Privacy Policy

This Privacy Policy explains what personal information PlaywithBuddies (the "Service", at playwithbuddies.com) collects, why it is collected, who receives it, how long it is kept and the rights you have over it. The Service is run by Bilal Saeed ("we", "us" or "our"), based in Pakistan, who decides how and why your information is used and is therefore its "controller" under laws such as the EU and UK General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), and you can contact us about anything in this policy at bilalsaeed10b@gmail.com. To be completely clear, the Service does collect and store personal data about the people who use it, and everything it collects is described in this policy. We use that data lawfully and only to run the Service as described here: we never use it for any illegal purpose, we never sell, rent or trade it, we never share it with advertisers or data brokers ourselves, and we do not build advertising profiles. We do show adverts from Google AdSense, only on the home page, game pages and guides and never in a room or during a game: Google and its partners may use cookies and similar technology on those pages to show ads and to measure them and stop fraud, as described at https://policies.google.com/technologies/partner-sites. Ads are personalised only if your browser has told us you are 18 or over; everyone else, and anyone who has not been asked, sees ads that are not based on their interests. In the European Economic Area, the UK and Switzerland, Google asks for your consent before any ad cookie is used, and you can change that choice at any time from the link the consent message leaves on the page; anyone can turn off personalised Google ads at https://adssettings.google.com. We use no tracking pixels or fingerprinting. We handle it in line with the laws of Pakistan, including the Prevention of Electronic Crimes Act, 2016, and, where they apply to you, the EU and UK GDPR and the privacy laws of US states such as California. Before you can sign in or play as a guest, we ask the month and year you were born. We use the answer only to work out whether you are under 13, between 13 and 17, or 18 or over, and we keep only that band, never the date: in your browser and, if you sign in with Google, on your account, so you are not asked again. No account record or profile is created until you have answered, and our security rules refuse to create one without the answer. If you are under 13 the Service is not for you, nothing is created, your browser remembers the answer so the question cannot simply be answered again, and any account that was already signed in on that browser is deleted. Players aged 13 to 17 can use the Service fully, except that they cannot buy random crates with gems. For guest play, we also reserve your selected name and guest account ID in Firebase for 30 days after you select it, so another guest choosing the same name receives a numbered version. Signed-in players can check an exact name for availability, but cannot browse the reservations; this check can reveal the associated guest account ID. Expired reservations are removed by automated cleanup, and this gameplay name check operates independently of optional visit counting. You can use the Service in two ways. If you sign in with Google, Google shares your name, email address, profile picture and a unique account ID with us, but never your password, and we keep an account record holding your email address, the time you last signed in, your display name and picture (or a picture you upload instead), a friend code we generate so that people can add you without knowing your email address (it is also put in the room links you share, so that a friend who joins from one can be rewarded), the badge you choose to wear, and your progress: games played and won, per-game statistics, coins, gems, the items you have unlocked or bought with gems, a count of crates bought, your daily reward streak, your daily challenge progress, your badges, your age band, and your Broadside Bay progress, which is kept in your browser and copied to your account so that it survives clearing your browser or changing device. If you joined from a friend's room link and played with them, we also record which account invited you, the room and when, so that each of you is given the invite gems once; that record is seen only by the two of you and our administrators. The time you last signed in is removed from your account once you have not signed in for 90 days. If you play as a guest instead, you type a name and we create an anonymous account with a random ID and no email address or Google data; the name is kept on that account and in your browser, coins you earn as a guest stay only in that browser tab unless you sign in with Google from it, when they and your unlocks move into your new account, and guests cannot add friends, receive invitations, send bug reports or hold gems, and their games are not added to the Service's statistics. If a guest later signs in with Google, the same account carries on as an ordinary account. Whichever way you play, we also keep your friends list, friend requests and room invitations (who sent them, to whom, for which room and when); messages in your inbox, such as rewards and notices; the rooms you create or join, the game chosen and the players in them and, for a room made private, its 6-character passcode, which the players in that room can read, and the passcode each person arriving typed, right or wrong, which the room's host can read, and the account IDs of anyone the host banned from the room, which stay on the room's record, and, where we have switched network bans on, a scrambled fingerprint of the network address you joined from, made by a small service of ours at Cloudflare that sees your IP address for that purpose and does not store it, kept on the room's record so that a host's ban can cover a network as well as an account, readable by the host only for an account they have banned, and deleted with the room; the chat messages you send, with your name, account ID and the time, after a word filter has starred out swear words and slurs in English and Roman Urdu, which it also does to display names, guest names and the words, prompts and answers players type in games; what you make in games for other players to see, such as drawings, typed answers, prompts and descriptions in drawing games, word lists a host types, reactions and