Privacy Policy

Effective date: 22 October 2026 · Contact: [email protected]

1. Who we are

Mercato (“we”) operates mercato.gg, a read-only market data site for the Steam economy, run by sole proprietor Artem Titorenko (Ukraine). Mercato is not affiliated with Valve Corporation.

2. There are no accounts

You cannot register, sign in, or connect a Steam account to Mercato. We do not ask for your name, your email address, or a password, and there is nothing to log in to. Everything on the site is public and readable without identifying yourself.

Because there is no account, we hold no watchlist, no portfolio, no inventory and no notification settings for you. Earlier versions of Mercato offered those features; they have been removed.

3. What we record

• Server logs. Like any website, our servers record the request: your IP address, the page or file requested, the time, the referring page and your browser’s user-agent string. These are kept for security and to diagnose faults.
• Item ratings you cast. If you rate an item, we store the rating, which item it was for, the time, and a random identifier for your browser (§4). Nothing else — not your IP address, not your user-agent.
• Usage and device data. When you use Mercato, our analytics providers may automatically collect information such as the pages you visit, the links you follow, your browser and device type, and your approximate location. We process it on the basis of our legitimate interest in understanding how the site is used and improving it, and — where applicable law requires it — with your consent (§4).

We advertise Mercato on Google and measure whether an ad led to a visit and to a click through to a marketplace (§4). We use no remarketing and no personalised advertising, we do not build profiles, and we do not sell data.

4. Cookies and analytics

Before you give consent, Google Analytics may receive cookieless measurement signals: no analytics cookies are read or written, and no persistent analytics identifier is stored in your browser. Advertising measurement depends on where you are, as described below.

Three things can set a cookie:

• mct_voter — set only if you rate an item: a random identifier with no meaning outside Mercato, whose only purpose is to stop the same browser rating the same item twice. It is HttpOnly (no script can read it), SameSite=Lax, Secure, and it expires after about 13 months. It is not an account, it is not linked to your IP address or to anything else we hold, and it cannot be used to identify you. Clearing it removes the only record connecting your browser to the ratings you cast; the ratings themselves remain in the totals.
• Analytics cookies — used only with your consent, which you give by pressing OK on the consent bar. They help us tell returning visits apart and understand how the site is used. Your choice itself is remembered in your browser (a mct-consent entry in local storage), not on our servers.
• Advertising measurement cookies and similar records in your browser — set by Google’s tag so that we can tell whether a visit came from one of our ads on Google and whether it led to a click through to a marketplace. In the United Kingdom, the European Economic Area (EEA), Switzerland and Québec they are set only after you press OK; before that, Google may still receive cookieless signals, including the ad-click identifier carried in the page address. Elsewhere, this measurement is on unless you turn it off below.

To turn measurement off for this browser, use the button below: from the next page you open, no Google tag and no analytics script loads on Mercato. Clearing this site’s data in your browser also removes these cookies and records — and with them this choice. In the United Kingdom, the EEA, Switzerland and Québec that withdraws your consent, and the consent bar asks again; elsewhere, measurement resumes on the next page until you turn it off again.

We use no remarketing and no personalised advertising, and we build no audiences from visits to Mercato.

5. Services we rely on

• Cloudflare sits in front of mercato.gg to serve the site and protect it from abuse. All traffic passes through Cloudflare, which processes connection data (including your IP address) on our behalf for that purpose.
• Google (Analytics and Ads) measures site usage and the results of our ads, as described in §3 and §4; Google also processes this data under its own terms. Our analytics provider measures site usage on our behalf. Both receive what their own scripts collect in your browser. In addition, when you follow a marketplace link, our server records which marketplace and which item it was and passes that record to our analytics provider. The record carries no IP address; if you pressed OK and have not turned measurement off, it is linked to the analytics identifier in your browser.
• Marketplace links. Some links take you to third-party marketplaces, and some are affiliate links which may earn us a commission. Once you follow one you are on that company’s site and its privacy policy applies, not ours. We do not pass anything about you to them.

6. Payments

Mercato is free and takes no payments. We do not ask for card details and none reach our servers.

7. Retention

Server logs are kept on a rolling operational schedule and then discarded. Ratings are kept while the item exists.

8. Your rights and how to reach us

Because there is no account, there is normally nothing of yours for us to hold, look up or delete. If you believe we hold data about you, you may ask for access, correction or deletion. Email [email protected] with the subject “Privacy request” and we will respond within 30 days.

9. Children

Mercato is not directed at children and we do not knowingly collect data from them.

10. Changes

We post material changes here, with a new effective date, no later than when they take effect.