Safety & families on Game Night.
Last updated: 29 September 2026 · covers Game Night 1.6.0
A short, honest summary of how we protect the people who play. Built in Lahore by a parent for parents, with the engineering specifics so you can verify the claims.
The short list
- No signup. No email, no phone number, no social login. You install Game Night, you play.
- Content-rated Everyone. IARC-rated for all ages. Truth or Dare's Friendly pack is the default and ships kid-safe out of the box.
- Birth-year age checks. A one-time, neutral birth-year question gates chat and Bluetooth play (13+), the Hard Truth or Dare pack (13+) and the Romantic pack (16+). Under-13s can still play every game on one phone or over the same Wi-Fi.
- Chat only with people in the room. Chat (text, photos, voice notes) exists only inside Bluetooth and Wi-Fi rooms — there is no internet chat and no strangers — and it is filtered for blocked words.
- Non-personalised ads only. Google AdMob is configured with
tagForChildDirectedTreatment = yes. You see generic ads, never targeted ones. - No tracking SDKs. No Facebook SDK, no Mixpanel, no Sentry, no Crashlytics. Just AdMob (required for ad delivery). Fonts are bundled, so the app makes no Google Fonts request.
- Local-first data. Roll history, settings, saved lists, sticker collections — all in on-device storage. Uninstall the app, all of it goes with it.
How the age checks work
A neutral question, asked once.
The first time someone reaches an age-gated feature, the app asks for their birth year. The question is neutral — it doesn't hint at which answer unlocks anything. The answer is stored only on the phone and respected on every gated surface.
What it gates: 13+ for room chat, for Bluetooth play (Android requires the location permission for Bluetooth discovery) and for the Hard Truth or Dare pack; 16+ for the Romantic pack.
Under 13, every other game remains fully playable — Ludo, Truth or Dare's younger packs, dice, wheel, bottle, Tic Tac Toe, four arcade games, pass-and-play and Same Wi-Fi rooms — just without chat.
How we configure AdMob
Three flags are set on every ad request, in lib/core/ads/ad_service.dart:
| Flag | Value | What it does |
|---|---|---|
tagForChildDirectedTreatment | yes | Google never personalises ads to the user, regardless of their actual age. No retargeting, no interest profiling. |
tagForUnderAgeOfConsent | yes | European GDPR-equivalent treatment — strictest data-minimisation. |
maxAdContentRating | G | Only G-rated creatives. No suggestive content, no gambling, no shock ads. |
You can verify this on a live device: Settings ❯ Google ❯ Ads on Android. Your Advertising ID resets work, the "Opt out of Ads Personalisation" toggle works. We don't fight it.
What we collect — every byte
The complete list, in the order it appears in the Play Console Data Safety form:
- Advertising ID — read by AdMob SDK for frequency capping + fraud detection. Not linked to your identity. Not shared with us.
- Display name (optional, you choose) — shows up in multiplayer rooms so other players know who's at the table. Default is "Player".
- Chat content in Bluetooth and Wi-Fi rooms — your messages, photos, voice notes travel to the other phones in your room only. The data never leaves your local network, and there is no Game Night server.
- AdMob diagnostics — your IP address (for ad geo-serving), app version, OS version. Google handles this; we don't see per-user data.
That's it. No name, no email, no phone, no location (the LOCATION permission is required by Android's Bluetooth peer-discovery API but Game Night never reads your geographic location — the app code has no location-reading library).
What other apps do that we don't
The patterns we deliberately rejected.
- Mandatory phone-number signup — Yalla Ludo asks for a phone number on first launch. We don't.
- Friend-list import — Houseparty et al pull your phone's contacts. We don't have a friends list at all.
- Targeted ads on kids' surfaces — many "kids" apps run personalised ads via SDK partners. Our AdMob config blocks this at the network level.
- Engagement-trap notifications — "you're losing your streak!", "5 friends are playing!", "claim your reward before midnight!". We send exactly one notification a day, at 10 pm local, opt-out in Settings.
- Real-money cosmetics — no paid skin packs, no IAP at all.
- Subscription paywalls — no $4.99/month tier locking parts of the app.
For parents — practical steps
- Install Game Night on the family device(s). Free on Google Play.
- Answer the birth-year question honestly (or hand the phone over for your child to answer). Under 13, chat, Bluetooth play and the older Truth or Dare packs stay locked.
- Start them on Truth or Dare ❯ Friendly pack (6+). It's the default. You can edit any prompt yourself.
- Use the home-screen widget — a dice roller they tap without opening the app. Limits screen time to one roll.
- If you spot anything concerning in a room — the host can remove that player straight away. Screenshot it and email asadtechlead@gmail.com so we can improve the blocked-words filter.
How to report a problem
Email asadtechlead@gmail.com with the subject line beginning with SAFETY:. Things we treat as a safety report:
- A room chat message that was harassing or got past the blocked-words filter
- An ad that displayed inappropriate content despite our G-rating config (rare but possible — AdMob has bugs)
- A bug that exposed personal data
- A child under 13 who was able to reach chat, Bluetooth play or the Hard pack
We respond within 24 hours during the working week (Monday–Saturday, Pakistan Standard Time). For critical issues we patch and push within 48 hours.
Compliance summary
- COPPA (USA, ages under 13) — compliant via child-directed AdMob treatment, no PII collection, no behavioural advertising.
- Google Play Families Policy — compliant. Content-rated Everyone, non-personalised ads, no in-app purchases gated to gameplay.
- GDPR / UK-GDPR — we don't collect personal data that requires consent. Advertising ID is treated as a non-personal identifier in our processing flow. Right to deletion is honoured via email (and uninstall is instantaneous device-side).
- Pakistan PECA / data protection — same posture: minimal data, no PII, no behavioural profiling.
For the full technical disclosure — every Android permission and where the data goes — see the privacy policy.
Family-safe. Free. No signup.
Install Game Night and start playing. If anything looks wrong, one email reaches a real human.
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