Sort Hurdle Privacy Policy

You can play Sort Hurdle without giving us your name, your email, or anything else about you — the game never asks for them. It creates an anonymous identifier on your device the first time you open it, and that identifier, not you, is what your daily runs, coins and purchases are attached to.

One thing is worth knowing before you read the rest: your daily times are public, shown on the leaderboard under a name the game generates for you. Section 11 explains how to have everything erased, and the one thing that stays.

On first launch the app obtains an anonymous identifier from Sendora Cloud, our identity provider, and stores it on your device — including in the device keychain, so reinstalling on the same phone keeps it. Everything the game records on our server is attached to that identifier. It is not derived from your name, your email, your phone number, your advertising ID or your hardware.

The game has no sign-in. There is no account, and no way for us to connect the identifier to a person.

Your ladder progress — which level you have reached in each ladder — and the stars you have earned are stored on your device only, along with your settings, such as colour-blind symbols. We never receive them.

Attached to your identifier, the server keeps:

• Daily runs — which day you played, how long the clear took, how many moves it took, and how many hints you used. Your moves are sent so the server can replay them to check the clear; the replay happens in memory and only the move count is kept.
• Coins — a running ledger of every coin earned and spent, including what each spend was for (a hint on a particular board, an extra tube on a particular level, a past day you opened) and what each grant came from (a purchase, a rewarded ad, or the daily bonus).
• Past days you opened, and the days you claimed a daily bonus.
• Your timezone offset— a number of minutes from UTC, declared by your device and then fixed, so that “today’s board” means the same thing every day. It is a timezone band, not a location.
• A generated name, such as an adjective and a noun, for the leaderboard. See section 4.

The daily leaderboard shows the generated name and the time of everyone who filed a ranked run that day. It is served without any sign-in requirement, so it is readable by anyone on the internet, not only by people who have the app. The name is made up by the game; nothing you type is ever published.

The game shows ads through Google AdMob. Two kinds arrive on their own: a banner, and a full-screen ad that can appear when you leave a finished ladder level or restart one — never on the daily board. Plus and the one-time Remove Ads purchase both remove those two.

The third kind is never removed, on any tier: rewarded videos you choose to watch — for coins, for a hint, for more undos, to open a past day, or to double your daily bonus. You are always the one who starts them, and they pay you for the time rather than interrupting you.

Where the law requires it, the app shows Google’s consent form, from the second time you open it; on iOS it then asks for permission to track through Apple’s App Tracking Transparency prompt, on a later launch. Your answers are what Google uses to decide whether the ads you see are personalised. Declining does not change the game in any way — you will still see ads, they will simply be less targeted.

Google receives standard advertising signals directly from its SDK on your device; we do not see them and do not control them. When you watch a rewarded video, and only then, the app passes your Sort Hurdle identifier to Google so that Google can confirm back to our server that the video really was watched and the reward is owed. Banner and full-screen ads carry no such identifier.

The app sends crash and error reports to Sentry so that faults can be found and fixed. Reports carry the stack trace, a trail of what the app was doing, and basic device context such as the model, the OS version and the app version.

They are configured not to attach personal information: no IP address is recorded with the report and no identifier or leaderboard name is attached to it, and anything after a ? in a URL is stripped before the report leaves your device.

The game does not send analytics about how you play — no record of levels, taps or screens. It sends Sendora Cloud a small number of technical events about the app’s own plumbing: once per launch, a check that the anonymous session is valid (with your identifier, how old the session token is, and which server environment the app is using), a report if that check or the token fails, and a note when you use Restore purchases (how many purchases Apple returned, and whether Apple could be reached).

The app does not ask for permission to send notifications. If you have turned notifications on for Sort Hurdle yourself, in your device settings, the app registers your device’s push token with Sendora Cloud, along with the platform and the app’s bundle identifier, and if you tap a notification it reports which message it was.

Coins, Remove Ads and Plus are bought through Apple. We never see your card, your billing address or your Apple ID.When you buy, the app gives Apple a token made from your identifier, so that Apple’s notices name the right player. Apple tells our server that a purchase happened, and we record the transaction identifier, what was bought, whether it was a live or a test purchase, and the identifier it belongs to — so the purchase reaches the right player and a refund can be honoured.

Apple also notifies our server about renewals, cancellations, refunds and billing problems. Those notices are recorded so that Plus turns off, and a refunded purchase is withdrawn, when it should be.

Our server does not store your IP address, your user agent, or any device fingerprint, and there is no request log. It does read your IP address from each request in order to limit abusive traffic — that is held briefly in memory only, is never written to the database, and is not attached to your identifier. Our API sits behind Cloudflare, which carries the connection and so sees the IP address of every request, as any network provider between you and us would.

There is no Firebase Analytics, Amplitude, Mixpanel, Facebook SDK or AppsFlyer in this app. The services involved are:

• Google AdMob — serves the ads, and confirms rewarded videos. See section 5.
• Apple — takes the payment and tells us the outcome. See section 9.
• Sendora Cloud — issues the anonymous identifier, receives the diagnostics in section 7, and would deliver notifications (section 8).
• Sentry — receives crash reports from the app. See section 6.
• Cloudflare — carries traffic between your device and our server, and serves this website.

Our database is one we run ourselves, not a hosted service belonging to somebody else.

Game records are kept for as long as the game runs; there is no automatic expiry. Deleting the app removes what is on your device, but not what our server holds.

Because the game has no account, erasure is by request: email [email protected] with the leaderboard name the game shows for you. We then erase the records held against your identifier — your daily runs, your coin ledger, the past days you opened, your bonus claims, your subscription record, and your leaderboard entries, which disappear from the public board.

One thing is kept, and it is not about you. A receipt for a purchase — the store’s transaction number and what it was for — stays, with your identifier and purchase token stripped off it, so that it belongs to nobody. That is what lets a refund be matched to a payment months later, and stops the same transaction being credited twice. It cannot be traced back to you.

To ask what we hold about you, or for a copy, write to the same address.

Sort Hurdle is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect information from them. If you believe a child has given us information, write to the address below and we will remove it.

If this policy changes in a way that affects what we collect or who we share it with, the date at the top changes and the new version is published here before the change takes effect in the app.

For privacy questions, data requests, erasure requests, or complaints, email [email protected].