Privacy Policy

Effective date: 23 September 2026

Tucheze Charades (“the Game”) is developed and operated by Kanga Studios (“we”, “us”, “our”), based in Nairobi, Kenya. This Privacy Policy explains what data we collect, why we collect it, how we process it, and how you can exercise your rights under the Data Protection Act, 2019.

This policy covers both the mobile app and the website at tucheze-charades.com. Where something applies to only one of them, we say so.

1. Accounts & Identity

1.1 Guest Mode

When you first open the app, a guest account is created automatically with a random display name. No personal information is required, and you can play indefinitely this way.

1.2 Google Sign-In (Optional)

You may optionally link your account with Google. When you do, Google provides us with:

• Google account ID — used to recognise your account across sign-ins
• Email address — stored so you can recover your account. It is never shown to other players and is never returned by any part of the Game to anyone but you.
• Display name — shown on your own profile
• Profile picture URL — shown on your own profile

1.3 Sign in with Apple (Optional)

You may instead link your account with Apple. When you do, Apple provides us with:

• Apple account identifier — a value unique to this app, used to recognise your account across sign-ins
• Your name — supplied by Apple once, on first sign-in only, and used as your display name
• Email address — if you choose Apple’s Hide My Email option, we receive a private relay address rather than your real one, and we never see the address behind it

Your Google or Apple password is never shared with us. Authentication is handled entirely by Google’s or Apple’s servers.

2. Data We Collect

2.1 Game Data

When you play, we record:

• Which deck you selected and its difficulty level
• Round duration
• Which words were guessed correctly and which were passed, and how many of each
• Your score per round
• Timestamps for each game session

Word results are also kept as a running total per word, per deck — for example, how often a given word is passed. Those totals are not linked to any player: the records hold a word and a count, with no user attached. We use them to spot words that are too hard or unclear.

2.2 Decks You Create

If you create your own deck, we store the deck name, description and all the words in it, associated with your account. What happens next depends on you:

• Private — visible only to you, unless you create a share code
• Shared by code — anyone you give the code to can add and play the deck. You will be able to see the display name and profile picture of each person who redeems your code, and when they did.
• Submitted for publication — our team reads the deck to check it against our content standards before it can be offered to other players. We may approve, reject, or later remove it.

Our administration tools can currently open any deck stored in the Game, including a private deck you have not submitted. We only do so to operate and moderate the service, but we would rather tell you the capability exists than imply a boundary we do not yet enforce. We are working to restrict this to submitted decks only.

2.3 On-Device Storage

The Game stores the following data locally on your device:

2.4 Sensors

The Game uses your device’s accelerometer to detect tilt gestures. Sensor data is processed entirely on your device and is never transmitted to our servers.

2.5 Push Notifications

If you allow notifications, the app registers your device with Google Firebase Cloud Messaging so we can send you game notifications. This works in guest mode too. For each device we store:

• Registration token — an identifier issued by Firebase Cloud Messaging that lets us address notifications to the app on that device. It is not your phone number or an advertising identifier.
• Platform and app version — iOS or Android, and which version of the app is installed
• Device language and timezone — so we can send a notification to players who use a particular language, and send reminders at a reasonable local hour

We also store your on/off choice for each notification category, and a record of each notification we send you: when it was sent, whether it was delivered, and whether you opened it. The app tells us when you open a notification by tapping it. We use these records to limit how many notifications you receive and to measure whether our notifications are opened.

There are four categories:

• News and announcements from our team
• New decks added to the Game
• Reminders to play, sent after you have not played for some days
• Updates on decks you submitted for publication

To reach your device, the title and text of each notification pass through Firebase Cloud Messaging, and on iPhone also through Apple’s push notification service. The text contains no details of your account; an update about a deck you submitted includes that deck’s name. We do not use notification data for advertising.

You can turn notifications off at any time in your device settings, or turn individual categories off in the Settings screen of the app. When you delete your account, your device registrations and category choices are deleted — see section 8.

3. The Website

When you visit tucheze-charades.com — including this page — we record each page view to understand which pages people find useful. Each record contains:

• The page address and the page you arrived from
• Your browser and device type (the user-agent string)
• A one-way hash of your IP address. We never store the address itself, and the hash cannot be reversed back to it without a secret we hold separately.
• A randomly generated identifier stored in your browser under tucheze_analytics_anonymous_id, so repeat visits can be counted as one visitor rather than many

That identifier is a random value. It contains nothing about you, is not shared with anyone, and is not used for advertising or profiling. You can remove it at any time by clearing site data for tucheze-charades.com in your browser, and a new one will be generated on your next visit.

