Privacy Policy

This policy explains what Puzzle Lantern (“we”, “us”) collects when you use the Puzzle Lantern mobile app and this website, why we collect it, and what control you have over it. The service is operated by [LEGAL ENTITY NAME, ADDRESS].

Your account

Puzzle Lantern does not have a signup screen. The first time you open the app, we create a pseudonymous account on our servers and store its credentials in your device’s secure storage (iOS Keychain or Android Keystore). That account is what keeps your streak, your statistics, and your friends attached to you between sessions.

• No email address is required to play, to appear on leaderboards, to keep statistics, or to add friends.
• There is no password. We never ask you to create one, so there is none for us to store or for anyone to steal.
• You are given a generated username (something like quietlantern42). You can set a separate display name at any time.
• Optional email for account recovery is not available yet. It is planned, so that you could restore your account on a new device with a one-time code. Until we ship it and update this policy, we hold no email addresses for player accounts. If you uninstall the app before then, the account on that device may not be recoverable.

What we store

Account information

• an internal account identifier;
• your generated username;
• your display name, if you set one;
• the date the account was created.

Gameplay

• your Daily attempts and results for each game: which puzzle date, whether you finished, your score, elapsed time, and the accuracy or mistake information that game uses for ranking;
• enough of the moves you made to let our server validate a submitted result (see Terms of Service);
• your overall activity streak and per-game statistics.

Friends

• friendships you create, through an invite link or a username friend request: who is connected to whom, and when;
• pending friend requests you send or receive, until they are accepted, declined, or expire;
• the opaque invite tokens you generate or open. A token is a random string; it does not contain your username or any other readable identifier;
• blocks you set and reports you submit.

Technical

• device session records, so you can see and revoke signed-in devices;
• app version, operating system version, and device model, to diagnose crashes and bugs;
• standard server request logs, which include IP addresses. We keep these for a short period for security and abuse prevention, then discard them.

What stays only on your device

More puzzles are local. Puzzles you play in More puzzles, and the history of those sessions, are stored on your device and are not sent to our servers. More puzzles never appear on any leaderboard and never affect your Daily results or streak. Your in-app preferences (sound, haptics, reduced motion, notification choices) also stay on the device.

What we never collect

• Your contacts. The app never requests the Contacts permission. There is no contact syncing, no contact discovery, no “find your friends” feature, no username search or autocomplete, and no friend codes. There are exactly two ways to become friends, and both need the other person to agree: one of you shares an invite link, or one of you sends a friend request to the other’s exact username. Sending a request reveals nothing, because the reply is the same whether or not that account exists.
• Your precise location.
• Your photos, camera roll, microphone, or health data.
• Advertising identifiers. We do not serve ads, we do not track you across other apps or websites, and we do not sell or share personal information with data brokers or advertisers.

What other players can see

Leaderboards are part of the product. When you complete a Daily puzzle, your display name, your username, and your result for that puzzle can be visible to your friends on the friends leaderboard and, for that game’s global leaderboard, to other players. Nothing else about your account is shown. Choose a display name you are comfortable having seen publicly.

Analytics

In the app

The app does not send us analytics yet. There is a stub in the code where a provider will go, and it reports nothing anywhere. When we do ship it, we will measure how the product is used in aggregate, tied to your pseudonymous account identifier rather than to your real-world identity: things like how many people complete a Daily puzzle, whether players come back the next day or the next week, which games are started and finished, how often More puzzles are used, how invite links perform from share to accepted friendship, and how often puzzle generation or a result submission fails. We will name the processor ([ANALYTICS PROVIDER]) and update this page before that happens.

We do not use third-party advertising or cross-app tracking SDKs in the app, and we do not intend to.

On this website

This site can use Google Analytics 4 to count visits and see which pages get read. It runs only if you accept it. Until you choose Accept analytics in the banner, nothing is requested from Google and no cookie of any kind is set. If you decline, or simply never answer, the site loads no third-party script at all.

If you accept, Google Analytics:

• sets its own cookies, _ga and one named after our measurement ID, so a returning browser is recognised. They last up to two years;
• records the pages you open, the site or search that referred you, and your browser, device type and approximate location, which Google derives from your IP address;
• records when you tap an App Store or Google Play badge, and which part of the site you tapped it from.

Google processes this on our behalf and also uses it for its own purposes as an independent controller, and the data may be handled in the United States. Google Analytics 4 uses your IP address to work out that approximate location and does not store the address itself. We do not enable Google Signals, advertising features, or any sharing of this data with advertising products, and the tag is loaded with every advertising permission switched off.

Our legal basis is your consent. You can change your mind at any time with the Cookies control at the bottom of any page. Withdrawing clears the Google Analytics cookies from your browser and stops the script loading again. If your browser sends the Global Privacy Control signal, we treat that as a decline and never ask.

Your answer is kept in your browser’s local storage rather than in a cookie, so declining stores nothing that could identify you, and the answer never reaches our servers. Clearing your browser storage will make the banner appear again.

Deleting your data

Open Settings → Account → Delete account in the app. Deletion removes your account record, your username and display name, your Daily attempts and results, your streak and statistics, your friendships, and your invite tokens. Your entries disappear from leaderboards.

Deletion is permanent and cannot be undone. There is no email on the account to restore it with. We complete deletion within [30] days. We may keep a minimal record of a ban or an abuse report where we need it to keep the service safe, and aggregate statistics that can no longer be linked back to you.

You can also sign out or revoke individual devices from Settings → Devices without deleting anything.

Your rights

Depending on where you live, you may have the right to access, correct, export, or erase the personal information we hold about you, or to object to certain processing. The in-app deletion control covers erasure directly. For anything else, write to us at the address below and we will respond within the period the applicable law requires.

Because accounts are pseudonymous and hold no email address, we may not be able to verify that a request belongs to a particular account unless it comes from the app on the device that holds the account’s credentials.

Children

Puzzle Lantern is not directed to children under [13], and we do not knowingly collect personal information from them. If you believe a child has created an account, contact us and we will delete it.

Security and storage

Traffic between the app and our servers is encrypted in transit. Account credentials live in the platform’s secure keystore on your device. Access tokens are short-lived and refresh credentials are rotated, so a stolen token has limited value. Data is processed and stored in [REGION / SUB-PROCESSORS]. No system is perfectly secure, but we hold very little about you to begin with, which is deliberate.

Changes to this policy

If we change what we collect or why (for example when optional email recovery ships), we will update this page and change the date at the top. Material changes will also be surfaced in the app.

Contact

Questions about privacy, or a request about your data: privacy@puzzlelantern.app.