Privacy Policy

1. Who we are

Baluff (“Baluff Party”, “we”, “us”) is a real-time party trivia game published by GrowthTech, a studio based in Tunisia. GrowthTech is the data controller for the personal data described on this page.

You can reach us about anything on this page at privacy@growthtech.tn. This policy covers the Baluff game on the web, on iOS and on Android, and this marketing site.

2. The short version

If you read nothing else:

• There is no account. No email, no password, no phone number, no real name.
• Your nickname, avatar and settings live on your own device. They are sent to our servers only while you are actually in a room, so the other players can see who they are playing against.
• A room and its match are deleted outright when the last player leaves. Nothing about the game you played is kept afterwards.
• We use no analytics tools, no crash-reporting tools and no tracking pixels. We do not build a profile of you and we do not sell data to anyone.
• The game is free and is funded by ads, which Google serves. That is the one place a third party is involved — see section 6.
• The camera is used only while the QR scanner is open, only to read a room code, and the picture never leaves your device.

3. What we collect

An anonymous player ID. The first time you open Baluff, the app is given a random, anonymous ID. It is not linked to an email address, a phone number, a social account or anything else that identifies you, and it exists so that one player in a room can be told apart from another.

Things that stay on your device. Your nickname, your avatar seed, your chosen language, your sound settings and your own games-played and games-won counters are stored in your device’s app storage. We do not receive them, and clearing the app’s data or uninstalling the app removes them.

Things that exist only while a room is live. When you create or join a room, these are written to a room record on our servers so the game can be played:

• your anonymous player ID, your nickname and your avatar seed
• the fake answers you write and the answers you vote for
• your score, your ready state and whether you are currently away or disconnected
• the room’s six-character code, its settings and which questions were drawn

Content reports. If you report a question as wrong or inappropriate, we store which question it was, your anonymous player ID and the time, so that a moderator can look at it.

Technical records. Like any app that connects to a server, connecting creates ordinary technical records — your IP address, the type of device or browser, and the time of the request. We use these to run and protect the service.

The camera. On the QR scan screen the camera preview is decoded on your device to read a room code. No frame, photo or video is uploaded, stored or seen by us. If you refuse camera access, or your device has no camera, you type the code instead and nothing else changes.

4. What we do not collect

To be explicit, Baluff does not ask for, receive or store:

• your name, email address, phone number or postal address
• your contacts, calendar, photo library, files or microphone
• your precise or approximate location
• any payment or financial information — there is nothing to buy in the game
• analytics events, session recordings or crash reports
• any advertising profile built by us about you

We do not sell personal data, and we do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising.

5. Why we use it, and on what legal basis

We use the data in section 3 to run a match — to put you in a room, show the other players who you are, collect answers and votes, and keep score. In GDPR terms that is performance of the contract you enter into by playing.

We use content reports and technical records to keep the game working and to keep it safe: to fix faults, to stop abuse of the servers, and to review questions that players flag. That is our legitimate interest in a service that functions and is not abused.

We show ads to pay for a game that is otherwise free, which is our legitimate interest — and, where the law requires consent for advertising identifiers, on the basis of that consent. See section 6.

We may also process data where a law obliges us to.

6. Advertising

Baluff is free and shows banner ads on some screens, plus one full-screen ad when you leave a finished match on mobile. Ads never appear on the screens where you are writing a bluff or voting.

Ads on iOS and Android are served by Google AdMob. Ads on the web version are served by Google AdSense. Google receives the information it needs to select, deliver, cap and measure an ad — this includes your IP address, general device and browser information, and, depending on the platform and your settings, a device advertising identifier. Google acts as an independent controller for that data under its own policies.

On iOS, Baluff does not show the App Tracking Transparency prompt and does not ask to track you. It follows that no IDFA is shared and iOS ads are selected from context rather than from a profile of you.

