Privacy Policy — Color: Water Sort Puzzle

This Privacy Policy describes how the mobile game Color: Water Sort Puzzle ("the App", "we", "us"), published by PlayBrain, handles information when you play. The App is a single-player offline puzzle game. We collect no personal data at all.

The short version

• No account, sign-in, name, email, or any personal detail is needed to play — or accepted.
• Your progress is saved on your device. If you are signed in to Google Play Games, a copy is also backed up to your own Play Games account (Google's Saved Games) so it can be restored. We cannot read it.
• We do not collect raw exception messages or stack traces. Limited diagnostics and optional gameplay recording in updated versions are described in the notice above.
• We send anonymous gameplay analytics to our own server, described below.
• The App shows Google AdMob adverts: optional rewarded videos you choose to watch and a short full-screen advert that may play when you leave a finished level. There are no banner adverts.
• The App uses Google Analytics for Firebase to report a few gameplay milestones to our advertising campaigns, described below.
• The App offers optional in-app purchases. Google Play handles the payment, and we never see your card or billing details.

What is stored on your device

The App saves the following to your device's local storage:

• the highest level you have unlocked,
• the level you are on and the moves you have made in it,
• your sound, vibration and shape-marker preferences,
• your wallet: drops, prisms, the boosters you hold, which bench you are playing on, your run of days, and the high-water marks that stop a reward being paid twice,
• a record of what you have purchased, so a purchase survives a restart.

Your saved progress is stored on your device and is deleted when you uninstall the App. If you are signed in to Google Play Games, a copy is also backed up to your own Play Games account (Google's Saved Games) so it can be restored on a new phone or after a reinstall. Google keeps that copy under its own privacy policy and you can delete it from the Play Games app; it is not sent to us and we cannot read it. We do not collect names, email addresses, contacts, location (other than the country, described below), photos, or health data. We have no way to identify you.

What is sent to our own servers

The App sends anonymous gameplay analytics to a server we run at playbrain.games. It is how we find out whether the game is being played and where people stop.

What is sent:

• a random identifier the App generates for itself on first launch, so one installation can be told apart from another,
• a session identifier, valid for the time the App is open,
• the install source: whether the install came from a Google ad, the Play Store, another PlayBrain game, or elsewhere, plus the ad campaign name (never the ad click identifier), sent once after install,
• the country you are in, which our server works out from your network address when the App first reports; the address itself is not stored,
• gameplay events from a fixed list in the App's source: sessions and screens, levels started, completed, failed or abandoned, adverts offered and how they ended (rewarded and full-screen), the rating prompt, the More games sheet, feature use, and errors with no message and no personal data,
• reminder events: the game offered to send you reminders; whether you said yes or not now to that offer; whether your phone allowed notifications when asked; a reminder was set, what kind and how many hours away; and you opened the game from a reminder,
• in-game economy events: drops, prisms and boosters earned or spent, and which in-game item was bought with them,
• advert earnings: when an advert is shown, what it earned us as reported by the advert network (the advert type, the amount and its currency). This is the advertiser's payment to us, not anything you pay,
• purchase events: which product was shown or bought, as a product identifier such as watersort.prisms_small, with a price tier (a code-chosen bucket name such as t1). A tier is not a price and no amount of money is ever sent,
• the app version and the platform.

What is never sent: your name, email or any account (the App has none), your advertising ID or any hardware identifier, your location (other than the country noted above), anything you typed, your contacts, photos and files, or your card number, billing address, receipt or any payment detail.

That random identifier is not linked to you, is not shared with anyone, is not used for advertising, and is discarded when you uninstall. Events are queued on the device and sent in batches over HTTPS, so playing offline loses nothing. To stop collection, uninstall the App; to request deletion, email [email protected].

Rating prompt

The App may occasionally ask you to rate it using Google Play's own in-app review dialog. Google decides whether that dialog actually appears; we only ask. Any rating you leave goes to Google Play, not to us, and we cannot see who left it.

Advertising (Google AdMob)

The App includes Google's Mobile Ads SDK for one optional feature: you may choose to watch a rewarded video in exchange for one extra tube on the level you are playing. One advert is not optional. A short full-screen advert (an interstitial) may play when you leave a finished level, never during one, never in your first few levels, and never more often than a fixed cap allows. The App shows no banner adverts.

When an ad is requested, Google may collect:

• your device's advertising identifier,
• device information (model, operating system, language, coarse region),
• your IP address,
• interaction with the advert (views, taps).

The rewarded videos and the full-screen advert may be personalised where the law allows it. In the EEA and the UK this follows the choice you make on Google's consent form, and you can turn personalisation off at any time in your device settings (Settings → Privacy → Ads).

If you are in the EEA or the UK, Google's consent form is shown before any ad is ever requested, and nothing is requested until you have answered it. If you decline, no ad is loaded and the optional extra tube is simply unavailable — the rest of the game is unaffected.

Google's handling of this data is governed by its own policies: Google Privacy Policy and How Google uses information from sites/apps that use its services.

You can reset or delete your advertising identifier at any time in your device settings (Android: Settings → Privacy → Ads).

Buying something never removes a rewarded advert. The hint button, the extra tube, the skip button, the streak rescue and the doubled daily gift are all still there after any purchase, because they are things you asked for. What a purchase can remove is the one advert you did not choose: the full-screen advert between levels.

Google Analytics for Firebase

The App uses Google Analytics for Firebase to tell our advertising campaigns which installs went on to play: for example, reaching level 3, 10 or 25, or opening the App again the next day. Google receives these events together with an app-instance identifier, your device's advertising identifier and an approximate location derived from your IP address, and handles them under Google's privacy policy. Screen views and the Android device ID are not collected, and nothing beyond these milestones is sent.

In the EEA and the UK this follows the choice you make on Google's consent form. You can reset the advertising identifier at any time in your device settings.

In-app purchases

The App offers optional purchases: packs of prisms, a bundle of boosters, a starter kit, and the option to remove the full-screen advert between levels. Nothing in the game is locked behind them: every level is playable from the first launch, every booster is earnable from the daily gift and the bench ranks, and the rewarded adverts are unchanged whether you buy anything or not.

Payment is handled entirely by Google Play. We never see, receive or store your card number, billing address, name or receipt. Restore purchases is available in the settings menu and in the shop, without an account. Packs of prisms are consumable: once spent they are gone.

For our own analytics we record which product was shown and which was bought, as the product identifier and a price tier, as described above. We never record an amount of money.

Audio and the microphone

The App plays sound and music. It does not record audio and has no microphone access. The RECORD_AUDIO permission that the audio library would otherwise request is explicitly blocked, and is absent from the App's manifest.

Children

The App is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect any data from them. If you believe a child has provided personal information, contact us and we will address it — though note the App has no mechanism to receive personal information in the first place.

Your rights

Because we hold no data about you, there is nothing for us to export, correct or delete. To remove everything the App has stored, uninstall it or clear its storage in your device settings. For advertising data held by Google, use the controls linked above.

Changes to this policy

If the App's data practices change — for example if a different ad format or an analytics tool is ever added — this policy will be updated before that version ships, and the date above will change.

Contact

[email protected]