votes, including votes to remove a player; the choices you make for a match, such as your team, vehicle, ship, equipment and cosmetic looks; aiming totals in Battle of Pirates; whether you are online and in which room, and whether your game has finished loading at the start of a match; the time of your last chat message, invitation, friend request, bug report and room creation, so that the Service can refuse actions repeated faster than its limits allow; reports you make about another player, a chat message or a drawing, which hold your name and account ID, the reported player's name and account ID, the room code and game, the reason and anything you add, and what was reported exactly as it was shown before the word filter, including a small picture of a reported drawing, so that our moderators can see what actually happened; and, if you ask us to delete your account, your account ID and the time of the request until the deletion has been carried out. To find and fix faults, the Service keeps an activity log while you are signed in, recording errors, warnings and events such as signing in, creating a room, starting and ending a match and filing a bug report, each with the time, a short description, the page address, your account ID, an ID for that browser tab and the version of the Service, and for some multiplayer games a summary of each match's connection quality, meaning the round-trip times, the frame rate and whether each link to another player, identified by that player's account ID, ran directly or through a relay; it does not record your IP address or your chat. A more detailed technical trace of individual matches can be switched on for a limited time to investigate a hard problem, and is switched off by default. Bug reports are optional, and if you send one we keep what you write, the game, room, severity and area you choose, your name, email address and picture, and technical details captured at that moment: the page address, your browser and operating system, language, time zone, screen and window size, display scale, pixel density, connection type, speed and round-trip time, device memory and number of processor cores where your browser reports them, and the version of the Service. The form has a place to attach a screenshot, but attaching one does not work at the moment, so no screenshots are collected; if it is restored, a screenshot will be one you choose, paste or capture through your browser's own screen-sharing prompt, and you should check that it shows nothing private, such as other people's messages. You may tick a box to attach your own activity log from the last 15 minutes to 3 hours, up to 150 lines, which is never sent unless you choose to send it, and we record when you ticked it as the record of your choice. When your browser connects, the companies named in this policy receive technical information such as your IP address, browser type, the page requested and the time. Real-time games connect players' devices directly where they can, for every player whatever their age, because it is the fastest way to play. That means the other players in your room, and their devices, receive your IP address, which can reveal your approximate location, such as your town and internet provider, and could be misused, for example to try to disrupt your connection. Using another player's IP address in any way is against our Terms, but we cannot control what someone does with it once their device has it. Where a direct connection is not possible, the traffic goes through a relay run by Cloudflare or through our database, and other players then see only the relay. You can switch on "Hide my IP address in games" in the privacy choices at the end of this policy, and games will then always use the relay, so other players never see your IP address and it is not part of the connection details exchanged while a match starts, at the cost of a little more delay. During a match, games share the round-trip times and frame rate they measure with the other players in the room, to choose the best host and to show connection quality. Some features use your device without sending anything at all: games read your screen size and orientation to lay themselves out, Volley Clash reads your phone's motion sensor only if you choose tilt controls (iPhone and iPad ask you first), games may read a game controller you connect and make your phone vibrate, and copy buttons write to your clipboard but never read it, and none of this is stored or sent. We also count visits to the site without cookies and without knowing who you are: when you open a page we add one to shared daily totals for visits and page views, the page, the kind of place you came from and, for a link, the name of that website, whether you use a phone, tablet or computer, your browser and operating system family, language, time zone (from which we estimate a country), a rough screen width, the hour, how long the tab was in front, whether the visit went into a room or started a match and which game (also counted separately for phones, tablets and computers), how many players each match had and how long it lasted, whether a phone held upright was turned sideways for a game, how many times an invite, a match result or a game page was shared from the site and in which way (never with whom), whether Play now on the home page went on to make a room and start a match, and whether a guest asked after a match to sign in with Google did so, whether the visit was opened from the installed app and when the site is installed, how fast the page loaded and whether a script error happened, together with a short-lived, minute-by-minute count of how many people are on the site. Nothing is stored with your IP address, account ID, name or anything you typed, nothing links one visit to the next, and a short note in the tab's session storage only stops a reload being counted twice. If your browser's time zone suggests you are in the European Union, the European Economic Area or the United Kingdom, we ask first, with a banner, and count nothing unless you say yes; everywhere else counting is on unless you switch it off. Either way you can change your answer at any time in the privacy choices at the end of this policy, and visits are never counted when your browser sends Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control, or for search-engine crawlers and administrators. Once you play, as a guest or with a Google