Privacy Policy

The short version

There is no account, no sign-in and no profile. The game does not ask for your name, your email address, your contacts, your photos, your camera, your microphone or your location.

What it does carry is advertising, supplied by Google AdMob. Showing an ad means Google receives a limited amount of information about your device. That is the only thing in the game that sends anything anywhere, and it is the part worth reading about below.

You can play without ever agreeing to personalised advertising. You will still see ads, they will just be chosen without reference to you.

What leaves your device

Advertising requests, and nothing else.

When the game shows an ad, Google receives your device’s advertising identifier (the IDFA on iOS, the Advertising ID on Android), an approximate location derived from your IP address, your device model, operating system version and language, and which ad slot was filled. Google uses this to choose an ad, to avoid showing you the same one repeatedly, and to detect fraudulent clicks.

There is no analytics in this game. We do not record which hands you play, how long you play for, what you tap, how you aim, or whether you win. There is no crash reporting, so we receive nothing when the game fails either. There are no accounts and no purchases, so there is nothing to bill and nobody to bill.

What reaches us from Google is a count: how many ads were shown and what they earned. We cannot tell who you are from it.

Where the ads appear

Two places, and both are worth naming because they behave differently.

• Between hands. An interstitial ad runs on a cadence as you play. You do not choose to see these, though you can close them once the ad allows it.
• The chip top-up. When you run out of chips you can watch a rewarded ad to top them back up. This one is entirely your choice. Your chips also refill on their own over time, for free, whether or not you ever watch an ad.

Advertising, and who sees what

Advertising is served by Google AdMob. When AdMob fills a slot, Google and its advertising partners act as independent controllers of the data they receive. What they do with it is governed by their policies, not by this one:

• Google Privacy Policy
• How Google uses information from sites or apps that use our services

We never see your advertising identifier ourselves.

Choosing whether ads are personalised

Personalised ads are chosen using your advertising identifier and the profile built against it. Non-personalised ads are chosen from the context instead, and still use a limited amount of data for frequency capping and fraud prevention.

In the EEA, the UK and Switzerland, Google’s consent form appears before any ad loads, and personalised advertising runs only if you agree to it. You can reopen that form and change your answer at any time from the rules sheet, under the ad privacy choices.

On iOS, the system asks you separately, through the App Tracking Transparency prompt, before any tracking happens. Decline and no tracking identifier is shared. You can change your answer later in Settings, under Privacy and Security, then Tracking.

On Android, you can reset or delete your Advertising ID in Settings, under Privacy, then Ads. Deleting it stops personalised advertising in every app on the device.

Declining costs you nothing. The game plays identically either way, the chip top-up still works, and the ads are the same length.

What stays on your device

Your chips, your progress, your settings and your consent choice are written to the app’s own storage, which the operating system keeps separate from other apps. They stay on your device. They are not sent to us, we cannot read them, and there is no cloud save.

Deleting the app deletes all of it.

Deleting what has already been sent

Advertising data is held by Google, not by us, so we cannot delete it on your behalf. Google’s retention periods and its own deletion tools are set out in its privacy policy, linked above. Resetting your advertising identifier, as described above, breaks the link between your device and the profile built against the old one.

We hold nothing that identifies you, so there is nothing on our side to delete.

Children

The game is not directed at children. We do not knowingly collect anything from a child under 13, and the game is not enrolled in any child-directed advertising programme. Its age rating is shown on its store listing.

The chips are virtual. They cannot be bought, they have no cash value, and nothing in the game can be paid for with real money.

Your rights

Depending on where you live you may have the right to ask what personal data is held about you, to have it corrected or deleted, to object to it being processed, and to complain to your data protection regulator. The GDPR and the UK GDPR give these rights in Europe and the UK, and the CCPA gives comparable rights in California.

Almost everything here is Google’s to answer, because Google is the controller for everything to do with advertising, and its privacy policy explains how to make a request of it. Where we are the controller, write to us and we will answer within 30 days.

Our legal basis under the GDPR is your consent for personalised advertising, which you can withdraw at any time by the route above, and our legitimate interest in being paid for a free game for non-personalised advertising.

We do not sell personal information, and we do not share it for cross context behavioural advertising beyond the advertising described here, which you can turn off.

Where the data goes

Google processes advertising data on servers in a number of countries, including the United States. Transfers out of the EEA and the UK rely on the European Commission’s standard contractual clauses.

Changes to this policy

If a future version of the game collects something it does not collect today, this policy will be updated before that version is released, and the effective date above will change. If the change is material you will be asked in the app rather than left to notice it here.

Contact

Questions about this policy, and any request to see or delete what is held about you, can be sent to support at madsciencelabs dot com dot au.

Ricochet Royale is published by Mad Science Labs Pty Ltd.