Privacy Policy

This policy explains what Sixpence collects, why, who it is shared with, and how to get rid of it. It covers the Sixpence mobile app on Android and iOS, published by Team Mio ("we", "us"). If you also want the rules for using the app, those are in our Terms of Use.

1. You can play without an account

Most of Sixpence works offline and signed out. In that mode, we do not know who you are. The app still stores your settings and your lives balance, and it sends a randomly generated device identifier to our server so your lives cannot be reset by reinstalling. That identifier is not linked to your name, your email, or your Google or Apple account.

Advertising is the one exception: ads are shown to signed-out players too, and section 7 explains what that involves.

2. Signing in

Online play — friends, invitations, leaderboards, match chat requires an account. You can sign in with Google or with Apple.

Whichever you choose, we receive and store:

• your email address;
• a user ID we generate for you;
• the display name that the provider gives us, which we use only to suggest a starting player name.

If you use Apple's "Hide My Email", we only ever see the relay address Apple gives us, and we do not try to resolve it.

We never receive or store a password. Google and Apple handle sign-in themselves and only tell us that it succeeded.

3. Your profile

Your profile holds a player name and, if you add one, a profile photo.

Your player name is public. Other players find you by typing it exactly — there is no partial or browsable search, so someone can look you up only if you have told them your name. Your name also appears on leaderboards, in invitations, and in matches, and we cannot hide it there without breaking the games. Names are checked against a blocklist of offensive and impersonating patterns.

If another player is bothering you, blocking is the control that matters. Someone you have blocked cannot find you in search, cannot invite you to a game, and cannot see your photo. You can block and report from any match, and manage your blocks in Settings.

Profile photos are optional, and you choose their audience in Settings › Privacy: Everyone, Friends only, or No one. New photos start at No one. If you upload one it is resized and stored in our avatars store. Other players never receive a permanent link to your photo — the app fetches it through a short-lived signed URL, so a narrower setting takes effect for them within about ten minutes as any link they already hold expires. Players you have blocked never see it.

We also record which version of the Terms of Use you accepted and when.

4. Playing online

When you play a match, we store the match itself: which game, who is playing, whose turn it is, the board state, and the result. Finished matches keep their result so scores and history stay correct.

We store your best score per game, which is what the leaderboards read from.

We store your friend list and pending friend requests, who asked whom, and whether it was accepted.

Match chat is different: messages are delivered live between the players in the match and are not written to our database. We cannot read your chat history, and neither can you once the match screen is closed. This also means that if you want to report something said in chat, you need to do it while the match is open.

5. Reports and blocks

If you report a player, we store who reported whom, the reason you picked, any note you wrote (up to 500 characters), and which match it happened in. If you block a player, we store that you blocked them.

We keep reports while both accounts involved still exist and use them to act on repeat behaviour. If either account is deleted, the report goes with it.

6. Notifications

If you allow notifications, Google's Firebase Cloud Messaging gives the app a push token, and we store that token together with your user ID and whether the device is Android or iOS. On iOS, Firebase delivers through Apple's Push Notification service. It is how we tell you about game invitations, friend requests and the replies to them, when a friend changes their player name, and when one of your matches ends.

You can choose which of those reach you in Settings, and you can turn notifications off entirely in your device settings. Turning them off in your device settings does not delete the stored token; signing out or deleting your account does.

7. Advertising

Sixpence is free and is funded by advertising supplied by Google AdMob. The only ads in the app are rewarded video ads, which you choose to watch in exchange for a life of any specific game. There are no banners, no interstitials, and nothing plays without you tapping it.

To serve those ads, the Google Mobile Ads SDK collects and processes device information, including:

• your device's advertising identifier, the Advertising ID on Android, or the IDFA on iOS;
• device and app information such as model, operating system version, app version, and coarse location inferred from your IP address;
• information about the ads you were shown and whether you interacted with them.

Google uses this to select ads, to cap how often the same ad is shown, to measure performance, and to detect fraud and invalid traffic. Google is an independent controller of this data. What Google does with it is described in Google's Privacy Policy (policies.google.com/privacy) and in "How Google uses information from sites or apps that use our services" (policies.google.com/technologies/partner-sites). The advertising partners Google may work with are listed at support.google.com/admob/answer/9012903.

