Liverpool Rummy — Privacy Policy (DRAFT)
Effective date: [date]
Who we are: Liverpool Rummy is operated by [legal entity name], [postal address] ("we", "us"). Contact: [privacy contact email].
1. Summary
- You play under a nickname. Other players see only your nickname, never your real name or email.
- There is no chat of any kind, no ads, and no payments in the app.
- We collect only what the game needs to run: your sign-in, your nickname, your games and statistics, your settings, and (if you allow it) a token to send you notifications.
- Your email address is stored encrypted.
- You can delete your account in the app at any time.
- We do not sell your personal information and do not use it for advertising.
2. What we collect
| Data | Why | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Email address (if you sign up with email) | To sign you in, verify your address, and reset your password | Encrypted at rest; a keyed one-way index lets us find your account by email without storing it in readable form. |
| Password (email accounts) | To sign you in | Stored only as an argon2id hash; we cannot read it. |
| Sign in with Apple, Google, or Facebook | To sign you in | We keep only the provider's account ID for you. We never store your name, profile photo, or the email the provider shares. |
| Nickname | Shown to other players | You choose it. It must pass a filter for offensive words. |
| Games | To run the game | Seats, every move, scores, and results. Each game keeps a log of moves for replays and to settle disputes. |
| Statistics | Shown to you; a summary is shown on your public profile | Wins, losses, games played, points, and similar counts. |
| Friends, blocks, invites, reports | Social features | Who you are friends with or have blocked, invites you sent or received, and nicknames you reported (reports carry no text). |
| Settings | To remember your choices | Table colour, card style, sounds, haptics, hints, hand sort, and which notifications you want. |
| Device notification token (if you allow notifications) | To send notifications | Stored encrypted; deleted when the notification service tells us it is no longer valid. |
| Sign-in sessions | To keep you signed in | Stored only as one-way hashes of the session tokens. |
| IP address | Security (rate limits, abuse prevention) | Kept in security logs only, for 90 days. |
| Activity times | To show when a game last moved and when you were last seen | For example when an account was created and last seen. |
We do not collect your location, contacts, photos, real name, date of birth, or payment information. The app has no advertising or third-party analytics SDKs.
Beta sign-up (website)
If you sign up for the beta on our website, we keep your name, email address, and platform (iPhone, Android, or web) to invite you to test. Your name and email are encrypted at rest. We email you once to confirm; an unconfirmed sign-up is deleted after 48 hours. Every beta email has a link that removes you from the list at once. We use your sign-up only to invite you to the beta.
Website analytics and cookies
Our website (liverpoolrummy.app) can use Google Analytics to count visits and see which pages people read, but only if you choose Allow Cookies in the banner. Until then nothing is sent to Google and no analytics cookies are set. If you allow it, Google Analytics sets cookies (_ga, _ga_<id>) and receives your IP address, browser and device type, the pages you open, and roughly where you are (city or region); Google does not give us your IP address. We use it only to see how people find and use the site. You can change your mind at any time with Cookie Settings at the bottom of every page; choosing No Thanks removes our analytics cookies. The site sets no other cookies.
3. What other players see
Other players see your nickname, your seat and moves in games you play together, a summary of your statistics on your public profile, and whether you are friends. They never see your email or any provider name. Cards in your hand are never shown to anyone else while a hand is being played. When a hand ends, every player's remaining cards and score are shown to everyone at that table (that is part of the game).
Your account carries an internal player ID. Other players' apps can see it in game seats, search results, and friend lists, so a nickname can be reported. It is a random code and reveals nothing about you.
4. Notifications
If you allow them, we send notifications about your games (for example "your turn", invites, game over, friend requests, nudges from other players). You can turn each kind off in Settings, except the request to vote when a player leaves a game you are in, because the game waits on you. Notifications are delivered through Google's Firebase Cloud Messaging (and, on iPhone, Apple's push service), which receive the notification text and your device token.
5. Email
We send email only to verify your address and to reset your password. Email is sent through Amazon Simple Email Service. If your address bounces or a message is marked as spam, we stop sending to it.
6. Who processes your data
Your data is stored and processed on Amazon Web Services in the United States (region us-west-2). AWS also sends our email (Amazon SES). Google (Firebase Cloud Messaging) and Apple (Apple Push Notification service) deliver notifications. Google Analytics measures visits to our website, only if you allow it (see Website analytics and cookies). If you use Sign in with Apple, Google, or Facebook, that company handles the sign-in under its own privacy policy. We do not share your personal information with anyone else, except where the law requires it.
7. Security
All traffic is encrypted in transit (TLS). All data stores are encrypted at rest with keys managed in AWS KMS, and your email is encrypted again inside the application. Staff access goes through a separate management application with two-factor sign-in, and every staff action is recorded in an audit log.
8. How long we keep data
- Account data is kept while your account exists.
- Security logs (with IP addresses) are kept for 90 days.
- Lobbies that never fill are closed after 15 minutes.
- After you delete your account, your nickname stays reserved for 90 days so nobody can immediately take it to impersonate you. A nickname that staff made a player change is reserved permanently.
- [Backups: point-in-time recovery keeps up to 35 days of database history; confirm and state the backup retention here.]
9. Deleting your account
You can delete your account in Settings → Delete account. We then:
- sign you out everywhere,
- delete your sign-in methods, devices, friends, blocks, invites, statistics, and your email address,
- revoke Sign in with Apple, if you used it.
You also leave every game you have not finished, as if you had left it yourself: your seat in a lobby opens up (a lobby you created closes), and in a game in progress the other players decide whether a bot takes your seat or the game ends. In every game you played, your seat is then shown to the other players as "Deleted player", and your account ID and nickname are removed from that game's records.
Some records keep only an internal ID and are not linked to you once your account is gone. For example, the marker that a game's statistics were applied keeps no personal data.
10. Your rights
Depending on where you live, you may have the right to access, correct, delete, or receive a copy of your personal data, and to object to or restrict how we use it. You can delete your account in the app, and change your settings at any time. For anything else, contact us at [privacy contact email]. [Add region-specific sections if needed, e.g. GDPR/UK GDPR legal bases, CCPA/CPRA notice.]
11. Children
Liverpool Rummy is not directed at children under [13 / 16 — decide]. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children under that age. If you believe a child has created an account, contact us and we will delete it. [Confirm against the store age rating questionnaires, D-112.]
12. Changes
If we change this policy, we will update the effective date and, for significant changes, tell you in the app.
13. Contact
[Legal entity], [address], [privacy contact email].