account, and only when your visits are counted as just described, we also keep a record of your visits linked to your account ID, so that we can see how players find the site and whether they come back. It holds your display name, whether you play as a guest, when your account was made, when you first and last visited, how many visits you have made, and totals of the time the tab was in front, pages opened, rooms joined and matches started, by game; where your first and your latest visit came from, meaning the kind of source, the website, the address of the page that linked to us without anything after a "?", the name of a tagged campaign link and the page you arrived on; for your latest visit, whether you used a phone, tablet or computer, your browser and operating system family, your language and your time zone, from which we estimate a country; and, for each of your latest 30 visits, when it happened, where it came from, the page you arrived on, the device type, browser and operating system family, and the pages, time, rooms, matches and games in it. It holds no IP address, no email address and nothing you type. Cloudflare, which delivers the website, also measures page views for us with Cloudflare Web Analytics, receiving for each page loaded its address, the page you came from, your browser and device type, page-load timings and a country worked out from your IP address; it sets no cookies, stores nothing on your device and reports only totals to us, but it is switched on in Cloudflare's own settings rather than by our pages, so the banner and the privacy choices do not control it. Other players can see your display name, picture, badge and friend code wherever players are listed; players in your room also see your chat, what you make and choose in games, your scores and your connection quality; your friends, and only your friends, can see when you are online; and your email address is never shown to other players. Volley Clash and Go Eat Fish remember your selected 2D or 3D view in their existing browser settings. They test whether a temporary WebGL context can start, without collecting a graphics-card identifier or sending the result to us. Aquarium Odyssey offers optional gem looks through the same account wallet and permanent-item records described above. Aquarium Odyssey keeps its story checkpoint, current aquarium, discovered fish, golden clam pearls and their skills, recovered music recordings, chosen fish appearance, optional challenge medals, repaired filters and furnishings, accumulated play time, sound, camera and graphics preferences in a small record in your browser until you reset that journey or clear browser data. Active challenge timers, attempts, oxygen levels and pursuing fish positions stay only in page memory and restart if you reload. Solo and co-op story checkpoints are separate browser records; neither syncs to an account. In co-op, authenticated lobby members share the host’s story checkpoint, objectives, repairs, rewards, chosen fish and appearance, fish positions, oxygen and gameplay actions through the existing WebRTC connection (or Firebase Realtime Database fallback). Lobby account IDs and filtered display names identify party members. Every participant keeps a copy of the shared checkpoint until a new co-op story replaces it or browser data is cleared. Connection traffic is transient; a normal exit removes the player’s update/signaling data, while crash remnants follow room cleanup. As with other multiplayer games, direct peers may learn connection IP addresses and Cloudflare TURN may relay traffic. No new chat or purchase data is collected. Anyone using the same browser profile can see its saved journeys. Its room background image is served by our website, with no request to the image provider. Mouse-lock controls read mouse movement while you use them, without storing or sending it. In Dragon Battle, your chosen dragon and its verified loadout are saved with your account ID in the room and shown to its players; automatic loading status is shared with the room until you leave or the game closes; our database checks premium ownership without sharing your gem balance. These choices are replaced when you select again and deleted when the room or your account is deleted. Dragon Battle also keeps your story checkpoint, earned progress, skill choices, explored areas, discoveries and up to five personal map pins in your browser and, for a signed-in account, in your private account save until you reset it or delete your account. During a co-op story, players share the host’s campaign, skill choices and areas they reveal; map pins and quest-tracking preferences stay private to each account. A room's chat, its live game data and the connection details exchanged while a match starts can be read only by the players in that room, but anyone signed in who has the room's code can see who is in it and which game it is playing, because that is how they join, so share room codes only with people you want to play with. A small number of authorised administrators can see account records including email addresses, rooms and their chat, bug reports with their attached logs, the activity log, suspensions, a daily summary of guest accounts with their names and the times they first and last played, which players are online or in a room, the visit totals, with any group smaller than five hidden, each player's visit record described above, and the reports players send, and they can correct balances, grant items, close rooms, remove content and suspend accounts. Every administrator action is written to a record that nobody can edit, and a suspension is kept with its reason, who made it and when it ends, and the suspended player can see it. Pictures you upload are kept in private storage and never at a public web link: a profile picture can be viewed only by signed-in players, and a bug report screenshot, once attaching one works again, only by you and our administrators, our security rules check every request, and an automated daily check removes any public access added by mistake. We use your information on these legal bases: to provide the Service you asked for, meaning sign-in, accounts and guest play, profiles, friends, rooms, chat, games, progress, gems, rewards and the inbox, because it is necessary to perform our contract with you, which is our Terms and Conditions; to find and fix faults and make the Service work better (the activity