Playvale Games

Privacy Policy

Playvale Games LLC · Effective 10 September 2026 · Last updated 10 September 2026

The short version

We try to keep this simple and honest, including where the honest answer is more complicated than we'd like.

You don't need an account for anything. Not to play, not to subscribe, not to use premium. Accounts are optional and exist only to back up your stats and sync across your devices.

We don't sell your data as a product. But we should be straight with you: we are paid to show you ads, and personalized ads pay more than non-personalized ones. So we have a financial interest here, and we'd rather say so than pretend otherwise.

You can switch personalized ads off for free, in Settings, and keep playing online. You'll still see ads — they'll just be chosen by context instead of by a profile of you. You never have to pay to opt out.

Offline games never show ads and never require a connection. If you're not signed in, nothing leaves your device at all. If you are signed in to a Playvale account, the app syncs your stats and settings in the background — including for offline games — because that's what you asked it to do when you made the account.

Online play needs your IP address to connect you — that's how the internet works.

Premium subscribers see no ads at all, and we request nothing from the ad provider for them.

We never see your payment details. Apple and Google handle payment; we only learn that a subscription is active.

We use no third-party analytics at all — no session tracking, no engagement funnels. Just the crash reporting Apple and Google provide.

We never touch your contacts. Friends are added by code, never by scanning your address book.

These games are for adults. They're not made for or marketed to children.

The rest of this document is the detail behind those statements.

1. Who we are

Playvale Games LLC ("Playvale," "we," "us") is an independent game studio in Texas, USA. We make and operate the Playvale Games collection of card, dice, domino, tile, and board games (the "Games").

For users in the European Economic Area and the United Kingdom, Playvale Games LLC is the "controller" of the personal data described in this policy, except where we say otherwise.

Contact: privacy@playvale.games

2. What we collect, and when

We've organized this by what you're doing, because that determines what happens.

2.1 Playing offline

Offline games never show ads and never require an internet connection. Your play is never gated on being able to reach us.

If you are not signed in to a Playvale account, nothing leaves your device. Game progress, statistics, settings, and save data are stored locally, and we receive none of it.

If you are signed in to a Playvale account, the app will contact our servers in the background — potentially at any time, including while you are playing an offline game — to sync the data you asked us to back up: your game statistics, match history, in-progress games, and preferences. This is the feature you opted into when you created the account, and it's why the account exists.

Two things to be clear about:

Syncing does not gate play. With no connection, the game works normally and syncs later.

Syncing has nothing to do with ads. No ad is requested or shown during offline play, whether you're signed in or not, and no advertising data is collected from offline sessions.

If you'd rather nothing be transmitted, sign out or don't create an account. Every game remains fully playable.

2.2 Playing online — free tier

To connect you to online play, we necessarily process:

We do not ask for your name, email address, phone number, precise location, contacts, photos, or microphone or camera access for online play.

2.3 Ads (free tier, online play only)

Free online play is supported by advertising served through Google AdMob (the "Ad Provider"). Ads appear only during online play. They do not appear when you play offline, and they do not appear for premium subscribers.

How we make money here, plainly stated: Google pays us for the ads shown in our games. Personalized ads earn more per impression than non-personalized ones, so we do have a financial interest in your seeing personalized ads. We're telling you that because a policy that says "we don't sell your data" while quietly profiting from it is the kind of thing we'd rather not write. What we don't do is package up information about you and sell it as a product to anyone.

We do not receive your personal information from Google, and we do not send Google information about you beyond what their software collects directly on your device.

Google's mobile ads software collects information directly from your device in order to select, deliver, and measure ads. According to Google's documentation, this includes:

• your device's advertising identifier (IDFA on iOS, Advertising ID on Android), unless you have reset, limited, or deleted it;
• your IP address, and the approximate region derived from it (typically city or country level);
• device model, operating system version, language, time zone, and screen characteristics;
• which ads were shown to you, whether you interacted with them, and basic performance and fraud-prevention information;
• app activity relevant to ad delivery, such as how long a session lasted.

These ads are personalized. That means the Ad Provider may combine the information above with information it holds about your activity in other apps and websites, in order to infer your likely interests and serve ads targeted to you.

