Privacy policy
What applies to you depends on which game you play. Our games differ: one has no sign-in and no scores leaving the phone, while another needs an account and a microphone. Section 1 is a table of exactly which game does what, and a game does nothing that its own row does not say.
Hamstar, the only game released so far, collects nothing about you. No sign-in, no online scores, no voice chat, no purchases. Its one connection to the outside is fetching an advert you chose to watch.
1. What each game does
Every released game appears in this table. A game appears here before it appears on the store, never after.
| Game | Sign‑in | Online scores | Voice chat | Purchases | Adverts |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hamstar | No | No | No | No | Yes, only when you choose to watch one |
Games we are building will use more of what follows: signing in through Google Play Games for achievements and scoreboards, purchases, and in one case voice chat. Those sections are written below already, so you can read what a feature means before you meet it. Each is marked with whether any released game uses it today.
2. What is stored on your device
Every game saves your progress locally, in Android's standard app storage. For games with no sign-in, this is the only copy that exists anywhere. For Hamstar it is:
- Your level, score, daily streak and daily score history
- The board you are currently playing, so you can continue later
- Your nickname, chosen avatar and frame
- Your settings: sound, music, vibration, language, board appearance
- Your item counts (magnifiers and hints)
- A random identifier generated on your device the first time you play
About that random identifier
The game generates a random string on first launch and stores it locally. It is not derived from your device, your account, or anything that identifies you. Its only purpose is to let you quote it if you report a problem to us. In Hamstar it is never transmitted; if we ever see it, it is because you typed it into an email yourself.
3. Signing in with Google Play Games
Games with achievements or online scoreboards use Google Play Games, which is Google's own service. Signing in happens inside Google's screen, with your Google account. We never see your password, and there is no separate Cageur account to create.
When you sign in, Google gives the game:
- your Play Games player ID, a number that identifies you within our games and nowhere else
- your Play Games display name and avatar, which are the ones you chose in Play Games, not necessarily your real name
- your achievement and score progress in that game
Google does not give us your email address, your real Google account name, your contacts or your friends list.
Signing in is optional. Every game can be played to the end without it. What you lose by staying signed out is achievements and the online scoreboard; the game itself is unchanged.
4. Achievements and online scoreboards
Achievements and scoreboards are stored by Google on Play Games servers. We do not run a scores database, and there is no Cageur server holding your results.
An online scoreboard is public by its nature: your Play Games display name and your score are visible to other players. If you would rather not be recognised, change your display name in Play Games before you play. That setting is Google's, and it applies to every game you use it with.
Google's handling of this data is covered by Google's privacy policy. You can review, hide or delete your Play Games profile and its data through Google's own controls, described in Your data.
5. Voice chat
In games where players talk to each other, voice chat works like this:
- The microphone permission is asked for by Android, and you may refuse. Refusing does not lock you out. You can still play, still hear others, and still use the game fully; you simply do not speak.
- Your voice passes through our relay server so the other players in the room can hear it. It is not written to disk, and it is not recorded. We cannot listen to it, then or later.
- Voice chat can be switched off entirely, and individual players can be muted, in the game's settings.
When someone is reported
Because live audio is not stored, a report has to carry its own evidence. If you report a player, the game sends us a short recording of the last moments of that conversation, taken from your device, so a person can hear what you heard. That clip is kept for up to 30 days while the report is reviewed, then deleted.
This only happens when you press report. Nothing is uploaded otherwise.
6. Purchases
Where a game offers in-app purchases, payment is handled entirely by Google Play Billing. We never see your card, your bank details or your billing address.
From Google we receive, for each purchase: what was bought, when, an order identifier, and the country of the store account. We keep that so we can grant the item, answer support questions about it, and meet the record keeping that tax law requires of us.
Items bought inside a game are a licence to use them in that game. They have no cash value and cannot be exchanged for money.
7. Advertising
One kind of advert, and only when you ask for it. If you run out of hearts on a board, you may be offered a video to watch in order to carry on. You choose whether to watch it. There are no adverts between boards, none on the menu, and none that appear on their own. If you never tap that button, you never see an advert.
The adverts come from Google AdMob. To choose and show one, Google receives:
- your device's advertising ID
- your IP address, which indicates your rough location
- information about your device: model, operating system version, language, screen size
- which adverts were shown to you, and whether you watched them
- diagnostic information about how the advert library itself performed: errors and timings, not anything about you
- through Android's Topics system, broad interest categories inferred from the apps on your phone
That data goes to Google, not to us, and is handled under Google's privacy policy. We never see it. What reaches us is counts: how many adverts were shown, how many were watched to the end, and how much that earned. Those reports are totals, not people.
