Reef Currents
The short version
Reef Currents is free to play and shows advertisements between puzzles, never during one. Ads are non-personalised and treated as directed to children. The free version needs an internet connection to play. One optional purchase removes ads permanently and lets you play offline. The game has no accounts, no analytics of our own, no chat, no links out to the web, and your progress never leaves your device.
What the game stores on your device
Your puzzle progress, reef journal, settings (sound, music, motion, low-power) and simple local play statistics such as how many turns a board took are saved in the app's private storage on your device. They are not transmitted to us or anyone else. Uninstalling the app deletes them.
Advertising
The free version shows interstitial advertisements between puzzles through Google AdMob. We configure AdMob to treat every player as a child for advertising purposes and to request non-personalised ads only, with content rated for general audiences. Because every player is treated as a child, the app does not request Android's advertising-identifier permission and no advertising identifier is provided to Google. AdMob may still process the technical information Google describes for non-personalised advertising, such as your IP address, coarse location derived from it, and ad-interaction events, under Google's privacy policy and how Google uses information from sites or apps that use its services. We do not receive that information. Under the child-directed configuration no personalised-advertising consent is ever requested; where a regional notice is still required, it is shown before any ad.
Ads never appear during a puzzle, at launch, or after you use undo or a hint. Hints and undo are free and unlimited.
Because the free version is supported by advertising, it needs an internet connection to play. When the game is offline it checks for a connection by contacting our own website, whaletailworks.net, and shows a plain screen with a retry button and the purchase option instead of the next puzzle. A puzzle already in progress is never interrupted. That check is an ordinary web request to our site and carries no game data.
Purchases
A single optional purchase, "Remove Ads & Play Offline", stops all advertising, stops the game loading the advertising software at all, and removes the connection requirement. Google Play handles the payment under its own privacy policy; the game only receives confirmation that the purchase exists and stores that fact locally so it works offline. There are no other purchases, no currencies and no subscriptions.
Children
Reef Currents is suitable for all ages and is offered in Google Play's Families program. We do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone, including children. Advertising is non-personalised for every player. There are no social features and nothing in the game can open a browser or contact another person.
Network access
The free version requests internet access to load advertisements, to verify the remove-ads purchase, and to make the connection check described above. Free play needs a connection; after the "Remove Ads & Play Offline" purchase the game plays fully offline and makes no network requests.
Changes
If a future version changes what is collected, this policy and the Play Store data-safety section will be updated before that version is released.
Contact
Whale Tail Works LLC — contact through the developer page on Google Play, or via whaletailworks.net.
This policy covers the Android application Reef Currents. The company-wide policy is at whaletailworks.net/privacy.html.