Privacy Policy — Connect the Dots: Line Puzzle

This Privacy Policy describes how the mobile game Connect the Dots: Line 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 anonymous gameplay analytics we do collect are described below.

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.
• The app offers optional in-app purchases: packs of fuses, a booster bundle, a starter kit, and removing the full-screen advert between levels. Nothing is locked behind them. Google Play handles the payment, and we never see your card, billing address or name. We record only which product was shown and bought, as a product identifier and a price tier, never an amount of money.
• A short full-screen advert may play when you leave a finished level, never during one and never in your first few. Every other advert waits until you tap a button marked "AD". Buying "Remove ads" removes the full-screen advert.
• An optional daily reminder can be switched on in Settings. It is a notification scheduled on your device by the App itself: nothing is sent to us or to anyone else to make it work, and Android asks for your permission only when you switch it on. You can switch it off in Settings at any time.

What is stored on your device

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

• which levels you have completed, the fewest moves you finished each in, and whether you finished it perfectly,
• the level you are on and the pipes you have drawn on it so far,
• which difficulty packs you have opened,
• your sound on/off preference,
• your wallet: sparks, fuses, the boosters you hold, which panel 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,
• gameplay events: sessions and screens, levels started, completed, failed or abandoned, optional adverts offered and how they ended, the full-screen advert between levels and how it ended, features used, whether the rating prompt was shown, and the sheet offering our other games being opened or clicked through,
• 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: sparks, fuses and boosters earned or spent, and which in-game item was bought with them,
• purchase events: which product was shown or bought, as a product identifier such as connectdots.fuses_small, together with a price tier, which is a code-chosen bucket name such as t1. A tier is not a price and no amount of money is ever sent,
• the install source, sent once after install: 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),
• advert earnings: when an advert is shown, what it earned us as reported by the advert network (the advert type, the amount, its currency and how precise the network says that amount is). This is the advertiser's payment to us, not anything you pay,
• 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,
• 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, described 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 two optional features: you may choose to watch a rewarded video in exchange for a hint on the level you are playing, or to open the next difficulty pack early. Both buttons are labelled AD before you press them. One advert is not optional: a short 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. Buying "Remove ads" removes the full-screen advert; the optional adverts stay, because you ask for those. Undo and restart are always free.

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).

All adverts 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 hints are simply given to you for free instead, so declining costs you nothing in the game.

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).

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. The App asks for internet access (for adverts), audio settings, vibration, billing (for optional purchases) and notifications (only used if you switch the daily reminder on). The notification library also adds permission to restore a scheduled reminder after the phone restarts and to show a badge on the app icon; neither reads anything from your phone. The advertising library adds the advertising ID and network-state permissions it needs to serve an advert.

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]