Privacy Policy for Sudoku: Classic Number Puzzle

This policy describes how Sudoku: Classic Number Puzzle ("the App"), published by PlayBrain, handles information. The App is a single-player offline puzzle game with no account and no online play.

The short version

• No account, sign-in, name, email, or any personal detail is needed to play, or accepted.
• Your puzzles and progress are 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.
• Apart from that backup, two things leave your device: anonymous gameplay analytics we collect ourselves, and requests to Google AdMob for the adverts described below.
• A short full-screen advert may play when you leave a solved puzzle, never during one and never in your first few. Every other advert waits until you press a button marked AD. The "No breaks between puzzles" purchase removes the full-screen advert.
• The App offers in-app purchases, handled by Google Play. We never see your card, your name or your address, and no price is ever recorded in our own events.
• The App can send you an optional daily reminder, only if you switch it on in Settings. It is scheduled by your own phone and nothing about it leaves the device.
• 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.

What is stored on your device

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

• the puzzle you are part-way through and the daily puzzle you are part-way through, each holding the digits and pencil marks you have entered, your mistake count, hints used and elapsed time,
• your settings: difficulty, and the highlighting, conflict and auto-clear-notes toggles,
• how many puzzles you have started and finished in each difficulty band, your fastest time in each, and which puzzle number comes next,
• the days whose daily puzzle you completed, your daily reward streak, and a lapsed streak bought back with an advert,
• your pencils balance, which cosmetic colours you own and which you have equipped,
• your nibs, the boosters you are holding, how far up the daily gift ladder and the rank ladder you have got, and whether the starter set has been paid out,
• a record of purchases the App has completed, so that a purchase is never credited twice and is never lost if the App is closed mid-way, held at its own storage key and never sent anywhere,
• whether you have finished the guided first puzzle,
• your sound, music and vibration preferences, and whether you switched the daily reminder on,
• counters for the rating prompt, and the analytics identifier and event queue described in the next section.

Pencils are earned by solving puzzles and spent only on colours. They cannot be bought. The optional purchases are described in the In-app purchases section below.

Your progress is stored on your device. If you are signed in to Google Play Games, a copy of it 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. The record of completed purchases is not in that backup. The only item in that list sent to us is the analytics identifier and event queue, which is what the next section is about. Everything on the device is deleted when you uninstall the App or clear its storage in your device settings. We do not collect names, email addresses, contacts, location (other than the country, described below), photos, files or health data. The App has no way to receive any of them.

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, plus a second random identifier for the current session,
• gameplay events: first launch, the app being opened, a puzzle completed or restarted, an optional advert offered and how it ended, whether the rating prompt was shown or skipped, the guided first puzzle being started, finished or abandoned, and the sheet offering our other games being opened or clicked through,
• 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,
• 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,
• purchase events, carrying a product identifier our own code chose and a price tier, a code we use internally such as t1 or t3. They never carry a price, a currency, a country, a payment method or a transaction id,
• 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 (beyond the country our server works out, described above), anything you typed, or your contacts, photos and files.

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 ask for deletion, email [email protected].

Rating prompt

The App may occasionally ask you to rate it using Google Play's own in-app review dialog, and only after a win. 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 and shows two kinds of advert: one short full-screen advert between puzzles, and rewarded videos you choose to watch. There are six things a video can buy: an explained next move, filling in one square, a check of your grid for mistakes, filling in every pencil mark at once, keeping your board after three mistakes, and doubling a reward you have just earned. Every button that costs a video is marked AD before you press it. One advert is not optional: a short interstitial may play when you leave a solved puzzle, never during one, never in your first few, and never more often than a fixed cap allows. It stops entirely if you buy the "No breaks between puzzles" product. Because it is not asked for, the App does request adverts while you play even if you never press a button marked AD. Every puzzle can be finished without watching a single video: undo, clearing a square, writing pencil marks by hand and starting the same puzzle again are all free and unlimited.

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, the ad SDK is not used at all. The help those buttons offer (the hint, a filled square, the grid check, filling in every pencil mark and keeping your board) is then given to you for free instead of being withheld, and the offer to double a reward is not shown, so declining costs you nothing.

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).

In-app purchases

The App sells nibs, boosters, a starter set and an option to remove the advert break between puzzles. Payment is handled entirely by Google Play; we never see, receive or store your card details, your name, your address or your email. Consumable purchases (nibs and the booster bundle) are spent in the game and are not restored by a reinstall, because Google Play does not report a purchase once it has been consumed. The Restore Purchases control says so when you press it. Purchases that are not consumable, such as the starter set and the advert removal, are restored.

Our other games

The App has a sheet listing PlayBrain's other games. Choosing one opens its Google Play listing in your browser or in the Play app, with a campaign tag that tells us the visit came from this game. No information about you travels with it, and nothing is sent unless you tap through.

Permissions, audio and the microphone

The App plays sound and music and can vibrate. 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 the audio library is configured with microphone support switched off. Access to external storage, photos and media, screen overlays and background services is blocked in the same place. What remains is the ordinary set a game like this needs: internet access and network state, used for adverts and for the analytics described above, a wake lock declared by the ad library, audio settings, vibration, and the notification permissions the reminder library declares (asked for only when you switch the reminder on).

Notifications

The Settings sheet has a Daily reminder switch, off until you turn it on. Turning it on is the only thing that asks Android for permission to post notifications; nothing asks at launch, and turning the switch off cancels everything queued. The reminders are local notifications, scheduled on your device by your device. There is no server, no push service and no account: nothing about you leaves the phone for them, and we cannot tell whether one was ever shown. They say only that today's puzzle is ready, or that a saved grid is waiting. If you revoke the permission in Android's settings, the switch turns itself back off the next time you open the App.

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

We hold no data that identifies you, so there is nothing personal to export or correct. To remove everything the App has stored, uninstall it or clear its storage in your device settings. To ask us to delete the anonymous analytics rows for an installation, email [email protected]. 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 another analytics tool is ever added, this policy will be updated before that version ships, and the date above will change.

Contact

[email protected]