World of Riddles (“we”, “our”, “us”) is a game in which players solve riddles, write riddles of their own, and tie them to real-world locations. This policy describes exactly what the app collects, why, who can see it, and what you can do about it. It describes what the app actually does today rather than what it might do in future.
1. Playing with or without an account
You can play without an account. Solving riddles — including timed riddles — works as a guest, and when you play that way we collect no account information about you at all: no name, no email address, and no identifier of any kind. We also keep no record of which riddles you opened or how your timed attempts went. Nothing about your play is stored, which is why it is not carried over if you sign in later.
An account is needed to write riddles of your own, create locations, upload images, rate riddles, mark favourites, report content, vote on reports, and to have a profile, a history and statistics.
Signing in happens through Google’s own software on your device. We never see, receive or store your Google password. Google gives the app a signed token, our server verifies that token directly with Google, and then issues its own sign-in credentials for this app.
2. Information we collect
Everything in this section describes an account. If you are playing as a guest, none of it applies to you except the technical information at the end, which our server records for any request it receives, from anyone.
Account information, from your sign-in provider. When you first sign in, we store: your email address (if your provider shares it), your display name, your profile picture address, which provider you used, and the account identifier that provider assigns you. Your email address is also what we would use to recognise you as the same person if the app ever offers a second way to sign in.
Content you create. Riddles you write (title, description, question, solution, hints, tags, the language you wrote it in, any multiple-choice answers, any image you upload, and — for a trail — which of your locations each part is played at) and locations you create (name, description, image, and the exact latitude and longitude you choose).
Your activity in the game. Which riddles you have opened and when, whether you opened each one in regular or timed mode, the outcome of your timed attempts — including, on a typing riddle, the answer you typed, kept exactly as you wrote it — the ratings you give riddles (clarity, enjoyment and difficulty), the riddles, locations and creators you mark as favourites, and the challenges you send or accept, with the time you accepted each one. This is what produces your History, Statistics and daily-riddle streak, your challenge results, other players’ riddle ratings, creators’ reputation scores, and the play statistics a creator sees for their own riddles.
Moderation records. If you report a riddle or location, we permanently record that you reported that item, together with the reason you chose, anything you typed alongside it and what the item was called at the time — and, once the report is settled, how it ended and when. The record of who reported what is kept even after the report is settled, because it is what stops the same person reporting the same item twice. The rest is what your “Riddles I flagged” and “Locations I flagged” screens show you: what became of each report you filed, and how many succeeded. While a report is open we also record how you voted on it; those votes are deleted as soon as the report is settled.
We also keep a record when the community votes down something you made, when you delete or withdraw something of yours that was under review, and when a report you filed is rejected. Each of these records the date, what the item was called at the time, and why it had been reported. They are what the temporary limits on posting and reporting are calculated from, and they stop counting after six months.
Location, only while you are using location features. See section 4.
Technical information. Our server keeps standard operational logs of the requests it receives, which include the network address your request came from, the path requested, and the response status and timing. These are used to diagnose faults.
3. What other players can see
Some of what you provide is public to anyone using the app, including people who are not signed in:
- Your display name, profile picture and reputation score.
- Every riddle and location you create, including the coordinates of your locations and any images you upload.
- The aggregate ratings your riddles receive.
- The identifier of each riddle and location, shown on its own screen so it can be quoted in a report or a support message.
- A riddle shared as a link opens a public web page showing its title, description, picture, creator’s display name and — unless it is a timed riddle or one played at a particular place — its question. Never its answer.
Your email address is never shown to other players. It is returned only to you, on your own profile.
Individual ratings you give are not attributed to you publicly; other players see only the averaged score of a riddle. Your History, Statistics, daily-riddle streak, favourites and your moderation record are visible only to you.
Challenges are the exception to that, and only for the riddle concerned. If you send a challenge, or accept one, your display name and your result on that one riddle — whether you solved it, and how long it took — are shown to anyone who opens that challenge’s link, including people who do not have the app. Nothing else about your play is shown.
