In short
Inkfang has no account system of ours, and asks you for nothing about yourself. Your saved game is written to your own Play Games or Game Center cloud, not to a server of ours.
Four things leave your device. The game measures how it is played, through Google Analytics for Firebase — which battles are started and how they end, never who you are. It reports crashes, through Firebase Crashlytics. It shows advertising, through Google AdMob, which uses your device's advertising identifier. And if, and only if, you enter the global ladder, it sends the identifier your platform gives you together with the pet you entered.
We set no identifier of our own anywhere, and we sell nothing to anyone. Where the law requires it, the game asks for your consent to personalised advertising before any of it happens, and taking that consent away is a tap in the settings.
Who is responsible
Inkfang is made by an independent developer, reachable at pandyapp.team@gmail.com. That address is the contact for every question, request or complaint about this policy.
The ladder: what it sends, and when
The global ladder is optional and nothing in the rest of the game depends on it. If you enter it, and each time your entry changes, the game sends the following to our ladder server:
| What | Why |
|---|---|
The player identifier issued by your platform, stored with a prefix that says which
one (pgs: for Play Games, gc: for Game Center) |
It is what tells one row of the ladder from another, and what lets you keep your rung between sessions. We cannot turn it into your name or your email — only the platform can |
| The pet you entered: its internal id, its name, its level, and the configuration it fights with | The ladder is asynchronous: your pet has to be able to defend itself while you are not playing, so its configuration is stored frozen |
| Timestamps of when the entry was created, updated, and last used to challenge | Ordering the ladder, and limiting how often a challenge can be issued |
Pet names are generated by the game, not typed by players. There is no chat and no free text anywhere in Inkfang, so nothing you write can end up on our server — because there is nothing you write.
How the game measures itself
Published builds include Google Analytics for Firebase and Firebase Crashlytics. The first tells us how the game is played, the second tells us when it breaks. Both are on from the first launch, and neither is used to build a profile of you or to advertise anything.
What the game records itself
Events, with the numbers that make them readable — and nothing else:
- a story battle starting and ending: which board, which tile, your pet's level, how many times you have walked that board again, the kind of fight, how it ended, and whether the pet died;
- a ladder challenge starting and ending: how far you have got in the story, your pet's level, the outcome, and the rung before and after;
- something bought in the shop with in-game Ink: which item, of what kind, at what price.
There is no event for anything you write, because there is nothing you write. We never attach a user identifier to these events, which is also why we cannot pick your events out of the pile later — see deletion, below.
What Firebase adds on its own
Google Analytics for Firebase collects, by design and not by our choice: an app instance identifier (a random id for this installation, which is reset if you clear the app's data or reinstall it), the device model, the operating system and app version, the language, and an approximate location — country or region — derived from the IP address, which Google does not hand to us. It also records automatic events such as the first launch and the start of a session.
Crashlytics collects, when the game crashes: the stack trace, the state of the device at the time, and its own installation identifier. It is what turns "the app closed itself" into something we can fix.
Both are governed by Firebase's own privacy documentation, and the data lives in a Firebase project we control. Event-level data is kept for the retention window set on that project; Firebase's default is two months.
Nothing of this is sent by a build without a Firebase configuration file — the game then runs with no analytics and no crash reporting at all, which is a supported state and how it is developed.
What we never collect
- Your name, email address, phone number, postal address, date of birth or age.
- Your location, in any form or precision.
- Your contacts, calendar, photos, files, messages or health data.
- Your advertising identifier on our side. Advertising is served by Google AdMob, which reads that identifier itself; it is never sent to us, joined to your game data, or stored by us. See the advertising section below.
- Any identifier of our own: we never assign you one, in the game or in the analytics.
- Anything you type, because the game has no field to type in.
Advertising
Inkfang is free, and advertising is how it stays free. Ads are served by Google AdMob, a Google service, and the whole of it happens between your device and Google: we receive money and aggregate reporting, never a list of who saw what.