log, match traces, connection measurements and bug reports), to keep it safe and fair (the age check, the word filter, rate limits, preventing cheating, abuse and attacks, reports, moderation, suspensions and the record of administrator actions), because of our legitimate interests in running a Service that works and is safe, which we have weighed against your rights and which you can object to; to count visits and keep players' visit records, because of our legitimate interest in understanding how the site is used and how players find it, except in the European Union, the European Economic Area and the United Kingdom, where we rely on your consent; to attach an activity log to a bug report, to hide your IP address and to use your motion sensor, because you choose to; and to carry out deletion and other privacy requests and respond to lawful requests from authorities, because the law requires it. We make no decisions about you by automated means that have legal or similarly significant effects on you. We do not run our own servers, so your information passes through or is stored with the following companies, each acting as our processor under its data processing terms unless we say otherwise. Google LLC, through Firebase and Google Cloud, signs you in and stores everything described in this policy apart from emails we exchange, in data centres in Singapore and the United States (Google Privacy Policy); Google also acts for itself when your browser loads a Google profile picture or a game uses its public connection servers, and it provides Gmail, which holds the emails you send us. Cloudflare, Inc. delivers the website to your browser, provides connection details for real-time games, relays game traffic between players who cannot connect directly (that traffic is encrypted between the players' devices) and may measure page views as described above, on its global network including the United States (Cloudflare Privacy Policy). Atlassian, through Trello, holds accepted bug reports that an administrator copies to our private task board, with their description, your name and email address, the room code and the technical details, but never an attached activity log (Atlassian Privacy Policy). GitHub, Inc. runs our automated daily maintenance job, which reads and deletes stored data as described in this policy without keeping a copy (GitHub General Privacy Statement). These companies may process your information in countries other than yours, including Singapore and the United States, which may have different data protection laws, and where the law requires it we rely on safeguards such as the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses, the UK International Data Transfer Addendum, or the EU-US Data Privacy Framework and its UK extension where the company is certified; you can ask us about them. We may also disclose information where the law requires it, to protect the safety, rights or property of anyone, or to establish, exercise or defend legal claims, and if the Service is ever transferred to a new operator your information may move with it and stay protected under this policy, after we have told you. We will add any new service that receives personal information to this policy before we start using it. Dragon Battle 3D keeps a local profile in this browser: your selected dragon, dragon XP and upgrade ranks, earned Embers, owned and equipped crest finishes, match and win totals, and up to 50 recent local reward receipts. These are kept until you clear this site's browser data, do not transfer between browsers or accounts, and are not platform coins or gems. Friend battles use dragon-tier base stats without local upgrade ranks and do not award this local progression. During a friend battle, lobby members see your existing display name, selected dragon, crest finish, automatic loading status, movement, attacks, race lap and gate progress, finish times and match state. The host's arena choices are stored with the lobby. Live play uses the existing peer connections and, when needed, a slower Firebase Realtime Database relay. A tab clears its relay entry on leaving or disconnecting; abandoned entries follow the existing room cleanup period. The Service keeps things in your browser's storage rather than in cookies, sets no cookies of its own and stores nothing for advertising or tracking, although Google may set cookies on its own domains while you sign in, which Google's cookie notice covers. This is everything we keep in your browser, what it is for and how long it lasts: the sign-in tokens Firebase keeps in local storage and IndexedDB so that you stay signed in, until you sign out; a note that someone is signed in on that device, so the next visit loads sign-in straight away, and the time you last signed out, so another open tab does not sign you back in; a marker that your profile was checked in the last 24 hours, so a repeat visit does not read and write it again; the last room you were in, so you can rejoin it from the dashboard, until you leave it; the passcode of a private room you made or were let into, in the tab's session storage so that a reload does not ask for it again, until the tab closes; which site notice you closed, until a newer one replaces it; your colour theme and display size; that the daily reward panel has already opened by itself today, for a day, that you chose Not now on an offer to install the site, for a week, and, on iPhone, that you closed the full screen tip, until the tab closes; if a room's host banned you from their room, a note of that room and of the account that was banned, for a week, so that the same browser is not let back into that room; if you play as a guest, the name you typed and, for that tab only, the coins you earn, and how many matches you have finished as a guest in that browser and how many times you have been asked to sign in with Google, so that the ask after a match comes at most three times; your privacy choices, meaning your answer to the visit counting question and when you gave it, a note that counting is off if you switched it off, and whether games should hide your IP address; the result of the age check, which is your age band or, if you answered that you are under 13, that this browser may not be used to play, and never your date of birth; each game's own settings and rules and, outside a signed-in room, its coins and unlocks; game saves, meaning Broadside Bay's items, coins, crates, progress, ship, map