What we never collect
No matter how the switch is set, Party Down never collects:
- Your name, email address, or any account details — the app has no accounts
- Your location
- Your contacts, photos, calendar, or health data
- Anything you type or anything shown to you, including the words you find, the bonus words you think of, and any board code you enter
- Your device’s advertising identifier, or anything else that identifies your phone
- Your IP address. Like any website, our server sees it in order to reply to your device, but it is never stored.
The Daily puzzle
Each day the app asks our server for that day’s puzzle, whether or not Share Usage Data is on. The request says which region your device is set to and the first language on its list, such as Canada and French, so that on a holiday the server can send a puzzle for that holiday, in that language.
The region is the one in your device’s Language & Region settings, not where you are. The server uses the two to choose the puzzle and doesn’t keep them or connect them to anything else.
What we collect if you turn it on
With Share Usage Data on, the app makes notes at a few moments — opening the app, starting a game, finishing one, leaving one unfinished, and closing the app — and sends them in batches. Those notes cover:
- Which games you play, for how long, how far you got, and whether you finished
- How you use help: hints and lifelines, and which game they were used in
- Where games go wrong: whether a board had run out of moves, how long since your last move, and how much was left when you stopped
- The tutorials: which sudoku lessons you open and which you finish, and which of the app’s guided tours and pointers you finish, skip, or act on
- How the app is set up: sound, haptics, appearance, notification settings, whether a game you share includes a picture, which games you have favorited, and each game’s own options — solitaire’s left-handed layout, card theme, scoring mode, and so on
- When you play, as the hour of the day and the day of the week in your own time. Not your time zone, not your region, and not your location
- A random identifier, described below
- Which version of the app you are using, and which version of iOS, iPadOS, macOS, or visionOS it is running on
- The language your device is set to, such as English or Spanish. Just the language: not your region, and not the other languages on your list
The identifier
When you turn the switch on, the app makes up a random identifier for itself. It is generated on your device, it is not based on your phone or your Apple Account, and it cannot be traced back to you by us or by anyone else.
Its only job is to tell one person’s fifty games from fifty people’s one game. Without it, none of the numbers would mean anything.
Two things about it worth saying plainly:
- It survives deleting and reinstalling the app. That is deliberate — it is what makes it possible to tell a returning player from a new one — and it is the most privacy-relevant thing on this page.
- Turning the switch off destroys it. Not pauses it; deletes it, along with anything waiting to be sent. If you turn the switch on again later, the app makes a brand-new identifier and is a stranger to us again.
Where it goes and how long we keep it
Everything is sent over an encrypted connection to a server run by the developer of Party Down. It is not sent anywhere else, and no other company has access to it.
It is kept for 90 days and then deleted.
No third-party tracking
Party Down does not use any third-party analytics, advertising, or tracking services, and contains no third-party software of any kind. Nothing collected is sold, shared, or combined with data from any other app, website, or company. Party Down does not track you across other companies’ apps or websites.
Why iOS asks you about tracking
Because the identifier above survives a reinstall, Apple treats turning this on as a request to track, and requires the app to ask through the system’s own App Tracking Transparency prompt rather than through a screen of its own. So that is what the switch does: it asks iOS, iOS asks you, and the answer you give there is the one that governs. Nothing is gathered while it is anything but yes.
You can change that answer at any time in Settings › Privacy & Security › Tracking, and turning Share Usage Data off inside Party Down works no matter what you answered.
None of this makes the collection any less optional. It ships off, no part of the app behaves differently with it off, and there are two separate ways to refuse it and either one is enough.
Children
Party Down is suitable for all ages and collects nothing that could identify anybody, of any age.
Your choices
- To stop collection: turn off Share Usage Data in Party Down’s Settings, or turn off Party Down under Settings › Privacy & Security › Tracking. Either takes effect right away, and either one by itself is enough.
- To delete what has been collected about you: turning the switch off deletes the identifier and anything not yet sent. Notes already received are anonymous and cannot be traced back to a person or a device, so there is nothing we could single out to delete on request — and equally, nothing that identifies you. They are deleted within 90 days.
Changes to this policy
We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time. Any changes will be posted on this page with an updated effective date.