What that means legally: personalized advertising is treated as "sharing" your personal information for cross-context behavioral advertising under California law, and may be treated as a "sale" under some other state privacy laws — the definitions differ, and several of them turn on "monetary or other valuable consideration," which ad revenue plainly is. Rather than argue about which label applies, we treat your opt-out as covering all of it.

Your three options here. The first is free and changes how ads are chosen; only the second removes advertising:

• Switch personalized ads off in the game — free. Go to Settings → Privacy → Personalized Ads and turn it off. You will still see ads; they'll be selected from general context (the game you're playing, your coarse region) rather than from a profile of you. This is a control over how ads are targeted, not a way to remove them. It costs nothing and requires no subscription.
• Subscribe to premium — the only option that removes advertising entirely.
• Play offline, where no ads are ever shown.

We also honor the following automatically:

• Apple's App Tracking Transparency. On iOS we ask for permission before accessing your advertising identifier for tracking. If you decline — or if you never answer — we serve non-personalized ads. Declining does not restrict your access to the game in any way.
• Global Privacy Control. Where we can detect a GPC signal, we treat it as a valid opt-out of sharing.
• Consent in the EEA and UK. We ask for consent before serving personalized ads, through a consent prompt shown the first time you play online. If you decline, you keep free online play with non-personalized ads.
• Device-level controls. If you reset or delete your advertising ID in your device settings, the Ad Provider loses the identifier it was using.

Google is an independent controller of the data it collects through AdMob and handles it under its own policies:

• Google Privacy Policy — https://policies.google.com/privacy
• How Google uses information from sites or apps that use our services — https://policies.google.com/technologies/partner-sites

We don't control Google's practices and can't speak for them, which is part of why we've made the opt-out above free and easy.

When you opt out, we enable Google's restricted data processing mode for you. In that mode Google limits how it uses the data and serves non-personalized ads only, with interest-based and demographic targeting disabled.

2.4 Premium subscriptions

Premium removes advertising entirely and unlocks lobby hosting and invites, friends chat, leaderboards, custom avatars and card backs, additional game rules and variations, and unlimited online play.

Payment is handled entirely by Apple or Google. We never see, receive, or store your credit card number, bank details, billing address, or Apple/Google account credentials. What we receive is a signed receipt or transaction token confirming that a valid subscription exists, together with its status and expiry date.

Your premium status is tied to your Apple ID or Google account, not to any account with us. We store only the store-issued transaction identifier and the subscription's status and expiry. We cannot connect that identifier to your name or email address, and we don't try to. You do not need a Playvale account to subscribe, to use premium, or to restore a purchase.

Because the entitlement lives with your store account, premium follows you to any device signed in to that same Apple ID or Google account.

To be straightforward about a limitation: premium does not carry across platforms. A subscription purchased through the App Store works on your Apple devices; one purchased through Google Play works on your Android devices. That's a consequence of tying entitlements to the stores rather than to accounts on our servers — which we chose because it means we don't have to hold your identity in order to sell you a subscription. Creating a Playvale account does not change this.

To manage or cancel your subscription, use your Apple or Google account settings. Only they can stop the billing; we can't do it for you.

2.5 Playvale accounts — optional, and not required for anything essential

You can play every game, subscribe to premium, and use every premium feature without ever creating an account. Accounts exist for one reason: so your data can follow you to a new device or a second device.

A Playvale account is strictly opt-in. We will not nag you into one, and nothing is withheld from you for declining.

What an account is for:

• backing up and restoring game statistics and match history
• syncing preferences and settings across your devices
• resuming an in-progress game on a different device
• a display name and profile
• friends lists and playing with people you choose

What we store if you create one:

How friends work, and what we don't do. You add friends with a transient lobby code shared in a lobby or a game. We offer no name search and no player directory. We never ask for, upload, or scan your device contacts, phone number, or address book, and we never suggest friends based on them. Your friends list is visible only to you. People you have added can see your display name and your online play statistics — games played, won, and lost, your current win or loss streak, and game-specific figures such as a high score or best time. They cannot see anything about the games you play offline. You can remove a friend at any time, and you can block any player you can see in a lobby or a game.