The advert library starts when the game starts, not when an advert is offered, so it can have one ready. That means Google is contacted shortly after you open the game, even in a session where you are never shown an advert.
What you can do about it
- Reset or delete your advertising ID. On Android: Settings, then Privacy, then Ads. Deleting it stops adverts being chosen from your history, and the game keeps working.
- Play offline. With no network connection, no advert can be fetched, and the button to watch one is simply not shown. Everything else in Hamstar works exactly the same.
8. Analytics
We run no analytics in any game. We do not measure which screens you open, how long you play, or where you stop. The only numbers we ever see are the advert totals described above.
9. Permissions, game by game
Every game keeps to the same rule: it asks only for what it cannot work without. Where a game needs no internet access, it does not ask for it, and where it does, this page says what for. Each released game gets its own list here.
Hamstar requests these:
VIBRATE- Haptic feedback. You can switch it off in the game.
INTERNET,ACCESS_NETWORK_STATE- Fetching an advert. Nothing else in the game uses the network.
AD_ID,ACCESS_ADSERVICES_AD_ID- Your device's advertising ID, which Google uses to choose adverts. You can reset or delete it, as described above.
ACCESS_ADSERVICES_TOPICS- Android's Topics system, which lets Google infer broad interest categories from the apps on your phone in order to pick adverts.
ACCESS_ADSERVICES_ATTRIBUTION- Measuring whether an advert led to an install elsewhere.
WAKE_LOCK,FOREGROUND_SERVICE- Added by Google Play services, which the advert library depends on.
The last five are added by the Google advert library, not written by us. We list them because you would find them anyway, and a list you find yourself is worse than a list we gave you.
Hamstar does not request storage, location, contacts, camera or microphone.
10. Who receives your data
We use as few outside companies as we can, and this is all of them:
- Google (Play Games)
- Sign-in, achievements and scoreboards, in games whose row says so.
- Google (Play Billing)
- Payment for in-app purchases, in games whose row says so.
- Google (AdMob)
- Choosing and showing adverts, in games whose row says so.
- Cageur Interactive
- The voice relay, in games with voice chat, and report clips for up to 30 days.
- Cloudflare
- Hosting this website. Nothing to do with the games.
We do not sell your data, and we do not share it with anyone outside this list.
11. How long we keep things
- Game progress on your device
- Until you clear the app's data or uninstall it. We hold no copy.
- Achievements and online scores
- Held by Google, for as long as your Play Games profile keeps them.
- Purchase records
- As long as tax and accounting law requires us to keep them.
- Voice during a call
- Not stored at all.
- A clip attached to a report
- Up to 30 days, then deleted.
12. This website
This site sets no cookies of our own, runs no analytics, and contains no tracking scripts. It loads no fonts, scripts or images from other companies; everything on the page is served from this domain.
The site is hosted on Cloudflare Pages. To deliver a page to you, Cloudflare necessarily handles technical information about the request, including your IP address, and uses it to protect the site from attacks. For that purpose Cloudflare may set a strictly necessary security cookie. That processing is Cloudflare's, under their privacy policy.
We do not receive those logs. We keep no record of who visited this site, which pages they read, or when.
13. Children and age
Our games are not directed at children and we do not present them as children's apps. Hamstar contains nothing unsuitable for a child, but it shows adverts chosen with a device advertising ID, and that alone puts it outside the rules for a children's app.
Games with voice chat, or with card play, are for older players and are rated accordingly. The age rating shown on a game's store page is the authority, and it is set by the rating boards, not by us.
If a child uses your phone, the advertising controls linked above apply to the whole device and are the strongest thing available to you. Google's Family Link can also restrict which apps can be installed.
14. Your rights
Rights such as access, correction, deletion and portability apply to personal data that a company holds about you.
For Hamstar we hold nothing, so there is nothing for us to show, correct or delete. Game data lives on your device and is under your control; see Your data for how to remove it.
For a game where you have signed in, what we hold is your Play Games player ID and your purchase records. You may ask us for a copy of it, or ask us to delete it, by writing to privacy@cageur.com. We answer every message, including the ones where the answer is that we have nothing on file.
Data that Google holds, whether for adverts, Play Games or payments, is Google's to show or delete, and requests about it go to Google. The most direct controls in your own hands are your device's advertising ID and your Play Games profile.
15. Changes
If this policy changes, the updated version appears at this address with a new date at the top. Changes that affect what data is handled will be published before the affected version of the app is released, and a new game appears in the table in section 1 before it appears on the store.