Privacy Policy

Time Travel Heist is made and published by Annanor Technologies Ltd., an independent company registered in the United Kingdom (company number 17432852), which is the data controller for the limited processing described below. It is a small independent operation: there is no investor and no data-sharing arrangement behind it.

What we collect: anonymous play statistics

To make the game better, it sends us anonymous statistics about how it is played. This is the complete list of what is sent:

• that a level, a chapter or a whole campaign has been attempted for the first time, and which one — including which version of the level, since levels are revised between updates;
• that a level, a chapter or a campaign has been completed for the first time, together with how much play time it took to get there and how many hints were shown along the way;
• a random player ID, and a second random ID for each saved campaign, described below;
• the app's version number and its language setting, so that figures from different releases and translations are not mixed together;
• the time on your phone's clock when each of those happened.

Play time means time with a level open and the game on screen. Time with the game in the background is not counted, and neither is a long spell without touching the screen.

We use these statistics for one purpose: improving the game. They tell us which puzzles are too hard or too easy, where players get stuck and give up, and whether the hints actually help — the things a small studio otherwise only learns from the few people who write in.

The random player ID

The first time it needs one, the game makes up a random code (a UUID, a long string of random letters and digits) and keeps it on your phone. It is not taken from your phone, your SIM or your Google account, is not an advertising ID, and is not shared with any other app. It lets us count players rather than button presses — someone who plays a level in two save slots is one player who attempted it, not two — and see how a player gets on from one level to the next, without our knowing who any player is. Each saved campaign gets a second random code of the same kind, so that a second play-through is not mixed up with the first.

You can see your player ID under the Share play statistics setting in the game's Options. Clearing the app's data or reinstalling the game throws it away, and the game then makes a new one that is not connected to the old one.

Switching it off

The Share play statistics switch in Options turns the statistics off. From then on nothing is sent, and anything waiting to be sent is deleted from your phone. Nothing else about the game changes.

How it is sent and stored

The statistics are sent only over an encrypted (HTTPS) connection, to timetravelheist.co.uk; the game will not send them any other way, and our server refuses unencrypted connections. They are stored in a database run for us by our web host, Cloudflare, which processes them on our behalf and may not use them for anything else. If your phone is offline they wait on the phone and are sent later.

What we do not collect

We do not collect your name, email address, Google account, contacts, location, advertising ID, device identifiers, photos or files, and the statistics carry nothing that ties them to you: the only ID in them is the random one described above. We do not collect which moves you made, where you went on the board, or what any hint said. Your connection's IP address necessarily reaches the server that receives them, as it does with any request on the internet, but our server does not read or store it, nor your phone's model, browser details or country.

Who sees the statistics

Only us. They are not shared with any third party, not sold, and not used for advertising or to build a profile of anybody. The game contains no analytics, advertising or crash-reporting library from another company; the statistics go straight to a server we run, whose hosting provider stores them on our behalf and may not use them for anything else. We keep them for as long as they are useful for improving the game, and look at them in aggregate — how many players finished a level, and how long it took them on average, not what any one player did.

Everything else about the game is unchanged: every level, image and sound is inside the app, and it plays identically in aeroplane mode.

What the game saves on your device

So that the game remembers where you are, it writes a small amount of data to storage that belongs to the app and is private to it. This is the complete list:

tth_progress

Which levels you have attempted and which you have completed, and the fewest turns each completed level has been finished in.

tth_solutions

The moves of your best run on levels you have solved, so a solved level can be replayed.

tth_settings

Your preferences: haptic strength, walking speed, music and effects volume, and language.

tth_seen

Which one-off tutorial prompts and story cards you have already been shown, so you are not shown them twice.

tth_theme

Which colour scheme you are playing in.

tth_statsid

Your random player ID, described above.

tth_stats

For each saved campaign: its random ID, and the running play time and hint count for the levels, chapters and campaign you have not finished yet, so that the figure sent on completion covers every sitting.

tth_statsq

Statistics waiting to be sent while your phone is offline. Emptied as they are sent, or when you switch statistics off.

None of it identifies you. Apart from the play statistics described above, none of it is transmitted. On Android it is held in the app's private storage area, which other apps cannot read. It is removed when you clear the app's data or uninstall the game.

Android's own backup

The game allows Android's standard backup service to include that saved data, so that your progress survives a factory reset or a move to a new phone. When it does, a copy is held in your own Google account, under Google's terms and not ours — we have no access to it and are not told it exists. You can turn backup off for the app, or for the device, in Android's Settings under System → Backup. Doing so costs you nothing but the transfer of progress between devices.