Consent. Where the law requires it in the EEA, the UK, and Switzerland, we ask for your consent before any personalised advertising, using Google's User Messaging Platform. The ads SDK does not start at all until that choice has been made. If you decline personalised ads, you may still be shown non-personalised ads, which use the same device information for frequency capping, measurement, and fraud prevention, but not to build an advertising profile.

On iOS, Apple additionally asks whether Sixpence may track you across other companies' apps and websites. That is App Tracking Transparency, and declining it is respected regardless of what you told the consent form.

You can reset or clear your advertising identifier at any time in your device settings — Settings → Privacy → Ads on Android, or Settings → Privacy & Security → Tracking on iOS.

We do not receive your advertising identifier ourselves, and we do not sell your data or share it with advertisers directly.

8. Fraud and abuse prevention

We keep a ledger of lives granted and spent, tagged with whether each life came from a win, an advertisement, or the free refill. We use it to spot automated abuse of the rewarded-ad reward. It is tied to a device identifier, not to your name.

9. Who processes your data

We use these providers, and only these:

• Supabase: our database, authentication, file storage, and real-time messaging. This is where your account, profile, matches, scores, friends, and reports live.
• Google Firebase Cloud Messaging: delivery of push notifications.
• Google AdMob: advertising, as described in section 7.
• Apple and Google: the app stores you installed from, and the sign-in providers, each under their own privacy policies.

Your data may be processed outside your country, including in the United States. Where that happens for data covered by UK or EU law, transfers rely on the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses or an adequacy decision.

10. Why we are allowed to do this

If you are in the EEA or the UK, our legal bases are:

• performing our agreement with you, your account, your profile, matches, leaderboards, friends, and notifications you asked for;
• your consent for personalised advertising, notifications, and uploading a profile photo, each of which you can withdraw;
• our legitimate interests in keeping the game fair, acting on reports, preventing fraud, and keeping the service running;
• a legal obligation where we have to keep or produce something by law.

11. How long we keep things

Account data, profile, scores, friendships, blocks, and reports are kept while your account exists and are removed with it. Match records are removed when any player in them deletes their account. Push tokens are removed when you sign out or delete your account. Chat is never stored.

One thing outlives your account: the player name itself stays reserved, so nobody can take your old name and pretend to be you. The reservation holds no data about you; it is the text of the name and nothing else.

12. Deleting your account

You can delete your account yourself, from inside the app: Settings → Delete account. You do not need to email us, and there is no waiting period.

Deleting removes your sign-in record, your profile, your profile photo, your scores, your friendships, your blocks, your push tokens, and any report you filed or that was filed about you.

It also removes your matches. One-on-one matches you played disappear for the other player too. Group matches you were hosting are removed; group matches you had merely joined lose your seat and continue for everyone else.

Your player name stays reserved so that nobody can adopt it and impersonate you, as described in section 11.

Deletion is immediate and cannot be undone. If you would rather we did it for you, email support.teammio@gmail.com from the address on the account.

13. Children

Sixpence is not directed at children. You must be at least 13, or older if the age of digital consent where you live is higher. We do not knowingly collect data from anyone below that age. If you believe a child has given us data, email us, and we will delete it.

14. Your rights

Depending on where you live, you have the right to ask for a copy of your data, to correct it, to delete it, to restrict or object to how we use it, to take it elsewhere, and to withdraw a consent you gave. Withdrawing consent does not undo what was done while it was valid.

Email support.teammio@gmail.com and we will answer within 30 days. If you are unhappy with our answer, you can complain to your local data protection authority.

15. Security

Traffic between the app and our servers is encrypted in transit. Access to your rows in our database is enforced by row-level security, so one player cannot read another's private data. Profile photos are served through short-lived signed links rather than public URLs. No system is perfectly secure, and we cannot promise otherwise.

16. Changes to this policy

We may update this policy. The date at the top always says when. If a change materially affects you, we will tell you in the app before it takes effect.