Privacy Policy
Castles in the Sand is a beach-building game for iOS, Android and the web. This policy explains what the game does with information about you. The short version: we collect nothing about you ourselves, and the game has no account, no sign-in and no servers of ours. The mobile versions show ads, which are supplied by Google, and Google receives some information about your device in order to send them.
What we collect
Nothing. We have no servers, no account system and no way to identify you. Castles in the Sand does not ask for your name, your email address or anything else about you, and nothing you do in the game is reported back to us.
Advertising
The iOS and Android versions of the game show ads, supplied by Google AdMob. There are two kinds, and they are the only ads in the game:
- a full-screen ad that may appear between levels, never during a round and at most once every twenty minutes;
- an ad you can choose to watch to save a flag the tide has taken. That one only ever appears as a button you press, and declining it costs you nothing but the round.
The web version has no ads at all, and neither does any desktop build. There is no code for them in those versions.
Ads in this game are treated as ads shown to children
This game is for all ages, and we assume every player might be a child. That decision changes what the ads are allowed to do, and it applies to everyone — we do not ask your age, and there is no setting that turns it off:
- ads are contextual only. They are chosen from the game they are shown in, never from anything about you, your interests or what you have done in other apps.
- there is no personalised or interest-based advertising, and no remarketing.
- the game never uses the advertising identifier — Android's Advertising ID or Apple's IDFA. Because the game does not ask for it, iOS never shows you the “Allow tracking?” prompt: there is nothing to allow.
What Google receives
To send an ad, Google's advertising software collects some information about the device it is running on. As Google describes it, this can include the device type and operating system, coarse (city-level) location derived from the network address, a non-permanent identifier used to limit how often the same ad is repeated, and diagnostic information about whether an ad loaded and was displayed. This happens on the mobile versions only, and only for the ads described above.
We never see this information. It is not sent to us, and we have no access to it. What Google does with it is governed by Google's own privacy policy and by Google's advertising terms.
Asking you first
Where the law requires your consent before ads may be requested — the EEA, the UK and Switzerland — the game asks for it, through Google's consent form, before it makes a single ad request. If you decline, no ad is requested at all. You can change that answer at any time from the game's own Settings screen.
Buying the ads away
The mobile versions offer one in-app purchase: Remove Ads, a one-time purchase that turns off every ad in the game permanently. There is nothing else to buy, no currency, no subscription and no paid content.
The purchase is handled entirely by Apple or Google. We never see your payment details — the game is told only whether you own the item. The Settings screen also has a Restore Purchase button, so a purchase made on one device, or before you reinstalled, can be re-applied on another.
Buying it stops the ads from that moment: no further ad is requested, so no further information goes to Google for advertising.
What the game stores on your device
The game keeps three small files on your device: your volume and quality settings, which levels you have finished, and whether you have bought the ads away. These files stay on your device, contain nothing about you as a person, and are removed when the game is uninstalled — except that your purchase is remembered by the store, which is what lets you restore it. You can reset your progress from the game's Settings screen at any time.
Children
The game is suitable for all ages and is meant to be. Because we cannot know how old any player is, the game treats every player as a child for advertising purposes — contextual ads only, no advertising identifier, no interest-based targeting. That is described in full under Advertising above.
We collect no information from anyone, so we collect none from children. Parents or guardians with a question about this policy can write to us at the address below.
The store you installed from
Apple's App Store and Google Play may collect information about app downloads, crashes and usage under their own privacy policies, which are separate from this one and which we do not control:
- Apple: apple.com/legal/privacy
- Google: policies.google.com/privacy
Changes to this policy
If a future version of the game ever changes what it does with your information, this policy will be updated first, the effective date above will change, and the change will be described here. The addition of ads and the remove-ads purchase, in September 2026, was such a change: before that the game made no network connections at all.
Contact
Questions about this policy: privacy@hexmonger.com