Permissions the app declares

• Vibrate — the short confirming buzz when you hold to wait a turn. Nothing else uses it, and you can set it to Off in the game's settings.
• Internet — used to send the anonymous play statistics described above (unless you have switched them off), and required by the framework the game is built on in order to load the game's own bundled files inside its display component. The game downloads nothing: you can play it with the phone in aeroplane mode and everything works.

The app requests no runtime permissions at all — no camera, microphone, location, storage, contacts or notifications. You will never see a permission prompt.

Buying the game

Time Travel Heist is free to download. A single one-time in-app purchase unlocks the full campaign; there is no advertising and nothing else to buy. The purchase is handled entirely by Google Play. We never see your payment details, your address or your Google account: Google gives us anonymised, aggregated sales and country figures, and processes your purchase under Google's own privacy policy.

Children

The game is a single-player puzzle with no chat, no social features, no user-generated content and no links out of the app. Because it collects no personal information from anyone, it collects none from children either: the anonymous play statistics carry only a random ID and identify no one. A parent can switch them off in Options, and ask us to delete what has already been sent, as described under Your rights. Please see the game's age rating on Google Play for guidance on story content.

Hosting

timetravelheist.co.uk is a set of static pages served by Cloudflare. Like every web server, Cloudflare's records the technical details of each request — IP address, the page requested, approximate timestamp, browser and operating system — and uses them to deliver the page, to keep the site available and to block attacks. That processing is Cloudflare's, under its privacy policy; we do not query, export or analyse those logs.

The same host also runs the small server program that receives the game's play statistics, at timetravelheist.co.uk/api/. It runs only for those requests from the game — never when you view a page — and stores only what is listed under The Android game above.

Analytics

There are none. We run no analytics product on this site — not Google Analytics, not a cookieless alternative, not a tag manager, not a tracking pixel. These pages contain no JavaScript whatsoever, so there is nothing running in your browser to measure you with. What we know about our visitors is whatever our host's ordinary server logs say, which we do not query.

If that ever changes we will say so here first, with a new date at the top, as described under Changes to this policy below.

Cookies

This site sets no cookies of its own, and none for advertising, tracking or profiling. Cloudflare may set a strictly necessary security cookie when it needs to distinguish a person from a bot; it carries no information about you and is not used to track you. There is no consent banner here because there is nothing to consent to.

Third-party content

None. There are no social widgets, no comment system, no advertising, no tag manager and no hosted webfonts — the typefaces here are ones your device already has. The short film on the front page is not a YouTube or Vimeo embed; it is an ordinary video file sitting on this server, and it plays without telling anyone but us that it was asked for. Every image, video and stylesheet is served from this domain, so opening a page here does not quietly announce your visit to anybody.

This is enforced rather than merely intended: the site is served with a content security policy that permits no external origin at all, so a stray third-party embed added by mistake would be blocked by your own browser rather than quietly loading.

Contacting us for support

If you email us, we will have your email address and whatever you chose to put in the message. We use it to answer you and for nothing else — never for a mailing list — and delete the correspondence once the matter is closed.

Under UK and EU data protection law you have the right to access, correct, delete, restrict or object to the processing of your personal data, to receive it in a portable form, and to complain to a supervisory authority — in the UK, the Information Commissioner's Office.

In practice we hold almost nothing to exercise them against: we have no account records and no way to connect the play statistics to a person, so we cannot look you up. What we can do is find the statistics sent under a particular random player ID. If you send us the ID shown in the game's Options, we will send you what is held under it, or delete it — whichever you ask. Our lawful basis for collecting the statistics is our legitimate interest in improving the game, which is why we collect so little, nothing personal, and let you switch it off at any time; switching it off is also how to object to it. The data the game saves is on your device and under your control — clearing the app's data erases all of it immediately, with no request to us needed. Where server logs held by our host constitute personal data, our lawful basis is legitimate interest in keeping the site running and secure. If you want to exercise a right, write to us at the address below and we will do what we can.

If the game or the site changes in a way that affects this policy — and any change that introduced data collection certainly would — we will publish an updated version here with a new date at the top, and note it in the app's release notes. We will never make a change of that kind quietly.

Questions about this policy, or about anything else, are genuinely welcome:

privacy@timetravelheist.co.uk