Safety & families on Game Night.
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.
- 13+ chat gate. Multiplayer chat (text, photo, voice notes) requires a one-time age confirmation. Under-13 users can play every game but can't send chat messages.
- 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) and Supabase Realtime (only when you join an online room).
- 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 13+ chat gate works
The gate is a real gate, not a marketing word.
The first time any user taps the Chat icon in a multiplayer room, the app shows a full-screen age confirmation. The user picks "I'm 13 or older" or "I'm under 13". The choice is stored in local settings and respected on every subsequent chat surface. There is no path to chat that bypasses this check.
If a user picks "under 13", every game in the hub remains fully playable — Ludo, Truth or Dare, dice, wheel, bottle, tic-tac-toe, four arcade games, every multiplayer transport — only the chat panel inside multiplayer rooms is locked.
Parents who want absolute lockdown can set the chat as permanently disabled in Settings ❯ Multiplayer ❯ Disable chat features. That toggle persists across reinstalls if the parent uses the same Google account.
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 multiplayer rooms — your messages, photos, voice notes travel to the other players in your specific room only. Bluetooth/LAN: data never leaves your local network. Online: data passes through a stateless Supabase Realtime channel and is dropped when the room closes.
- 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 BLE peer-discovery API but Game Night never reads your geographic location — verified by the neverForLocation flag on the BLUETOOTH_SCAN permission and by zero references to Geolocator or Location data classes in the app code).
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.
- Cosmetic loot boxes — no random-roll skin packs, no real-money cosmetics, 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.
- Open Settings ❯ Multiplayer. If your kid is under 13, leave the chat-gate confirmation alone (or actively disable chat features for absolute lockdown).
- Start them on Truth or Dare ❯ Friendly pack. Default. G-rated. Vetted for ages 8+.
- Use the home-screen widget — a 2×1 dice roller they tap without opening the app. Limits screen time to one roll.
- If you spot anything concerning in chat (from another player in an online room) — screenshot, then email asadtechlead@gmail.com with the room context. We purge transient logs.
How to report a problem
Email asadtechlead@gmail.com with the subject line beginning with SAFETY:. Things we treat as a safety report:
- An online-room chat message that was harassing or contained inappropriate content
- 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 access chat features
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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