

last updated: september 2026