Choose a display name that you're comfortable other players seeing. It doesn't have to be your real name, and we'd gently suggest it isn't.

If you use Sign in with Apple, you may hide your email address; we'll work with the relayed address Apple provides and never learn your real one.

Deleting your account removes the data above. See Section 7.5. Deleting your account does not cancel your subscription — that lives with Apple or Google.

We use your email address only for account access and essential service notices, such as a security issue or a change to this policy. We will not send you marketing email unless you separately opt in, and we will never sell or rent your address.

2.6 If you contact us

If you email us for support, a bug report, or a privacy request, we receive your email address and whatever you choose to include. We use it to respond and keep it for 24 months so we can follow up on recurring issues. Please don't send us sensitive information — we don't need it.

2.7 Crash and diagnostic data

We use only the crash reporting built into the App Store and Google Play. Apple and Google provide us with aggregated, largely de-identified crash reports — the device model, OS version, and where the code failed — under their own privacy policies and their own user controls. On iOS, this depends on whether you've opted to share analytics with app developers in your device settings.

We do not operate a separate crash reporting service, and we do not use any third-party analytics product. We don't measure your session lengths, funnel you through events, or track feature engagement. Beyond what the Ad Provider collects to serve ads (Section 2.3), no analytics SDK is present in our Games.

3. What we do not do

We think it's as important to be clear about what we don't do. We do not:

• package up or sell information about you as a product to data brokers or anyone else;
• collect your name, phone number, precise GPS location, contacts, photos, calendar, health data, or biometric data;
• access your microphone or camera;
• require an account to play, offline or online;
• show any advertising to premium subscribers;
• show any advertising during offline play;
• run our own analytics on your gameplay behavior, or build our own advertising profiles of you;
• use any third-party analytics or attribution SDK;
• read, upload, or scan your device contacts, address book, or phone number;
• require an account for any feature other than cross-device backup and friends;
• use your email address for marketing unless you separately ask us to;
• charge you anything to opt out of personalized ads;
• restrict your gameplay, features, or content because you opted out, declined tracking, or declined consent;
• knowingly collect information from children under 13;
• use dark patterns to push you toward sharing more than you intend.

The one thing we do that we'd rather not have to: personalized advertising funds free online play, it involves Google collecting device information, and we are paid for it. Section 2.3 explains exactly what that means and how to switch it off for free — while still playing online, still free.

4. Why we're allowed to process your data (EEA and UK users)

If you're in the EEA or UK, the GDPR requires us to identify a lawful basis for each purpose:

Where we rely on consent, you can withdraw it at any time in Settings → Privacy without affecting the lawfulness of what came before. Withdrawing consent for personalized ads does not take away free online play — you'll keep playing and simply receive non-personalized, context-based ads instead. We don't make you pay to say no.

Where we rely on legitimate interests, you can object; see Section 7.1.

5. Who we share data with

We share personal information only in these situations:

Service providers. Companies that run infrastructure for us, under contract, only on our instructions:

Legal requests. We will disclose information if we're required to by valid legal process — a subpoena, court order, warrant, or equivalent binding demand — or where we believe in good faith that disclosure is necessary to prevent imminent physical harm.

Our commitments when this happens:

• We review each request and reject requests that are overbroad, defective, or not legally binding. An informal email from an agency is not a court order.
• We disclose the narrowest set of data that responds to the request.
• We will notify you if your data is requested, unless we are legally prohibited from doing so or there's a genuine risk of harm to someone. Where we're placed under a gag order, we will seek to notify you as soon as it lifts.

Honestly, we hold very little. If you play without an account, there is often nothing meaningful to produce beyond time-limited server logs.

Business transfer. If Playvale is acquired or merges, your information may transfer to the successor. We will give notice in the app or on our website before that happens, and the successor remains bound by this policy until it provides notice of any change.

With your direction. If you ask us to share something, we will.

That's the complete list. We don't share data with data brokers, advertising exchanges beyond the Ad Provider described above, analytics aggregators, or "partners" of any other kind.

6. How long we keep things

Our rule is: keep it only as long as we need it to do the thing you asked for, then delete it.