Creators see how their own riddles are being played: how many players tried, how many solved them, how long a solve usually takes, and which wrong answers are most common. These are totals, never names. A wrong answer you typed is shown to the creator only if at least one other player typed the same thing, so nothing you alone wrote is ever passed on.
Reporting is the one place where something you write is shown to strangers. If you report a riddle or location, the reason you pick and any words you add are shown to everyone reviewing it, and to the person who made it — they need to know what to fix. Your name is never attached: nobody is told who filed a report, including the person reported. Write reports on that basis.
Images you upload are stored on our server under an unguessable web address and served without requiring a sign-in. Anyone holding that address can view the image, and copies may remain in device and network caches for up to a year.
When the riddle or location that showed an image is deleted, the file is deleted too, unless another riddle or location is still using the same one. Until then, assume anyone who has the address can see it: do not upload anything you would not want to be public.
4. Location
The app asks for location permission so it can show you nearby locations, centre the map, pre-fill the coordinates when you create a location, and check that you are at the place a riddle is played. You can decline, and the rest of the app continues to work — except riddles tied to a place, which can only be played by someone who is there.
When you use those features, your coordinates are sent to our server so it can work out which locations are near you. Your position is used to answer that request and is not attached to your account, added to your profile, or kept as a history of where you have been. Playing as a guest there is no account for it to be attached to either way.
Riddles tied to a place — bespoke riddles, and each stop of a trail — can only be played within 300 metres of that place. When you open one, the app finds your current position and sends it to our server with that request, which checks the distance and answers. The app does this only for a riddle tied to a place, never for any other. As above, the position is used for that one check: it is not stored, not attached to your account or to your history, and not kept as a record of where you have been. It travels in a request header rather than in the web address, so it is not written into the server’s request logs described in section 2.
The exception is deliberate: if you create a location, the coordinates you choose are saved with it and become public, as described in section 3.
5. How we use your information
We use the information above only to run the game:
- To sign you in and keep you signed in.
- To show riddles and locations, including which ones are near you.
- To keep your History and Statistics, and to work out riddle ratings and creator reputation.
- To enforce the rules — that no other player can edit or delete what you created (we can ourselves take something down; see section 9), and the limits described in the Code of Conduct on how much one account can post or report at a time and what happens when the community votes something down.
- To find and fix faults.
We do not use your information to build a profile of you for any purpose beyond the features described here.
6. What we do not do
- We do not show advertising and there are no advertising networks in the app.
- We do not use analytics, tracking or crash-reporting services.
- We do not sell, rent or share your personal information with anyone for their own purposes.
- We do not track you across other apps or websites.
- We do not collect your contacts, photos beyond an image you deliberately choose to upload, microphone, or any other device data.
7. Third-party services
The app includes software from the following company, which processes data under its own privacy policy:
- Google, for signing in with a Google account and for the map. The map component communicates with Google to fetch map imagery.
Signing in tells Google you are using this app. We encourage you to read their privacy policy.
Separately from the sign-in above, our own servers run on Google Cloud, which stores our database and the images players upload. Google does this on our behalf and on our instructions; it is our service provider, not another audience for your information. Section 8 says where that data is held.
If you use the “Contact us” screen, the app hands your message to whichever email app you have set up and that app sends it. The message goes from your own email account and does not pass through our servers.
The “Supporting the game” button at the bottom of Settings opens a page on our website in your browser. Nothing about you is attached to the link, and the page itself sets no cookies and loads nothing from another host. That page describes ways to help the game along, and the last of them is a link to a Ko-fi page; if you follow it, from the moment it opens you are on Ko-fi’s site, under their privacy policy, exactly as if you had typed the address yourself. No payment goes through the app or our servers, and we are not told whether you made one, so a donation is never connected to your account here.
8. Storage, security and data on your device
Your data is held in our database and, for uploaded images, on our server’s storage. Both run on Google Cloud in Frankfurt, Germany, so your information is stored in the European Union. Google LLC is based in the United States and may reach it from there in the course of running and supporting that infrastructure. All communication between the app and our server uses encrypted connections.
Sign-in credentials are short-lived, are replaced each time they are renewed, can be revoked, and are stored on our server only in hashed form. On your device they are kept in encrypted storage protected by the Android keystore.