On Android, Google may use the Advertising ID your device provides. You can reset it, or turn off ad personalisation entirely, in Settings → Google → Ads. On the web, you can control personalisation at myadcenter.google.com.

How Google uses data from sites and apps that use its services is described at policies.google.com/technologies/partner-sites.

7. Who else sees your data

Other players in your room. While a match is running, everyone in the room sees your nickname, your avatar, the fake answers you wrote once they are revealed, and your score. Write bluffs accordingly — a nickname is the only name anyone needs, so there is no reason to use your full one.

The service providers who help us run the game. We rely on a small number of established providers to host Baluff and keep it running. They handle this data only on our instructions, only to provide the service to us, and never for their own purposes.

Google, for advertising, as described in section 6.

Anyone we are legally required to disclose to, if we ever receive a valid legal demand.

That is the complete list. We work with no data brokers, and with no advertising partner other than Google.

8. Where your data is processed

Our service providers operate in several countries. Your data may therefore be processed outside the country you are playing from, including outside the European Economic Area.

Where that involves a transfer out of the EEA or the UK, it is covered by the European Commission’s Standard Contractual Clauses in our contracts with those providers.

9. How long we keep it

A room and its match are deleted as soon as the last player leaves. The bluffs, the votes and the scores go with them — there is no match history and no archive.

Your nickname, avatar, language, sound settings and personal counters stay on your device until you clear the app’s data or uninstall it. Deleting the app deletes them.

The anonymous player ID persists so a returning player is recognised on the same install. It carries no personal data beyond the random ID itself, and clearing the app’s data or uninstalling ends it.

Content reports are kept while they are open and for a reasonable period after they are resolved, so a question is not re-reported and re-reviewed endlessly.

Technical records are kept for a short period and then discarded.

10. Children

Baluff is not directed at children. It is intended for players aged 13 and over, or 16 and over in the European Economic Area and the United Kingdom where local law sets that higher age for processing a child’s data.

We do not knowingly collect personal data from children below those ages. Because the game asks for no identifying information, we have no way to tell a player’s age from the data we hold — so if you are a parent or guardian and believe a child has provided data to us, write to privacy@growthtech.tn and we will delete what we can identify.

11. Your rights

Depending on where you live, you may have the right to access the personal data we hold about you, to correct it, to have it deleted, to restrict or object to how we use it, to receive it in a portable form, and to withdraw a consent you gave. Residents of California and similar jurisdictions also have the right not to be discriminated against for exercising these rights.

Most of your data is already in your hands: your nickname, avatar, settings and counters are on your device, and clearing the app’s data or uninstalling the app erases them without asking us. A room erases itself when everyone leaves.

For anything else, email privacy@growthtech.tn. Please be aware of an honest limitation: because Baluff has no accounts, we usually cannot connect a request to a specific anonymous ID unless you can tell us what it is, and we will not ask you for identifying documents in order to create a link that does not otherwise exist.

If you are in the EEA or the UK you may complain to your national data protection authority. In Tunisia, that authority is the Instance Nationale de Protection des Données Personnelles (INPDP).

12. How we protect it

We take the security of your data seriously and use appropriate measures to protect it, both while it travels between your device and our servers and while it is held there.

Access to anything we hold is limited to the few people who need it to run the game and review reported content.

Your strongest protection, though, is the design itself rather than anything we can promise about our systems: we ask for almost nothing, and what a match does create is deleted when the match ends.

No system is perfectly secure. What we can say is that the amount of personal data there is to lose here is deliberately close to zero.

13. Changes to this policy

If we change this policy we will publish the new version on this page and update the date at the top. If a change materially affects how we handle your data, we will say so in the app rather than leave you to notice.

The version in the game (Settings → Privacy Policy) says the same thing; the copy on this page is the authoritative one.

14. Contact us

Questions, requests or complaints about this policy: privacy@growthtech.tn.

GrowthTech, Tunisia — growthtech.tn.