Privacy Policy: Water Sort

Effective date: 03.09.2026
Last updated: 03.09.2026
Applies to: the Water Sort mobile game for Android (package com.lelobyte.watersort)

Water Sort is published by Altug Ataalp (“we”, “us”). This policy explains what happens to information when you play the game, who else is involved, and what you can decide.

If you have a question about anything here, write to ataalpaltug92@gmail.com.

1. The short version

2. What stays on your device

The game keeps your progress in local storage on your phone. This includes:

• which levels you have finished and how many stars you earned on each
• your best move count per level, and any level you left part-played
• coins, XP, player level, power-up charges and daily check-in streak
• your chosen glassware, background, language, haptics and reduce-motion settings
• your answer to the age question described in section 8

We never receive any of this. It is not uploaded, backed up to us, or shared with our partners. It lives in the app’s private storage, which other apps on your phone cannot read.

If Android’s own backup feature is enabled on your device, your operating system may include this data in the backup it makes to your Google account. That backup is governed by Google’s privacy policy, not by this one.

Uninstalling the app deletes this data from your device.

3. Permissions the app requests

Some of these the app declares itself; the rest are merged in by the Google SDKs described below. Either way they are what the app is able to do on your device:

The app does not request location, contacts, photos, files, storage, microphone, camera, phone state, or any other permission. Where a policy like this would normally tell you that we do not read your contacts, the stronger and more checkable statement is that the app is not permitted to.

The internet permission is the consequential one, and the sections that follow set out exactly what it is used for.

4. Analytics

Separately from the advertising described in section 6, the game includes Google Firebase Analytics. It measures how the game is used — how many people finish chapter three, which level is where players give up, whether an update made things worse — so we know what to fix next. It is measurement, not advertising: it does not choose ads and does not build an interest profile.

We have written no custom tracking. The app makes no analytics calls of its own; what follows is what the SDK gathers by itself.

• Automatic events: first open, sessions starting, the screen being shown, foreground time, app updates, and the app being removed.
• A pseudonymous app instance identifier, generated on your device to tell one installation from another. It is not linked to any account, and it is regenerated if you clear the app’s data or reinstall.
• Your device’s advertising identifier — the same resettable identifier described in section 6. Where that section says no advertising identifier is used, that statement holds for advertising and for the measurement here too.
• Device and app information: model and brand, operating system version, app version, language, screen characteristics and network type.
• Approximate location derived from your IP address — country, sometimes region or city. The app has no permission to read your precise location.
• Install attribution, from the Google Play install referrer.

Google processes this on our behalf; it reaches nobody else. We see aggregated reports, and cannot use them to identify you, contact you, or single out your device. Google describes its handling in the Firebase privacy documentation.

The ad-free upgrade does not cover this. It stops the advertising SDK from ever starting, which is what section 6 claims and all it claims. Measurement is a separate SDK with a separate basis, and it keeps running for players who have bought the upgrade. We would rather say so plainly than let “removes every ad” be read as “collects nothing”.

What does stop measurement is the consent rule: it is off in the EEA, the UK and Switzerland unless you agree to it, off where the country cannot be determined, and off for any player whose age answer places them below the age of digital consent.

5. Purchases

The game offers optional in-app purchases. These are processed by Google Play Billing.

• Google is the seller of record. You buy from Google, using the payment method on your Google account. Your card number, billing address and similar payment details go to Google and are never sent to us and never seen by the app.
• What the app receives from Google is limited to what it needs to unlock what you bought: a purchase token, an order identifier, the product identifier, and whether the purchase completed, is pending, or was refunded.
• The app uses that to grant the item and to check, on later launches, that the purchase is still valid. This is stored on your device with the rest of your progress.

Google’s handling of your purchase is covered by the Google Payments privacy notice and Google’s privacy policy.

Refunds are requested through Google Play, not through us, though you are welcome to contact us first and we will help where we can.

6. Advertising

The game shows ads. We do not operate the ad system ourselves — we embed a third-party advertising SDK, and that partner is the one that collects and processes data for advertising.

The ad-free upgrade

Settings offers a one-time purchase that removes every ad in the game. It does more than hide them. Once you own it, the advertising SDK is never started at all on your device: no advertising identifier is read, no ad request is made, and nothing in this section happens to you. That is a stronger statement than “ads are hidden”, and it is the one we are making.