It's worth correcting a common misconception here, because we'd rather explain our reasoning than recite a number. Almost nothing in this policy has a legally mandated retention period. Privacy law pushes in the opposite direction — it requires us to minimize what we keep and delete it when the purpose is done. The only real retention floors we face are financial: tax and accounting records. Everything else is a choice, and we've chosen short.

About that 7 years. Subscription records are business financial records, and they're subject to tax recordkeeping rules rather than to our preferences:

• The IRS period of limitations for assessing most returns is 3 years, extending to 6 years where more than 25% of gross income was omitted, and 7 years for records supporting a bad-debt deduction. Employment tax records must be kept 4 years.
• The Texas Comptroller requires records relating to sales and use tax to be kept 4 years, and longer if an audit, appeal, or refund claim is open.

We keep 7 years to cover the longest of these without having to guess which applies. These records are transaction identifiers, dates, and amounts — not your payment details, which we never receive at all.

Legal holds. If we receive a valid preservation request from law enforcement, or we're on notice of litigation, we must suspend deletion of the specific data covered for as long as the hold lasts. This is narrow and rare, and it doesn't change our normal practice.

7. Your rights and choices

7.1 Everyone

Switch personalized ads off — free. Settings → Privacy → Personalized Ads. To be clear about what this does and doesn't do: you will still see ads during free online play. They'll be chosen by general context — the game you're playing, your coarse region — instead of by a profile of your interests. It is not a way to remove advertising. No subscription required, and nothing else about the game changes.

Device-level ad controls. You can reset or delete your advertising identifier at any time: iOS — Settings → Privacy & Security → Tracking, and Settings → Privacy & Security → Apple Advertising. Android — Settings → Privacy → Ads, where you can delete the advertising ID entirely.

Decline tracking on iOS. When the App Tracking Transparency prompt appears, choosing "Ask App Not to Track" switches you to non-personalized ads (again — ads still appear, they're just not personalized). You can change this later in Settings → Privacy & Security → Tracking.

Subscribe to premium — this is the only way to remove advertising entirely.

Play offline, which never shows ads at all.

Contact us at privacy@playvale.games with any request or question. We respond to every message, not just the ones we're legally required to answer.

7.2 If you're in the EEA, UK, or Switzerland

You have the right to access your data, correct it, delete it, restrict or object to processing, receive it in a portable format, and withdraw consent. You also have the right to lodge a complaint with your national supervisory authority — though we'd appreciate the chance to fix the problem first.

We will respond within one month, extendable by two further months for complex requests, and we'll tell you if we need the extension.

7.3 If you're in California

Under the CCPA/CPRA you may request to know what we collect and disclose, request deletion, request correction, and opt out of the "sale" or "sharing" of your personal information. You have the right not to be discriminated against for exercising these rights — and you won't be: your gameplay, features, and content are identical either way.

We do not sell information about you as a product. But we are paid for the ads we show, and because those ads are personalized, we share personal information for cross-context behavioral advertising as California defines it. Some state laws may characterize the same activity as a "sale." We don't think the label should determine your rights, so we treat an opt-out as covering both.

To opt out, at no cost:

• In the game: Settings → Privacy → Personalized Ads — the same control described in Section 7.1, which is the mechanism for both. This is the primary mechanism, and it takes effect immediately.
• By email: privacy@playvale.games. Say you want to opt out; we don't require an account or any verification to honor it.
• Automatically: we honor Global Privacy Control signals where we can detect them, without requiring anything further from you.

When you opt out, we enable Google's restricted data processing for you, which limits Google's use of the data and serves non-personalized ads only.

Opting out does not require a subscription, does not limit your access to the game, and does not change your gameplay. You will still see ads during free online play — they'll be chosen by context rather than by a profile of you.

Our website is a static page hosting our store links and legal documents; it has no accounts and collects nothing, so there is nothing there to opt out of. The in-app control and the email address above are the mechanisms, and the website points to them.

We do not knowingly sell or share the personal information of consumers under 16 years of age.

Categories of personal information collected in the past 12 months: identifiers (advertising ID, IP address, session identifier); commercial information (subscription status); internet or other electronic network activity (gameplay events, ad interactions); coarse geolocation (region derived from IP address); account email address, if you created a Playvale account. Sources, purposes, and recipients are described in Sections 2 and 5.

