Privacy Policy

The short version

• There is no account and no sign-up.
• Online play uses your Game Center identity, which Apple manages. There is no chat: players communicate with preset emotes only.
• Your games, results and hints are stored on your device and in your own iCloud, where we cannot see them.
• Parlour is free and shows ads, chosen by Unity LevelPlay from the advertising partners named below. There are no ads in your first session. They receive technical information about your device to show and measure ads. They never receive your games, your moves, your Game Center identity or your purchases.
• Ads aren't personalised unless you allow it. From your second session, ads that aren't personalised may show before you answer Parlour's ad privacy question. In the UK, the EU and Switzerland, ads are personalised only after you tap Allow. In the US, Don't allow opts you out of the sale or sharing of your data. Players under 18 never get personalised ads.
• iOS asks whether Parlour may use your advertising identifier only if you have allowed personalised ads, and never in your first session. You can say no, and you'll see the same number of ads.
• Remove Ads stops banners and full-screen ads; you can still choose to watch a rewarded video for a reward, which starts the advertising code. Parlour Plus has no ads and no ad offers at all.
• Kid mode: for players under 13, the advertising code is never started, so there are no ads, no ad offers and nothing goes to advertising partners. There is no tracking prompt, no usage data is sent to us and online play is limited to Game Center friends.
• You can report any ad from Me → Report an ad.
• Only if you agree (in the US, unless you turn it off), the app sends us anonymous usage data: which features you use and when something goes wrong. Never your content, your name or anything that identifies you. Turn it off or delete it in Settings at any time.
• Beyond the advertising SDKs, there is no third-party analytics or tracking code in the app. Our own usage data goes only to our server, run for us by Google Cloud in London.

What the app stores, and where

Parlour stores your games in progress, results and statistics, your hint balance and your settings on your device, inside the app's own storage area. That data is not accessible to other apps, is included in your device backups if you back up your device, and is deleted when you delete the app.

Your preferences — sound, board and piece sets, and the games you play most — are stored the same way.

Parlour also keeps your hint balance and progress in iCloud key-value storage under your own Apple Account, so they follow you to your other devices. That data lives in your iCloud, handled by Apple under its own terms; we have no access to it and run no server of our own for it. Turning off iCloud for Parlour in your device's Settings keeps everything on one device.

Game Center

When you play online, Parlour uses Apple's Game Center for your player name and avatar, invitations, matchmaking, leaderboards, achievements and turn notifications. Apple handles this under its own privacy policy; Parlour sees your Game Center display name and player ID only to run the match and stores them on no server of ours. Game Center asks you to sign in only when you first open online play.

There is no free-text chat anywhere in the app. Players communicate with preset emotes only. Reporting a player opens Game Center's own report flow.

Usage data

To find out which features help people and what goes wrong, Parlour can send us anonymous usage data. It goes only to our own server, not to an analytics company, and there is no tracking: it is never combined with data from other apps or companies, never used for advertising, and Parlour never asks to track you for it.

What is sent: events such as opening the app, starting and finishing a game (which game, which mode and the result, never the moves), solving a daily puzzle, using a hint, an ad being shown (its format and where, nothing about the ad itself), opening a purchase sheet and the outcome of a purchase (which product, and whether it went through). Each event carries the app version, the iOS version, the device model (such as "iPhone18,2"), the app's language, the country of your App Store account, whether you have a paid upgrade, and a random ID the app makes for this purpose. The ID is not your device's identifier or advertising identifier and is different in each of our apps. Error reports contain only an error code.

What is never sent: your moves, Game Center identity, anything about an ad's content, your name, email, contacts, location or IP address. Our server does not record IP addresses.

Your choice: in the UK, the EU and most countries, nothing is collected unless you tap Share usage data when the app asks. In the US, the app tells you once that usage data is on and lets you turn it off straight away. Either way, Parlour Settings → Usage data → Share usage data turns it off or on at any time. Turning it off deletes anything not yet sent and the random ID. In Kid mode, no usage data is sent at all.

Deleting it: Parlour Settings → Usage data → Delete my data asks our server to erase everything sent under your random ID. It is removed from our reports at once and from storage within a day, and the app starts again with a new random ID. If you are offline, the app sends the request the next time it can.

How long we keep it: individual events for 13 months, then they are deleted automatically. We keep daily totals (such as how many people used the app that day) for longer. These contain no IDs.

Legal basis and where it is kept: where we ask first, your consent. In the US, our legitimate interest in improving the app. The data is stored on Google Cloud in London (europe-west2), which processes it only for us. On the App Store's privacy label this appears as usage data, diagnostics, a device ID and purchase history, collected but not linked to you and not used to track you.

Advertising partners

The free version of Parlour shows ads. Unity LevelPlay chooses and serves them. Unity LevelPlay is run by ironSource, part of Unity Software Inc. (Unity Technologies, USA, and ironSource Ltd, Israel). It runs an auction between ironSource's own ad network and Unity Ads (Unity Technologies, USA). The code for Mintegral (Mintegral International Ltd, a Mobvista company, Singapore and China) and Meta Audience Network (Meta Platforms Ireland Ltd and Meta Platforms, Inc.) is also in the app, and they will take part in the auction when enabled; until then they receive no ad requests. This page names every partner before its code ships.

To show and measure ads, they may receive: your device's advertising identifier, only if you allow tracking when iOS asks (below); the identifier for vendor (a random ID iOS gives each developer's apps on your device); your IP address and the approximate location derived from it; your device model, iOS version, language and network type; and ad interactions such as impressions and taps, plus diagnostics from their own code.

