Privacy Policy for Word Search: Word Puzzle

This policy describes how Word Search: Word Puzzle ("the App"), published by PlayBrain, handles information. The App is a single-player offline word puzzle 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 progress is saved on your device. It is uploaded only if you use Google Play Games, and then only to your own Google account (see below).
• Two things leave your device: anonymous gameplay analytics we collect ourselves, and a request to Google AdMob when an advert is shown: a rewarded video you chose, or the short advert between levels.
• There are no banner ads, and purchases are optional (see In-app purchases below). 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 press a button marked AD, and if you never do, you will not see an advert.
• 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:

• which levels you have finished and how many hints you used on each,
• the level you are part-way through: the words you have found, the letters and words a hint has revealed, and how many letter hints you have taken,
• your daily puzzle and time attack progress, your daily streak, and whether zen mode is switched on,
• your coin balance, your ink balance, the boosters you hold, which daily gifts and rank rewards you have collected, which board look you have bought and are using, and the furthest you have got in each mode: the highest level, daily, time attack run and theme you have cleared,
• whether you have finished the guided first level,
• your sound and vibration preferences,
• counters for the rating prompt, and the analytics identifier and event queue described in the next section.

Coins are earned by playing and spent only on board looks; they cannot be bought. Ink comes from the daily gift, your rank and the optional purchases described below, and buys boosters.

Apart from the optional Google Play Games copy described below, your progress never leaves your device. The only exception in that list is the analytics identifier and event queue, which is what the next section is about. All of it is deleted when you uninstall the App or clear its storage in your device settings. We do not collect names, email addresses, contacts, location, 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, a session starting and ending, which screen you are on, the guided first level being started, stepped through, finished or skipped, a puzzle being opened, solved, lost to the clock or left unfinished, coins or ink earned, spent or refused for want of enough, an optional advert being offered, tapped and how it ended, a full-screen advert between levels being considered, shown and closed, a feature such as the daily puzzle being opened, whether the rating prompt was shown or skipped, and the sheet offering our other games being opened or clicked through,
• 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, 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.

Google Play Games Services

On Android the App can use Google Play Games Services for achievements and for keeping your progress in your Google account, so that it is still there on a new phone. Signing in is handled entirely by Google inside the Play Games layer: the App never sees your Google account, your name or your email, and it does not read your Play Games profile. It reports which achievements you have unlocked, and it stores one saved-game slot ("Your progress") in your Google account, which Google keeps under its own privacy policy and which you can delete from the Play Games app. None of this is sent to our own server, and if Play Games is not available on your device the game plays exactly the same without it.

In-app purchases

The App offers optional purchases: packs of ink, a bundle of boosters, a starter kit, and the option to remove the full-screen advert between levels. Nothing is locked behind them: every puzzle ships inside the App and every booster is earnable from the daily gift and your rank. Payment is handled entirely by Google Play; we never see your card number, billing address, name or receipt. Purchases are recorded through RevenueCat, a purchase-management service, so a purchase can be restored on a new device. RevenueCat receives an anonymous identifier it generates for the installation and the purchase records the store gives it, never your name or payment details (RevenueCat's policy). Restore purchases is in the settings menu and in the store, without an account. For our own analytics we record which product was shown and bought, as a product identifier and a price tier, never an amount of money.

Advertising (Google AdMob)

The App includes Google's Mobile Ads SDK for optional rewarded videos. A video can reveal a letter or a whole word, double the coins of a level you have just finished, put time back on the clock in time attack, or repair a missed day of your daily streak. 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 finished level, never during one, never in your first few, and never more often than a fixed cap allows. There are no banner adverts, and every level can be finished without watching a single video: restart is always free, and a pack always opens by finishing the one before it.

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 App requests non-personalised ads only, which limits Google to using this data for frequency capping, ad measurement and fraud prevention rather than building an advertising profile of you.

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: no rewarded video and no advert between levels. Where a video would have bought a reveal, the reveal is given to you for free instead of being withheld; the other video buttons are simply hidden, and everything they offer is still earnable by playing.

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).

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 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, and vibration.

Notifications

The App sends no notifications of any kind. It contains no notification code and no push service.

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]