Categories shared for cross-context behavioral advertising: identifiers (advertising ID, IP address); internet or other electronic network activity (ad interactions); coarse geolocation. Recipient: the Ad Provider named in Section 2.3.

Sensitive personal information: we do not collect it, and therefore do not use or disclose it for any purpose requiring a right to limit.

Authorized agents. You may use an authorized agent to submit a request; we may ask for proof of authorization and may ask you to verify your identity directly.

7.4 If you're in another US state with a privacy law

Residents of Texas, Virginia, Colorado, Connecticut, Utah, Oregon, Montana, and other states with comprehensive privacy laws have rights to access, correct, delete, and obtain a portable copy of their personal data, and to opt out of targeted advertising and profiling.

Because we serve personalized ads, the targeted advertising opt-out applies to us. Use the same free controls described in Section 7.3 — the in-app toggle, a Global Privacy Control signal, or an email to privacy@playvale.games.

If we deny a request, we will explain why and tell you how to appeal. If we deny your appeal, we will tell you how to contact your state attorney general.

7.5 Deleting your data

If you never created an account, we almost certainly hold nothing tied to you — only time-limited server logs that age out on their own. If you ask, we'll tell you that honestly rather than performing a theatrical deletion of nothing.

If you have a Playvale account, you can delete it in Settings → Account → Delete Account, or by emailing privacy@playvale.games. Deletion removes your email address, display name, statistics, match history, in-progress games, preferences, and friends list, and removes you from other players' friends lists. Routine backups are purged within 30 days.

Deleting your account does not cancel your subscription. Only Apple or Google can stop the billing — cancel it in your store account settings first, or you'll keep being charged for a subscription you can no longer see.

Deleting your account also does not delete local save data on your device; uninstalling the app does that.

8. Security

We protect data with encryption in transit (TLS), encryption at rest where our providers support it, access controls, and the simplest protection of all: not collecting things we don't need. The data we never hold can't be breached.

We're a small studio and we won't pretend to have enterprise security. If we discover a breach affecting your personal data, we'll notify affected users and the relevant authorities as required by law, and we'll tell you what actually happened rather than issuing a non-statement.

9. Children

Our games are made for adults. They are classic card and solitaire games — Solitaire, Bridge, Cribbage, and similar — designed for and marketed to an adult audience. They are not directed to children, they are not designed to appeal to children, and we do not market them to children.

The Games are intended for users 13 years of age and older, and our Terms of Service require it. In the European Economic Area and the United Kingdom, where local law sets a higher age for consent to data processing, the minimum age is 16 unless local law provides otherwise.

We do not knowingly collect personal information from children under those ages, and we do not knowingly serve personalized advertising to them. We have configured our Ad Provider to indicate that our Games are not directed to children.

If we learn that we have collected personal information from a child under 13, we will delete it promptly. If you are a parent or guardian and believe your child has provided us with information, contact us at privacy@playvale.games and we will remove it.

California minors. We do not knowingly sell or share the personal information of consumers under 16 years of age.

10. International transfers

We're based in the United States, and our providers may process data in the US and elsewhere. If you play from outside the US, your information will be transferred to the US, which may not offer the same legal protections as your home country.

For transfers of EEA/UK personal data, we rely on the EU Standard Contractual Clauses, and our infrastructure provider participates in the EU-US Data Privacy Framework and require our providers to maintain appropriate safeguards. You can request details at privacy@playvale.games.

11. Changes to this policy

If we make a material change — collecting something new, adding a recipient, or changing why we use your data — we will:

• update the "last updated" date;
• notify you in the app before the change takes effect; and
• where the law requires consent for the change, ask for it rather than assuming it.

We won't make a material change quietly and rely on you re-reading this page. If you would like a copy of an earlier version so you can see what changed, email privacy@playvale.games and we will send it to you.

12. Contact

Privacy questions and requests: privacy@playvale.games

That's the only address you need. We're a small studio and email reaches a real person faster than anything else would.

We're a small team, so a real person reads these. We aim to respond within 5 business days, and always within the deadlines the law sets.