The purchase is tied to your Google account, so it applies on every device you sign in with, and it survives reinstalling the game. Restoring it asks Google what you own; it tells us nothing new about you.

The rest of this section applies to players who have not bought it.

Our advertising partner is Google, through Google AdMob.

What the ad SDK may collect

Depending on your age band and your consent choices, our advertising partner may collect:

• your device’s advertising identifier (the resettable Android Advertising ID)
• your IP address, and an approximate location derived from it — typically country, region or city level, not a precise position
• device and app information: device model, operating system version, language, screen characteristics, the app’s identifier and version
• ad interaction data: which ads were requested, shown, viewed or clicked, and whether an ad led to an install
• diagnostic information used to detect invalid traffic and ad fraud

The app does not ask for or use your device’s precise GPS location. It does not read your contacts, photos, files, microphone or camera. It has no permission to do any of those things.

What the ad partner does with it

Broadly: choosing which ad to show, capping how often you see the same one, measuring whether ads worked, billing advertisers, and detecting fraud. Where you have consented to personalised advertising, your data may also be used to build an interest profile and to show you ads across other apps and websites.

Google explains this in detail at How Google uses information from sites or apps that use our services and lists what AdMob collects at Google Ads data safety disclosures.

Personalised versus non-personalised ads

• Personalised ads use a profile built from your activity to choose what to show you. In the EEA, the UK and Switzerland we ask for your consent before these are used, and you can refuse or change your mind at any time.
• Non-personalised ads are chosen from the general context — roughly, that you are playing a puzzle game — rather than from a profile of you. They still require some data to be sent (an IP address, device type, and frequency-capping information), because an ad cannot be delivered or counted otherwise.

Refusing personalised ads does not remove ads from the game. It changes how they are chosen.

7. Consent

Where the law requires your consent before we or our partners may store information on your device or use it for advertising — this covers the EEA, the UK and Switzerland — the app shows a consent screen the first time you play, before any ad is requested.

The consent screen is provided through Google’s User Messaging Platform, which participates in the IAB Transparency and Consent Framework. Your choices are recorded on your device and passed to the advertising SDK.

You can change your decision at any time in the game under Settings → Privacy. Your new choice applies to ads from that point on; it cannot retroactively undo processing that already happened on the basis of the consent you gave earlier.

Legal bases, for players in the EEA and the UK

8. Children

Water Sort is a mixed-audience app. It is not designed specifically for children, but we know that a colour-sorting puzzle appeals to players of all ages, so the game is built to treat younger players differently.

The age question

The game is listed on Google Play for players aged 13 and over.

In the EEA, the UK and Switzerland — where the age at which you can consent to personalised advertising for yourself is set nationally at somewhere between 13 and 16 — the game asks for your year of birth before it shows you the consent screen described in section 7. It asks in a neutral way: it does not suggest which answer unlocks more, and it does not require a birth date, a name or an account. Your answer is stored on your device only and is never transmitted to us or to any partner. Only the resulting age band is used, and only to decide how ads behave.

Elsewhere the game does not ask, because the answer would not change anything: personalised advertising is off unless you turn it on in Settings → Privacy, everywhere in the world and for everyone. A player who is never asked their age is never profiled unless they have asked to be.

If you are below the age of digital consent where you live

The relevant threshold is 13 in the United States and the United Kingdom, and between 13 and 16 in the EEA depending on the country. The game applies the highest of these, 16, rather than trying to guess which national rule applies to you. If your answer places you below it, then for as long as that answer stands — on this device and in every country, including after you travel:

• ads are non-personalised only — no interest profile is built and none is used;
• no advertising identifier is collected or used for you, and the ad SDK is instructed to treat the request as child-directed and as coming from a user under the age of consent;
• no behavioural profiling, no remarketing, and no cross-app tracking takes place;
• data is limited to what is strictly needed to deliver an ad, cap how often it appears, count it, and guard against fraud.

We do not knowingly collect personal information from children beyond that. We do not ask children for a name, an email address, a photograph, a phone number or a precise location — the app has no way to collect any of these from anyone.

