Privacy Policy - Pick The Color
App: Pick The Color
Data controller: KT Dev Studio - the developer and publisher of the app
Contact: ktdevstudio@gmail.com
Published at: https://sites.google.com/view/pick-the-color-privacy-policy
Last updated: 13 September 2026
1. Summary
Pick The Color is a colour-learning game for a general audience, including children under 13. It is part of the Google Play Families programme.
There are no accounts, no logins and no sign-up.
We never ask for a name, e-mail address, phone number, photo, contacts or location.
Your in-game nickname is never typed. It comes from a fixed word list (animal + trait + number, for example Quick Fox 46), drawn at random or assembled by the player from those same ready-made blocks. There is nothing to type, so a child's real name cannot reach the public leaderboard.
Settings, progress and scores stay on your device.
Only four things leave your device: an anonymous leaderboard entry, anonymous usage analytics, ad requests, and — if notifications are switched on — a subscription to a language topic.
Nothing is collected and no ad is requested before the age question is answered on first launch.
There are no in-app purchases.
There is no chat, no messaging and no user-generated content — players cannot contact one another in any way.
2. The age gate
On first launch the game asks for a year of birth only — never a full date, never a name. The answer is stored on the device only and is never sent to us or to anyone else. It decides what the app is allowed to do:
Not answered yet - No analytics, no ads, no leaderboard. The advertising SDK is not even started.
Under 13 - Child-directed treatment (COPPA). No advertising ID, no personalised ads, ad content limited to the "G" rating, no links out of the app without a parental gate.
13–15 - Teen treatment — the same restrictions (below the GDPR consent age in several EU countries, including Poland).
16 and over - May see the EU consent form and, only if consent is given, personalised ads.
The year can be changed at any time in Settings. Moving it across the adult boundary immediately cancels any advertising consent collected earlier and re-applies the stricter rules, including discarding ads already loaded.
3. Data kept only on your device
The following is stored in the app's private storage and is not sent to us: your settings (languages, lessons, speech, sound, haptics, reduced motion, the notification toggle); your player name and the name elements unlocked with rewarded videos; the year of birth from the age gate; game progress (levels, best score, stars, local score history); and housekeeping data — the counters that limit how often ads appear, which tutorial screens you have already seen, which scores have already been submitted, and a cached copy of the leaderboard so that records can be shown offline.
Deleting it. Settings → Reset unlocked levels clears game progress. It deliberately keeps your settings, age answer, player name and unlocked name elements — those were chosen or earned, not progress. To remove everything, clear the app's data in Android settings or uninstall the app.
Backup. If Google backup is switched on, this single settings file may be copied to your own Google Drive backup, encrypted and tied to your Google account. We have no access to it. EU advertising consent is deliberately excluded from backup and device transfer, so it must be given again on each device.
4. The online leaderboard
When you finish a run with a qualifying score, the game may submit one entry to our Firebase Realtime Database. The entry contains four values and nothing else:
the encoded random nickname (animal, trait, number, colour),
the score,
the language code the colours were named in,
the time of submission.
There is no free-text field, so no personal data can be put there. The entry does not contain your year of birth, device identifier or advertising ID. Entries are publicly readable by every copy of the game — that is what a leaderboard is — and are immutable: no client, including yours, can edit or delete them. See section 9 for removal requests.
To write an entry, the app signs in anonymously with Firebase Authentication. This creates an anonymous identifier held by Google; it is not linked to an e-mail address or Google account, and we neither read it nor store it next to the score. Each request also carries a Firebase App Check token, which confirms the request comes from a genuine copy of the app rather than a script. That is an anti-abuse measure, not an identification of you.
5. Analytics
We use Google Firebase Analytics to see how the game is used — which levels are hard, which settings people turn on, whether the leaderboard is reached. Measurement is switched off until the age gate is answered.
The advertising identifier is permanently disabled for analytics, for everyone, adults included. This cannot be turned back on while the app runs.
Google Consent Mode is applied: analytics storage is allowed once an age bracket is known; ad storage, ad user data and ad personalisation are allowed only for adults who consented through the EU consent form, and denied in every other case.
We never set a user ID, so no identifier chosen by us is attached to the data.
What we record: app launches and screen views; level starts and results; learning-mode actions; leaderboard views and submissions; sharing; ad events (offer shown, reward earned, load errors); nickname changes; and settings changes. Every value comes from a fixed list — none is typed by the player — and scores and star counts are grouped into ranges before being sent. Alongside this, we store a snapshot of your configuration (languages, age bracket, speech and accessibility settings, notification toggle, highest level, bucketed score).
Firebase Analytics additionally collects standard technical data on its own, including a randomly generated app instance ID, device model, system and app version, and an approximate, country-level location derived from the IP address.
6. Advertising
The game is funded by ads served through Google AdMob: banners, full-screen ads between levels, and optional rewarded videos that a player chooses to watch in exchange for extra time, an extra star, a trial of a locked level or a name unlock. Rewarded videos are always a choice and can be closed.
Protections built into the app:
No advertising SDK is started and no ad is requested before the age gate.
For players under 16 the request is tagged as child- or teen-directed, which blocks use of the advertising identifier for targeting.
All ads, at every age, are limited to the "G" (general audiences) content rating — no gambling, alcohol, dating or adult content.
Where personalised advertising is not permitted — children, teens, and adults who declined — every request is marked non-personalised.
Ads loaded under looser rules are discarded the moment the rules tighten.
