What Stop the Frame does with your data.

1Who is responsible

ARLing s. r. o., Ivanská cesta 19112/32E, 821 04 Bratislava, Slovakia, company ID 56583486. We are the controller of the small amount of data described here. Write to support@arling.sk about anything on this page.

2What the game keeps, and where

Stop the Frame keeps its state in the app's own private storage on your phone, which no other app can read. The game sends none of it anywhere. The one copy that leaves the phone is made by Android itself, and it is described below.

The main file is the save. It holds the levels you have finished and your stars on each, how many frames off your best tap was on each level, the level you were on, your coins as a list of coin events, the looks you own and the pair you wear, the days you played Today's Frame with your score and which of its three daily tries you used, and the days that count for your streak. For each purchase the coin events hold a one-way hash of the Google Play receipt, so that the same receipt is never counted twice.

A few things belong to this phone alone and are never part of the save: your settings for sound, volume, vibration, reduced motion, appearance and going on after a Perfect; whether you have seen the intro; the tap timing the game learns from your taps, which says how late your taps reach the game and is stored on this phone only; a small record of calendar days, of the time since the phone last started and of how many times it has started, which stops the daily coins being paid again when someone moves the date; whether you own Remove ads; and the counters that keep advertising within its limits, which are how long you have played since the last full-screen ad, how many natural breaks have passed and how many full-screen ads were shown today. These are numbers, not a record of you.

Android's backup. Android's Auto Backup is on for this app, and it covers the save file only. If backup is switched on for your phone, Android may copy the save to your Google account's backup and restore it when you reinstall the game or set up a new phone. Everything listed in the previous paragraph is left out on purpose, and Remove ads is handed back by Google Play itself. The backup is made and held by Android and Google under Google's terms, and we never receive it. You can switch it off or delete it in your phone's Google backup settings.

There is no player account, no sign-in to Google Play Games, no cloud save of our own, no leaderboard, no chat and no multiplayer. The game has no analytics or crash reporting of its own. It does not read your contacts, photos, files, microphone, camera or location, and it asks for no runtime permission at all.

Purchases through Google Play. The game contains three packs of coins and Remove ads as optional one-time purchases through Google Play Billing, which adds the billing permission to the installed app. Nothing is bought unless you tap a price, and the price shown is the one Google Play gives for your country. A version that is published without purchases switched on keeps the shop shut and says in the coin window that coins can't be bought.

Google Play handles the payment. We never see your card, bank details, name or address. When you buy, Google Play hands the app a receipt signed by Google: the product, an order number and a purchase token. The app checks that signature on the phone, writes the coins into the save or Remove ads into the phone's own records, and tells Google Play the purchase has arrived. The receipt is not sent to any server of ours; we have none. Google processes the purchase under its own terms and the Google Payments privacy notice. In the Play Console we see what every seller sees about an order: the order number, the product, the price, the country and the date. We keep those order records as long as Slovak accounting law requires.

Bought coins live in the save like earned ones and have no cash value. They can come back from Android's backup, but they are otherwise gone if the game is uninstalled or its storage is cleared. Remove ads is kept by Google Play and comes back through Restore purchases on the same Google account. Refunds follow Google Play's refund policy; a purchase the app cannot verify is not confirmed, and Google Play refunds it by itself within three days.

A few things in the installed app's permission list are worth explaining before you wonder about them. Internet access is there for Google's advertising, consent and billing libraries. Network state is there so the game can tell when a connection returns and ask Google again. The billing permission is there for the purchases above. The advertising library adds permissions of its own, among them the one for the Android advertising ID. None of this changes anything written above: the game itself still sends nothing.

3Advertising by Google

The game shows ads through the Google Mobile Ads SDK, and asks for consent through Google's User Messaging Platform. These two libraries are the only reason the app needs the internet, apart from Google Play's billing service. They are Google's software, running inside the app, and what they collect goes to Google, not to us. We never receive it.

Google's own disclosure for this SDK lists four things it may collect: your IP address, which Google may use to estimate the general area you are in; your interactions with the app, such as launches, taps and video views; diagnostic information, such as start-up time, hangs and energy use; and identifiers of the device or account, including the Android advertising ID and the app set ID. Google says this traffic is encrypted in transit with TLS. Google uses it for advertising, measurement and fraud prevention.

The source is Google's page Data disclosure for the Google Mobile Ads SDK. Google's own privacy policy and its page on how Google uses information from sites or apps that use its services describe what happens afterwards, including how long Google keeps it and where it is processed. We do not control any of that and we will not pretend otherwise.

Because of this SDK, the app is not a zero-collection app, even though the game itself sends nothing. Saying otherwise in the store would be false.

Where ads appear is fixed by the game and not by us on the day. There is one optional video, which you choose to watch: in the coin window for 25 coins, up to three a day, or on the help sheet for help on your next try. Full-screen ads come only at a natural break, when you choose to go on at the end of a chapter or leave a campaign level for the home screen, and only under strict limits: at least five minutes of play since the last one, not in your first minutes of play, at most four a day, never right after help or a video, never on Today's Frame, never once Remove ads is bought, and never at launch, when you close the game or while a round is in flight. If the phone is offline or the ads fail, the game plays on exactly as before.

4Consent and how to change your mind

Where the law requires it, mostly in the European Economic Area and the United Kingdom, Google's consent message appears the first time the game starts. Your answer is stored by Google's library, not by us, and the game only requests ads when that library says it may.

To change your answer later, open Settings in the game and choose Privacy options. That row only appears when the consent library says a choice is required in your region, because showing it everywhere would open an empty screen for most of the world.

You can also reset or delete the advertising ID for the whole phone in Android's own settings, under Privacy and then Ads. Refusing personalised advertising does not switch off advertising itself, and it does not mean no data at all is processed.

The whole game works offline. No ad is ever required to play a level, and the optional video only ever gives coins or help that playing gives you as well.

5Children

Stop the Frame is not directed to children under 13 and we do not knowingly collect anything from them. The app asks for no name, no age and no e-mail address, so there is nothing for a child to submit. If you believe a child has sent us personal information directly, write to us and we will delete it.

6How long things are kept

What the game stores stays on your phone until you remove it. We never hold a copy, and the only other copy is the one in Android's backup described in section 2, which Android and Google hold and we do not. Reset in Settings clears the learned tap timing. To erase everything on the phone, including coins and looks: Android Settings, then Apps, then Stop the Frame, then Storage, then Clear storage. Uninstalling does the same. To remove the backup copy as well, delete it in your phone's Google backup settings; otherwise Android may restore it when you install the game again.

Retention of what Google collects is set by Google and described in the pages linked in section 3.

If you write to us by e-mail, we keep your message and address for as long as it takes to deal with it and to meet any legal obligation that applies. Please do not send passwords or identity documents to the support address.

7Your rights

Under the GDPR you may ask us for access to your personal data, correction, deletion, restriction or portability, and you may object to processing. You may withdraw consent at any time, which does not affect processing that was lawful before you withdrew it. For advertising we rely on your consent where consent is required; for the game itself there is nothing to rely on, because the game sends nothing to us.

In practice we hold almost nothing about you, so a request usually ends with us telling you that. Write to support@arling.sk. You may also complain to the Slovak supervisory authority, the Office for Personal Data Protection, at dataprotection.gov.sk.

8Changes

We change this page when the app changes, and the date at the top changes with it. We do not quietly add a new library and leave the old text standing.

Support for all our games: arling.sk/play/support/.