We do not use advertising cookies, trackers from ad networks, or cross-site tracking of any kind.

4. Analytics & Crash Reporting

4.1 Firebase Analytics (app)

We use Google Firebase Analytics to understand how the Game is used. Firebase collects standard metrics such as session duration, device model, OS version, and country, together with in-game events such as which deck was opened and which words were guessed or passed. We do not send Firebase your email address or your name. You can opt out by disabling analytics sharing in your device settings.

Note that these word events currently fire for decks you create as well as for ours, which means words from your own decks are sent to Firebase. If you would rather that did not happen, keep personal details out of deck words. We intend to stop sending word events for user-created decks.

4.2 Crash Reporting (app and our servers)

We use Sentry to detect and fix errors in the app and on our servers. The website itself sends no crash reports. When something goes wrong, the following may be captured:

• Error message and the point in the code where it happened
• Device model and operating system
• IP address, used to group related errors together
• The address, method and content of the request that failed, and the account identifier of the signed-in user, so we can reproduce the fault

Passwords, authentication tokens and cookies are stripped from an error report before it leaves our servers. Sentry deletes stored reports according to its own retention policy.

5. Who Can See What

The Game has no public leaderboard and no player profiles that strangers can browse. Your display name and picture are shown to another person only in one situation: if you redeem someone’s deck share code, the owner of that deck can see your display name, your profile picture, and when you redeemed it.

Our own staff can see play statistics in an administration console. In that console, player names are shown partially masked — for example, a player called Wanjiru appears as Wan***. Email addresses are not shown there at all.

6. Security

We take appropriate technical and organisational measures to protect your data, including:

• Signed authentication tokens with short expiry windows
• Two-factor authentication on all staff accounts
• Rate limiting on all API endpoints
• All traffic encrypted in transit
• IP addresses stored as one-way hashes in website analytics

7. Data Retention

8. Account Deletion

You can delete your account at any time from the Settings screen in the app. When you do, we permanently erase every piece of information that identifies you:

• Your email address, name, profile picture, and any Google or Apple link are erased and cannot be recovered.
• All your sessions end immediately and every token stops working.
• Your push notification registrations and category choices are deleted, so no further notifications are sent to your devices.
• Your entry is removed from any score ranking.

What we keep, and why. Your past game records — deck played, score, duration — and any decks you created are kept, but detached from you. The account they belonged to no longer has a name, an email, or any link to a real person. We keep them so our statistics about which decks are fun and which words are too hard do not silently change whenever someone leaves. They cannot be traced back to you.

The record of notifications we sent you, and whether you opened them, is kept in the same way, attached to the anonymised account.

We also keep a dated record that an account was deleted, as described in section 7.

If you would prefer your play records removed as well, contact us at [email protected] and we will do it.

9. Your Rights

Under the Data Protection Act, 2019, you have the right to:

• Be told what personal data we hold about you and why
• Ask for a copy of it
• Have inaccurate data corrected
• Have your data deleted
• Object to how we are using it, or ask us to restrict that use
• Withdraw consent at any time, where we relied on your consent

To exercise any of these, email [email protected]. We will respond within 30 days. If you are not satisfied with our response, you may complain to the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner of Kenya.

10. Children’s Privacy

Tucheze Charades is a family-friendly party game and children are welcome to play it. Guest mode collects no personal information at all, and it is the mode we recommend for children.

Creating an account with Google or Apple is a separate matter. Under Kenyan law a person under 18 is a child, and we do not knowingly collect personal data from a child without the consent of a parent or guardian. If you believe a child has created an account, contact us and we will delete it promptly.

11. International Data Processing

Our processors — Google and Sentry — operate internationally, so data shared with them may be processed outside Kenya. If you access the Game from outside Kenya, your data may be transferred to and processed in the country where our servers are located. Wherever it is processed, the protections described in this policy apply to it.

12. Third-Party Services

• Google (Firebase Analytics, Firebase Cloud Messaging, Google Sign-In) — Google Privacy Policy
• Apple (Sign in with Apple, and Apple’s push notification service for delivering notifications to iPhones) — Apple Privacy Policy
• Sentry (crash and error reporting) — Sentry Privacy Policy

We do not sell your data, and we do not share it with advertisers or data brokers.

13. Changes to This Policy

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. We will notify you of material changes by posting a notice within the Game or on this page. Continued use of the Game after updates constitutes acceptance of the revised policy.

14. Contact Us

If you have questions about this Privacy Policy or wish to exercise your data rights, contact us at:

• Email: [email protected]
• Entity: Kanga Studios, Nairobi, Kenya