Parents and guardians

If you believe a child has provided personal information to us or to one of our partners, write to ataalpaltug92@gmail.com and we will investigate and delete whatever we can reach, and ask our partners to do the same. Because the game has no accounts and stores everything locally, the fastest and most complete remedy is usually to uninstall the app, which removes the local data outright.

In-app purchases can be restricted or blocked entirely using the parental controls and purchase authentication settings in the Google Play Store app.

9. Who else receives data

We do not sell or rent your personal information, and we do not share it with anyone for their own independent marketing purposes.

Data reaches these parties as described above:

We may also disclose information where we are legally required to, or where it is necessary to establish or defend a legal claim — but note that we hold almost nothing about you to disclose.

10. International transfers

Our partners are global companies and may process data outside your country, including in the United States. Where data leaves the EEA or the UK, those transfers rely on the safeguards those partners put in place, principally the European Commission’s Standard Contractual Clauses and, for certified US recipients, the EU–US Data Privacy Framework. Google describes its own arrangements in its privacy policy and its framework commitments.

11. How long data is kept

• On your device: your progress and settings stay until you delete them in the game, clear the app’s storage, or uninstall it. There is no expiry.
• Purchase records: Google keeps transaction records for as long as its own policies and tax law require.
• Advertising data: retention is set by our advertising partner, not by us. Google documents its retention periods in its privacy policy and technologies pages.
• Analytics data: retention is set in the Firebase console. Event-level data is deleted at the end of the configured window; the aggregated reports we read cannot be traced back to a device.

We hold no personal data on our own systems, so there is nothing on our side to retain or delete.

12. Your choices and your rights

Controls available to everyone, on any device

• Reset or delete your advertising ID: Android Settings → Privacy → Ads. Deleting it stops apps from receiving an advertising identifier at all.
• Change your ad consent: in the game, Settings → Privacy.
• Stop ad data collection outright: buy the ad-free upgrade in Settings → Ads. The advertising SDK is then never started.
• Delete everything the game holds: use Reset progress in the game’s settings, or uninstall the app. Resetting progress does not cancel the ad-free upgrade — that belongs to your Google account, not to the save file.
• Control purchases: use purchase authentication and parental controls in the Google Play Store app.

If you are in the EEA, the UK or Switzerland

You have the right to access your personal data, to have it corrected or erased, to restrict or object to how it is processed, to receive it in a portable form, and to withdraw consent at any time without affecting processing that already took place. You also have the right to complain to your national data protection authority.

To exercise these rights against us, write to ataalpaltug92@gmail.com. Please note that because the game has no accounts and we hold no identifiers of our own, we usually cannot locate or link any data to you — in which case the effective route is the on-device controls above, or a request made directly to the partner concerned. We will always tell you honestly which of the two applies.

If you are in California

Under the CCPA as amended by the CPRA you have the right to know what personal information is collected and for what purpose, to delete it, to correct it, to opt out of its “sale” or “sharing”, and not to be discriminated against for exercising any of these rights.

We do not sell your personal information. Personalised advertising can qualify as “sharing” for cross-context behavioural advertising under the CPRA. You can opt out by refusing or withdrawing consent to personalised ads in Settings → Privacy, which is the mechanism our “Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information” control uses. Global Privacy Control signals are honoured where our advertising partner supports them.

Other US states

Residents of states with comparable privacy laws — including Colorado, Connecticut, Virginia, Utah and Texas — have similar rights of access, deletion, correction and opt-out from targeted advertising. The same controls and the same contact address apply.

13. Security

The app stores your progress in Android’s private per-app storage, which other apps cannot read. Purchases and ad delivery run over encrypted connections managed by Google’s SDKs.

We do not operate servers holding your data, which removes an entire category of risk. It does not remove all of it: no method of transmission or storage is completely secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security.

14. Changes to this policy

If we change how the game handles data — a new ad partner, a new kind of purchase, anything that alters the picture above — we will update this policy and change the “Last updated” date. Where a change is significant, and especially where it needs your consent, we will tell you inside the app before it takes effect and, where the law requires it, ask you again.

Older versions are available on request.

15. Contact

Altug Ataalp
Email: ataalpaltug92@gmail.com

If you are in the EEA or the UK and are not satisfied with our response, you may complain to your local supervisory authority. A list is maintained by the European Data Protection Board, and UK residents can contact the ICO.