- What AdMob uses. Your device's advertising identifier (the Android advertising ID or the iOS IDFA), the IP address of the request, and technical facts about the device and the ad — model, operating system, app version, which ad was shown and whether it was tapped. Google uses these to serve, cap and measure ads, and to detect fraud and invalid traffic.
- What we never receive. The advertising identifier itself, or anything that points back to one player. Ad data is never joined to your game data, your ladder row or your saved game — nothing in the game carries an identifier of ours that would let us join them.
- Your consent, where the law asks for it. In the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom and Switzerland, the game asks you before any personalised advertising happens, through Google's own consent flow. Saying no is a real answer: you keep playing, with non-personalised ads, which are chosen from the context rather than from a profile.
- Changing your mind. The consent choice can be reopened from the game's settings at any time. Your advertising identifier is yours to control as well: Android lets you reset or delete it under Settings → Privacy → Ads, iOS under Settings → Privacy & Security → Tracking.
- Children. Inkfang is not directed at children under 13. Where a player is identified as a child, or where the platform's own settings say so, ad requests are marked accordingly and personalised advertising is not used.
How Google handles this data is described in How Google uses information from sites or apps that use our services. Builds without an AdMob configuration — the ones the game is developed with — show no advertising at all and make no ad requests.
Your saved game
The game saves to your device and, if you turn it on, to the cloud save your platform already gives you: Play Games Saved Games on Android, Game Center Saved Games on iOS. That data is held by Google or Apple under their own privacy policies and their own controls. It never reaches us, and we cannot read it.
Signing in to Play Games or Game Center is your platform's own process, subject to Google's or Apple's privacy policy. Inkfang only asks it for the identifier described above.
Who processes data on our behalf
| Service | What it holds |
|---|---|
| Supabase | The ladder table and the single function that is the only way to reach it. This is where the row described above lives |
| Google Firebase — Analytics and Crashlytics | The gameplay events and crash reports described above, in a project we control |
| Google AdMob | The advertising described above: the ad requests your device makes, and the advertising identifier it sends with them. Held by Google, not by us |
| Google Firebase Hosting | This website. Like any web server it records standard request logs, which include the IP address of the request. We do not use cookies, analytics or trackers on this site |
| Google Play Games / Apple Game Center | Sign-in and your cloud save, held by them and not by us |
We sell nothing to anyone, and we build no profile of you. The one flow that serves an advertising purpose is the AdMob one described above, and it runs between your device and Google without passing through us. Traffic between the game and the ladder server is encrypted in transit (HTTPS).
How long it is kept, and how to get rid of it
Your ladder row stays for as long as you are in the ladder. To have it deleted, write to pandyapp.team@gmail.com — knowing which pet name you entered is enough for us to find it.
Your saved game is yours to delete: from inside the game, the Profile screen deletes both the local save and the cloud snapshot; from outside, the Play Games or Game Center settings on your device delete the game's saved data.
Analytics and crash data are the awkward case, and we would rather say so plainly than pretend otherwise: because we never attach an identifier of ours to them, we have no way to find your events among everyone's, and therefore no way to delete only yours. What you can do instead is cut the thread: clearing the app's data or reinstalling resets the app instance identifier, which starts a new pile with no link to the old one.
Your rights
If you are in the European Union or the United Kingdom, you have the right to ask what we hold about you, to have it corrected or deleted, and to object to its processing. In our case the answer is short: either nothing at all, or one ladder row. Write to the address above and we will answer.
The legal basis for the ladder row is your choice to enter the ladder, which the game asks for explicitly and which nothing else in the game depends on.
Children
Inkfang is not directed at children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect data from them. There is nothing in the game that asks anyone for personal data: no registration, no chat, no profile, no free text. Where a player is known to be a child, advertising is requested as non-personalised, as described in the advertising section.
Changes to this policy
If this policy changes, the new version is published on this page with a new date at the top. If a change ever means the game starts collecting something it did not collect before, it will be asked for in the game, not slipped into this page.