They use it to show ads, measure them, prevent fraud and for their own analytics, under their own privacy policies, linked below. They never receive your games, your moves, your Game Center identity or your purchases. We never receive that information about you individually; we see only aggregate revenue and performance figures.

There are no ads in your first session. From your second session, ads may load, including before you answer Parlour's ad privacy question; until you allow personalised ads, they are chosen without using your personal data for personalisation (contextual ads). Delivering and measuring those ads still sends partners the device and network information listed above.

Legal basis (UK and EU GDPR): for ads that aren't personalised, our legitimate interests in funding a free app, and in delivering ads, measuring them and preventing fraud (Article 6(1)(f)). For personalised ads, your consent, which you give by tapping Allow and can withdraw at any time.

Full-screen ads only come between games, never mid-game, in a tutorial or during an online match. Banners sit in their own row and never cover the board.

Paying stops the ads, reliably. Remove Ads (one-time) removes banners and full-screen ads the moment the purchase goes through. Rewarded videos stay available as an option: if you choose to watch one for a reward, the advertising code starts for that, with the partners and choices described here. Parlour Plus has no ads and no ad offers, so the advertising code is never started.

Report an ad: if you see an ad that is offensive, misleading or broken, Parlour → Me → Report an ad opens an email to us with the ad network and ad unit filled in, so we can block it. Add a description or a screenshot if you like; nothing is sent until you send the email.

Transfers: our partners may process data outside the UK and EEA, including in the USA, Israel, Singapore and, once enabled, China (Mintegral), under their own safeguards.

Unity privacy policy (Unity LevelPlay, ironSource, Unity Ads)Mintegral privacy policy (when enabled)Meta Audience Network privacy policy (when enabled)

Your choices about ads

In the UK, the EU and Switzerland, Parlour asks once, at a calm moment between games, whether ads may be personalised, with Allow and Don't allow as equal choices. Ads may already show before you answer, from your second session, but they are not personalised until you tap Allow. If you say no, you still see ads, but they aren't personalised.

In the US and elsewhere, Me → Ad privacy choices asks the same question. Where US state law gives you the right, Don't allow opts you out of the sale or sharing of your data for advertising. You can change your answer at any time in Parlour → Me → Ad privacy choices.

Teens: players whose device says they are under 18, or who are known to be minors without an exact age, never get personalised ads, whatever is answered. Parlour tells the partners not to use their data for personalised ads and not to sell or share it, uses Meta's Limited Data Use setting in the US, and never shows the tracking prompt.

Ads only track you if you allow it. Only after you have allowed personalised ads (or, outside the UK, the EU and Switzerland, not opted out), from your second session and after you have finished two games, and never during a game, Parlour explains that it is free and shows ads, then iOS asks whether Parlour may use your activity in other companies' apps and websites to choose them. If you say no, the app works exactly the same and you see the same number of ads; they are simply less relevant. You can change this at any time in Settings → Privacy & Security → Tracking on your device.

Kid mode never starts the advertising code and shows no ad space and no ad offers, so children see no ads at all and no data goes to advertising partners.

Parlour Plus turns ads and ad offers off, and with them everything above. Remove Ads turns off banners and full-screen ads; everything above then applies only if you choose to watch a rewarded video.

Purchases

In-app purchases are handled entirely by Apple. We never see your payment details. Apple tells the app only whether a purchase is active.

Subscriptions renew automatically until you cancel. You can manage or cancel a subscription at any time in Settings → your name → Subscriptions on your device.

Parlour sells Remove Ads (a one-time purchase), Parlour Plus (a subscription) and hints. Family Sharing applies to Remove Ads and Plus. Nothing you buy changes the dice or the deal.

Children and Kid mode

Parlour is for all ages and is rated 4+. It is a general-audience app, not in the Kids category. Parlour asks iOS for the account's declared age range (never a birthday) at the first moment it matters, and if the player is under 13, or parental controls say so, Kid mode turns on automatically and stays on.

In Kid mode: the advertising code is never started, and there is no ad space and no offer to watch an ad, so there are no ads and nothing is sent to advertising partners; there is no tracking prompt and no advertising identifier is used; no usage data is sent to us; online play is limited to Game Center friends, with no matchmaking with strangers; and purchases go through Apple's Ask to Buy as usual.

Players aged 13 to 17, and minors whose exact age isn't known, may see ads, but never personalised ones: the partners are told not to personalise ads or sell or share their data (in the US, with Meta's Limited Data Use setting), and there is no tracking prompt.

We do not knowingly collect personal information from children. If you think a child has sent us something, email support@tychelabs.net and we will delete it.

Your rights

The only information we hold is the usage data described above, linked to a random ID rather than to you. Turn it off or delete it any time in Parlour (Parlour Settings → Usage data). Because we can't tell who a random ID belongs to, that button is the reliable way to reach your data; for anything else, email support@tychelabs.net. To remove everything stored on your device, delete the app. You can also complain to the Information Commissioner's Office (ico.org.uk).

For data held by the advertising partners, use the links above; each has its own privacy controls, and your device's tracking setting applies to all of them.

Changes

If this policy changes, the updated version will be posted here with a new effective date. Material changes will also be described in the app's release notes.

Parlour is not yet on the App Store. This policy describes the first release we are preparing, and will be updated if it changes before launch.