To reduce data usage, the app keeps a copy of recent responses and images in its private storage on your device. The copies of server responses are cleared whenever you sign in or out, so nothing one account fetched is read back by the next. Cached images are not: up to 50MB of pictures you have looked at can survive a sign-out on a shared device. They are the same pictures anyone can fetch from their public addresses (section 3), which is why they are cached separately in the first place. Android may clear either at any time.
No system is completely secure, but we take reasonable technical measures to protect your information.
9. Keeping and deleting your data
If you play as a guest there is nothing here to keep or delete: nothing about you or your play is stored in the first place. The rest of this section is about accounts.
You can delete any riddle or location you created, from within the app. Deleting a location does not delete riddles other people tied to it.
We can also remove one ourselves — for example on a takedown request or after a support report — with an internal tool that deletes a single riddle or location by its identifier. That removes the item and everything attached to it: its ratings, hints, views and timed attempts, and, if we ask the tool to, the image files it used. It does not touch your account and records nothing against you — unlike a removal the community votes for, it counts nowhere and costs you no reputation. If the item was a location, any riddle tied only to it becomes orphaned for its creator to re-home, exactly as when an owner deletes a location themselves.
A riddle that stops being shown to other players — either because its ratings fell too low, or because players voted it down after a report — is kept in our database rather than erased, because your reputation score is calculated from the proportion of your riddles that remain in good standing.
Moderation records stop counting towards any limit after six months, but the rows themselves are kept while your account exists. The permanent record that you reported a particular item is kept for as long as that item does, since it is what prevents a second report of the same thing. Your own record of each report you filed — what you reported, why, and how it ended — is kept for as long as your account exists, even after the item itself is gone, so that you can still see what became of it.
You can delete your whole account from the Profile screen. This is immediate and cannot be undone. It permanently removes your account, everything stored about you under section 2, and everything you created — every riddle and every location, together with the image files they used. Those disappear for other players too, along with any ratings and play history attached to them. Ratings you gave other people’s riddles are also removed, and those riddles’ scores are recalculated so they stay accurate. Your moderation records, your reports and your votes go with your account too.
An uploaded image is only kept back if something else is still showing it — if a riddle of yours and one of somebody else’s use the same picture, that file stays for as long as theirs does.
One thing survives deliberately: if you had reported something and players were still voting on it when you deleted your account, that review carries on to a conclusion. It is no longer linked to you and you are not named in it — the objection simply outlives the account that raised it, because other people are part-way through deciding it.
Otherwise we keep your information for as long as your account exists — except for anything we take down under the second paragraph of this section, which goes when we take it down.
Deletion is immediate in the service itself, but copies take a little longer to disappear. We back the database up every night and keep fourteen days of those backups, together with seven days of transaction logs, so that a hardware failure or a mistake on our side can be undone rather than lost; a deleted image file is likewise recoverable for seven days, for the same reason. Anything you delete can therefore still exist inside those copies until they age out, which takes at most fourteen days. The backups are encrypted, nobody reads them in the ordinary course of things, and they exist only to bring the service back after something goes wrong — we do not use them to restore anything you asked us to delete.
10. Your rights
Depending on where you live, you may have the right to ask for a copy of the personal information we hold about you, to have it corrected, to have it deleted, or to object to how we use it. You can exercise any of these by emailing us at the address in section 12. Two of them you can exercise directly in the app, without asking us: your profile screen shows the account information we hold and lets you edit your display name, and you can delete your account outright as described in section 9.
11. Children’s privacy
This app is not directed at children under 13, and signing in requires a Google account, which Google has its own age requirements for. We do not knowingly collect personal information from children under 13. If you believe a child has provided us with personal information, contact us and we will delete it.
Please note that riddles and locations are written by other players, and we do not review them before they appear.
12. Changes and contact
If this policy changes, the updated version will appear on this page and on the corresponding screen in the app with a new effective date, and continuing to use the app means you accept it.
For any question about this policy, or to make a request under section 10, contact us at:
world_of_riddles@efstathopoulos.world