European consent. In the EEA, the UK and Switzerland the app shows Google's User Messaging Platform consent form. For players below the consent age the form is requested with the "under age of consent" flag, so no personalisation consent can be collected from them. Personalisation is switched on only when consent is actually recorded; declining means non-personalised ads.
Changing your mind: Settings → Ad privacy settings reopens the consent form at any time, wherever the form applies.
The advertising ID permission is declared because the AdMob SDK requires it, but the ID is blocked in code for every player under 16 and is never available to analytics.
7. Notifications
The game can send occasional notifications through Firebase Cloud Messaging.
We send to topics, not to individual devices, so we do not collect or store push tokens. The token stays on your device and inside Google's infrastructure.
A topic subscription carries only your menu language and whether you are old enough to receive messages that may link to the store.
A notification can only open a screen of the game or the app's own Play Store page — never an arbitrary web address.
On Android 13 and newer, notifications need your explicit system permission, and they can be switched off at any time in the game's Settings or in Android settings.
8. Leaving the app, sharing, and speech
Parental gate. Before a player under 16 can do anything that leads out of the game — opening this policy, opening the share sheet, or opening the advertising consent form — and before the declared year of birth or the progress reset can be changed, the game asks a simple multiplication question that a young child cannot answer. The digits typed there are not stored or transmitted. Children are never sent a notification that links to the store at all (section 7).
Sharing a result card. The image is drawn on your device, kept in the app's private cache, and handed to the app you pick through a one-time Android share link. We do not upload it anywhere and we do not learn which app you chose.
Reading colours aloud uses the text-to-speech engine built into your device. The app passes it only the colour name. What that engine does with the text is governed by its own settings and privacy policy, not by us.
9. Third parties, retention and deletion
All external processing is done by Google, through Firebase Analytics, Firebase Authentication, Firebase Realtime Database, Firebase App Check, Firebase Cloud Messaging, AdMob and the User Messaging Platform. We use no other advertising network, attribution SDK, crash reporter, social-network SDK or tracking pixel. Google's practices are described at https://firebase.google.com/support/privacy, https://policies.google.com/privacy and https://support.google.com/admob/answer/6128543.
Google's infrastructure may process data outside your country, including in the United States, on the basis of the European Commission's Standard Contractual Clauses and, where applicable, the EU–US Data Privacy Framework.
Everything on the device (section 3): Until you clear the app's data or uninstall
Leaderboard entries: Indefinitely — the board is an all-time ranking
Analytics events: Per Firebase settings (Google's default for user-level event data is 2 months); aggregate reports are kept without a time limit
Anonymous Firebase user: Until app data is cleared or the app is uninstalled
Notification topic subscriptions: Until you turn notifications off, change language, or uninstall
Removing a leaderboard entry. Entries carry nothing that ties them to a person, so we cannot look one up for you. Write to us with the exact nickname, score and approximate date and we will delete it by hand.
Security. All traffic uses HTTPS/TLS. Writing to the leaderboard requires both an anonymous authentication token and a valid App Check token. Database rules check the shape and length of every field and make entries impossible to overwrite or delete from a client. Local data lives in the app's private storage, out of reach of other apps.
10. Children's privacy
The game is built to comply with the Google Play Families Policy, the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) and Article 8 GDPR.
No personal data is knowingly collected from children.
Nicknames cannot be typed — there is no free-text field anywhere in the app.
The advertising ID is never used for players under 16.
Ads shown to children and teens are never personalised and never exceed the "G" content rating.
Children are never taken to the store or asked to rate the game, and anything else that leads out of the app is behind the parental gate.
Analytics for children stays within what COPPA treats as support for internal operations: no advertising identifiers, no cross-app or cross-site tracking, no profiles.
There are no in-app purchases.
Parents' rights. As a parent or guardian you may write to us at any time to ask what data relating to your child we hold, to have it deleted, and to refuse any further collection — the last of which you can also do yourself by turning notifications off and clearing the app's data or uninstalling it. Because what reaches us is anonymous, please include the nickname, the score and the approximate date so that we can find the entry. If you believe a child has nevertheless given us personal data, write to us and we will delete it.
11. Your rights
Where the GDPR or UK GDPR applies, you have the right of access, rectification, erasure, restriction, objection and data portability, and the right to complain to your national supervisory authority (in Poland: Prezes Urzędu Ochrony Danych Osobowych, ul. Stawki 2, 00-193 Warszawa). Most of what we process is either held only on your device or is anonymous, so the quickest ways to exercise these rights are inside the app: Reset unlocked levels, Ad privacy settings, changing the year of birth, switching notifications off, or uninstalling.
Legal bases. We rely on your consent for personalised advertising and notifications; on legitimate interest in running, securing and improving the game — covering the leaderboard, anti-abuse checks, non-personalised ads and anonymous analytics; and on performance of the service you asked for when you submit a score yourself.
Withdrawing consent. Consent can be withdrawn at any time and as easily as it was given: Settings → Ad privacy settings for advertising, the notification toggle for notifications. Withdrawal does not affect anything processed before it.
No profiling. We do not build profiles of players and we take no automated decisions that produce legal or similarly significant effects.
US state privacy laws. We do not sell or share personal information as those terms are defined by the CCPA/CPRA, and we do not carry out cross-context behavioural advertising for anyone under 16.
12. Changes and contact
If this policy changes we will update the date at the top and, for material changes, announce it in the app or in the Google Play listing.
Questions, data deletion requests and anything else: ktdevstudio@gmail.com. We answer privacy requests within 30 days.