and controls and when they were last saved, Doodle Dash's statistics, recent colours and, while it is your turn, the secret word and word choices, and Turbo Dash's preferences, car looks and a list of finished matches that stops a reward being paid twice; the visit counting note in the tab's session storage, which records which parts of a visit have already been counted and the address of the page that linked to us, without anything after a "?", so that a reload is not counted twice, holds no name and, once you play, holds your account ID and how much of the visit is already on your visit record, and goes when you close the tab; other markers in session storage that stop the same friend request appearing twice and a page reloading in a loop after an update, until the tab closes; for administrators only, a short-lived token for reading usage figures and a note that stops their own visits being counted; and, in memory only until you close or reload the page, pictures already loaded, so they are not downloaded twice. Unless we have said otherwise above, each item lasts until you clear your browser data, which you can do at any time in your browser settings, usually under cookies and site data. You will then be signed out and lose what was kept only on that device, such as your privacy choices, a guest's coins, Broadside Bay's progress if you play it as a guest, and some game settings, but not your account or the progress saved on it, and blocking storage for the site altogether stops you signing in, because there is then nowhere to keep your sign-in. We keep information only for as long as we need it, and an automated job that runs every day carries out the deletions on time. Your account, profile, friends and progress last until your account is deleted, which you can do yourself on your profile page or ask us to do, and we then delete it within 30 days, usually within a day, together with your chat messages, invitations, bug reports, reports you made, activity log, visit record, game saves, uploaded pictures, the rooms you host, your game data and your sign-in record, and we remove your account ID from other players' activity logs and replace it with an anonymous code in reports about you and in the record of administrator actions. A guest account that goes unused for 30 days is deleted, and what it left in rooms goes with those rooms. Rooms are deleted with their chat and live game data once they have gone unused for 30 days, and drawings and other live game data are also cleared at the start of each new match. Invitations are deleted two minutes after they are sent, and your online status is removed when your connection closes. The activity log is deleted after 30 days, and detailed match traces after 7 days. Bug reports, with their attached logs and Trello cards, are deleted 12 months after the problem is resolved, or sooner if you ask, and player reports are deleted 12 months after our moderators close them. The daily guest summary is replaced every day, suspensions are kept until they are lifted or the account is deleted, visit totals are kept indefinitely, as totals that cannot be linked to anyone, so a deletion request cannot single one out, each visit on a player's visit record is deleted 90 days after it happened, with only the latest 30 kept, and the rest of the record is kept until the account is deleted (for a guest, once it has gone unused for 30 days), and emails are kept for as long as we need them to deal with your message and no longer than 24 months. The record of administrator actions is kept permanently, because it is how we account for what was done to an account; if your account is deleted, your account ID in it is replaced with a code that no longer leads to you, and it keeps only short details such as an amount or a reason. We may keep information for longer where the law requires it or where we need it to deal with a dispute, a safety issue or a breach of our Terms, and deleted information may remain for a short time in our providers' backups before it is overwritten. All connections to the Service are encrypted and our security rules limit what each account can reach, but no system is completely secure, and if a breach is likely to put your rights at risk we will tell you and the relevant authorities as the law requires. The Service is not intended for children under 13, it asks everyone's age before they play, and we do not knowingly collect children's information; if the place where you live sets a higher age for agreeing to the use of your data online, you need a parent or guardian's consent until you reach it, and if you believe a child under 13 has given us information, tell us, or report the player as under 13, and we will delete it. Depending on where you live, you may have the right to a copy of your information, to have it corrected (you can change your name and picture yourself), to have it deleted, to restrict or object to how we use it, including switching off visit counting, and with it your visit record, at any time in the privacy choices below, to receive it in a portable format, to withdraw any consent you have given without affecting what was done before, and, in US states with privacy laws such as California, to know what we collect and not to be treated differently for using these rights. To use any of them, email bilalsaeed10b@gmail.com from the address linked to your account; we may need to check that it is you, and we will reply within one month, or within the time your law allows, free of charge, explaining why if we cannot do what you ask. You can also complain to your data protection authority, such as the Information Commissioner's Office in the UK or the authority where you live or work in the EU, although we would welcome the chance to put things right first. If your browser sends Do Not Track or Global Privacy Control, we treat it as a request not to sell or share your information, which we never do anyway, and we do not track you across other websites. If we change how we handle personal information, we will update this policy and the date at the top, let you know on the Service before a significant change takes effect, and never start a new use of your information that needs your consent without asking for it first. Our Terms and Conditions set out the rules for using the Service, and any question, request or complaint about your privacy can be sent to bilalsaeed10b@gmail.com.